Fairfood believes that during production, processing, sourcing and/or trading of food brand products, food and beverage brand owners have the capacity to cause harmful impacts on the human rights and lives of individuals, and thus may cause and exacerbate poverty and hunger. Therefore, Fairfood devised a strategy that places food and beverage brand owners as its primary target group.

Brand owners and the sustainability of products

However, in order to ensure that these brand owner companies seriously engage in sustainable practices, Fairfood uniquely concentrates on the level of sustainability of the companies’ brand products instead of on the companies themselves, mainly because growing consumer concerns about brand products associated with ill-treatment of workers and labour exploitations in farms and factories, toxic production wastes and emissions, soil and water contamination, use of hazardous chemical substances, deforestation, chain bribery and corruption, discrimination and other forms of human rights violations, could cost brand owners their reputation as well as financial disadvantages.

Fairfood only approaches brand owners of brand products and not the retailer. Unilever, for instance, is the brand owner of Magnum ice creams and can be the producer of house brand ice creams as well. However, Fairfood will only approach Unilever for its Magnum ice cream and approach the brand owners, for instance the supermarket, for its house brand ice creams. Fairfood chooses to do so because the brand owner not only decides how a brand product tastes, but also the sustainability aspects.

Worldwide

Fairfood influences more than 1000 brand owners in almost 50 countries, from Norway to South Africa and from the USA to China. Fairfood always is in contact with the headoffice, because policy on sustainablity is mainly made at the headoffice. Fairfood focuses both on larger and smaller companies. Whereas large companies are often well aware of the process that could lead to improvement, medium or small-scale companies often lack that information, but can change more rapidly. 

Transparency

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