At a Glance Social Responsibility
Millions of families around the world know and trust Bel brands for their delicious taste and quality, and for the care which they know goes into every portion we make.
Care is closely aligned with responsibility.
Click on the headings below to find out more about how we embrace our responsibilities, and the four pillars which we focus on to set standards of excellence: sustainable farming, our environmental footprint, our approach to nutrition and to people’s wellbeing.
We are committed to making our dairy farms as sustainable as can be, setting standards of excellence for tomorrow. We are supported & guided in this by the World Wildlife Fund.
Our goals range from minimising our environmental footprint on the farms to working with partner-farmers to ensure high standards of animal welfare.
Some examples of what this means in practice:
Our Free-Grazing promise: All our Leerdammer® cheese slices use milk from herds which graze freely in the fields (for a minimum of 6 hours each day, for 120 days a year; when it’s very hot or very cold, or wet, they shelter in stables nearby). You can read more about the Leerdammer® Free-Grazing promise here.
Our ‘Best Practice in Agriculture’ charter: In France, where many of our cheeses are made, our partner-farmers all adhere to the French ‘Best Practice in Agriculture’ charter, which sets standards in areas such as animal health & well-being, feed, avoidance of stress and injury and environmental protection. Our partner-farmers in other locations follow similar guidelines.
Supporting our Partner farmers: We guarantee many of our partner-farmers fixed prices for milk, and incentivise best practice in sustainable farming. An example of this is our agreement with the French milk producers’ group, ABPO, which has recently been extended. Read more about it here.
For more information about how we exemplify sustainable farming practices, and our partnership with the WWF please click here.
We’re working to enhance our products all the time to help our consumers live and eat more healthily, wherever they are in the world.
Our targets in this field range from developing products which are affordable in emerging countries to simplifying our ingredients list, always ensuring that our products are delicious, nutritious and loved by our consumers.
‘Wellbeing’ encompasses everything from looking after our staff and participating positively in the communities in which we operate, to doing the right thing for our consumers, our suppliers and our partners.
In fact, Our Code of Good Business Practice runs through everything we do and we’ve long been a signatory to the UN Global Compact. You can read our Code of Good Business Practice here.
We recognise that everything we do has an impact. We are dedicated to reducing the environmental footprint of our products and set ourselves challenging targets, throughout the full product life-cycle. For example, in the longer term, we aim to make our operations carbon neutral, to reduce the amount of water which we use in our production sites – even to operate using almost no water at all.
In fact, we’ve already cut water production in our cheese plants by almost 1/3rdsince 2008.
