illycaffé buys green coffee directly from the growers of the highest quality Arabica through partnerships based on the mutual creation of value. The Trieste-based company fosters long-term collaborations with the world's best coffee growers - in Brazil, Central America, India and Africa.
The company’s operational approach is based on three pillars: working directly with the producers, transferring the necessary know-how to produce excellent and environment-friendly coffee and paying them higher than market prices in recognition of the quality they produce and as an encouragement to continue to improve.
Thus It’s a model that
assigns a key role to quality and value creation for all the stakeholders involved all along the supply chain.
illycaffè wanted to be certified by a third party as a recognition for its efforts in developing a sustainable model all along the production chain during two decades of direct relationships with coffee growers.
DNV studied a new innovative standard for the evaluation of the sustainability of the supply chain that goes from certifying the supply chain of an organization, to certify an organization's ability to provide value creation for all the stakeholders.
Product sustainability is not possible without a sustainable “company".An organization has to ensure sustainability in all its processes and activities, in particular through a strong integration between sustainability and core business activities, starting from quality.
Developed by a holistic approach, the model provides the analysis of the organization’s processes and strategies, as the relation with stakeholders.
It’s a double–track approach: DNV certifies sustainability of the company headquarters activity as well as its work in the field, along the entire supply chain.
The standard verifies the organization’s commitment to sustainability, evaluating strategies, roles and responsibilities, business conduct, stakeholder engagement activities, communication about issues of social responsibility. Besides, the organization has to demonstrate to know and manage all the risks connected to business, like: environment, quality, product safety, human resources, human rights, etc.
The certification process extended for a year, where DNV carried out the audits and the company implemented actions to better internal processes in order to achieve the requirements requested.
During audit activities and for the development of actions to achieve the requirements, all illycaffè’s functions were highly involved: Board, Management, operative resources.
The DNV standard
The standard has been developed in respect of international standards and best practices: therefore illycaffè could assess itself against external input and primary references with the aim to understand point of strength and opportunity of improvement.
The project thus far carried out allowed illycaffè to rationalize all the initiatives, activities, tools, efforts developed toward stakeholders during the last twenty years through the definition of a well structured process that guarantees the consistency between illycaffè’s strategies and stakeholders’ interest and concern and that contributes greatly to monitor effectiveness and efficiency of the coffee supply chain.
With the KPI approach the company is able to monitor, with continuous improvement, its sustainability performance.
The standard supports the organization in a systematic evaluation of the differences of its supply chain on the basis of different Country context and helps the company’s strategic planning process and help to prioritize actions against the real needs of local stakeholders.
Third part certification, finally, is a valid a way to publicly face and outwardly benchmarking; a way to increase communication with stakeholders and transparency related to strategies and performance on sustainability issues.