Food Crops & Ingredients

Together with our Food Crops & Ingredients partners we will develop a common approach on existing but also new issues. With our targeted investments we co-fund projects on the ground. By sharing our learnings and creating shared solutions we can for instance improve impact on farmers livelihood.

Over the last 5 years, IDH developed sector covenants and platforms with defined sustainable sourcing targets by 2020/2025. The covenants are based on individual company commitment, and each covenant includes a step-wise approach to source and import sustainable products over the coming years.

The Floriculture Sustainability Initiative (FSI) is a international public private sector initiative aiming to create mainstream sustainability in the floriculture sector by building on existing initiatives and activities.

The Sustainability Initiative Fruits and Vegetables (SIFAV) is a pan-European initiative with retailers, brands, traders and civil society organizations in seven European countries. SIFAV partners aim to make imports of fruits and vegetables from Africa, Asia and South America 100% sustainable in 2020.

Sustainable Nut Initiative (SNI) is a foundation open for all organizations working within the Nuts supply chain, with the objective to stimulate traceability and sustainability in the nut sector.

The Sustainable Spices Initiative (SSI) brings together leading multinational companies and NGOs with the aim of sustainably transforming the mainstream spices sector, thereby securing future sourcing and boosting economic growth in producing countries.

The Sustainable Vanilla Initiative (SVI) aims to build a collaboration with local stakeholders, create and support ownership to maintain the quality of vanilla, increase livelihood of vanilla producers, support the professionalization of the sector and increase the supply of sustainably produced vanilla.

The Sustainable Juice Covenant is centered on the target of 100% sustainable sourcing by 2030. This is a moral (not a legal) commitment to working collaboratively, and on a pre-competitive basis to improving the sustainability of Juice supply chains.

More on these initiatives can be found below.

In this video, four private sector members of the SIFAV share how the initiative has helped them to integrate sustainability agendas into their businesses.

Play

The proliferation of sustainability standards, codes, audit methodologies and different approaches generates confusion and inefficiency along supply chains. By promoting transparency and comparability among relevant standards, we support the alignment of existing efforts and promote an international reference for best practices in the areas of social and environmental sustainable supply chain management.

The International Trade Centre,  GLOBALG.A.P. and the Global Social Compliance Programme (GSCP) are our key partners in this respect.

With our platforms, covenants and partners we formulate a common definition and understanding of sustainability based on the benchmarking of relevant standards. By using a selection (basket) of responsible sourcing standards to ‘safely’ choose from, we encourage standards to align with international references, and we favour efficiencies in auditing and training.

Find our more about IDH’s benchmarking approach  

In order to be successful and effective we carefully monitor and evaluate our instruments and mechanisms. We monitor and measure volume of responsible products (against covenant commitments), and will create one method of monitoring leading to economies of scale for the industry.

The percentage of sustainable produced and traded products will be measured based on the quantity of kg/tonnage that complies with the defined sustainability criteria as agreed by the participating parties of the covenants. The participating private sector parties will annually report about their uptake of sustainable products to IDH.