Animal nutrition company Nutreco published its 2020 Sustainability Report officially wrapping up company’s sustainability vision and strategy.

Nutreco, global animal nutrition company, published its yearly Sustainability Report for last year as is the custom. It shared how its employees worked with partners during the severe pandemic year, to drive the company’s purpose of feeding the future, while helping safeguard the food supply chain so that people could access the protein they needed.

“COVID-19 had an enormous impact on life across the globe in 2020,” said Rob Koremans, CEO of Nutreco. “Our hearts go out to all who lost loved ones and suffered hardship – and we are grateful for the work done by our employees and partners to help keep the feed-to-food chain running.”

“The lessons we learned during this extraordinary year only reinforced our dedication to operating in balance with the planet and ensuring sustainability is central to everything we do. Our report outlines the significant progress we made on this in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, and looks forward to a new strategic horizon we’ve set for the next five years,” Koremans added.

Nutreco’s 2020 Report officially wrapped up its sustainability Vision 2020 and introduced its strategy for the forthcoming five years, RoadMap 2025, that focused on three main pillars:

• health & welfare
• climate & circularity, and
• good citizenship

“While we were able to meet 85% of our Vision 2020 ambitions, we engaged a much broader group of internal and external stakeholders in developing RoadMap 2025, to ensure our ambitions are both achievable and targeted to the needs of both our business and our customers,” said José Villalón, Nutreco’s Corporate Sustainability Director.

Other highlights from the report include:

• Sharing our dilemmas: For the third straight year, Nutreco continued its candid discussion on long-term, fundamental issues faced by its sector, aiming to generate much-needed debate and engage people across the value chain in finding solutions. It seems to be having an impact, as this section of the report receives the most feedback every year. The 2020 topics covered include the complex challenge of eliminating deforestation and how tough business decisions are needed to live up to the company’s commitment to reduce the risk of anti-microbial resistance (AMR).
• Climate impact: In 2020, Nutreco committed to Science Based Targets initiative. While the targets weren’t published until 2021, the company can already report a 12% drop in Scope 1 and 2* absolute CO2 emissions in 2020. When measured per production ton sold, emissions reduction was even more significant, at -27%. Nutreco also reduced water usage substantially during the year.
• Diversity and inclusion: In 2020, Nutreco made significant progress on its longer-term diversity and inclusion (D&I) targets, including raising the proportion of females in the Nutreco Executive Leadership Team to 33%. Of the company’s 21 senior leadership teams, 86% consist of more than one nationality.

• Sustainable ingredients: The report highlights Nutreco’s Soy & Palm oil sourcing policy and Code of Conduct for Business Partners, both implemented in 2020 through cooperative efforts by Procurement and Quality Assurance teams in both divisions. These two important documents will ensure the company’s divisions use sustainable ingredients in all products and ultimately decouple deforestation from its value chain by 2025.