Ethical – Woolworths Holdings Limited

STRATEGY

The diverse and often complex supply chains involved in producing the food, fashion, beauty, and homeware products we sell can have significant social and environmental impacts. Continuously strengthening our value chains through our ethical sourcing programmes is non-negotiable to allow us to mitigate where necessary, and positively influence where possible, the outcomes and impacts of manufacturing and production.

Awareness regarding the transparency of supply chains and the traceability of products is also on the rise, and we are working actively to enhance our programmes to address this.

MANAGEMENT APPROACH

Ethical sourcing requires us to build meaningful and long-term value-sharing relationships with our suppliers and other key stakeholders in the supply chain. Our main focus is on our private label primary suppliers and supply chains. This is where we can exert the greatest influence for positive change, and more easily monitor performance. Where possible, we also engage with branded suppliers to ensure that our standards are understood and upheld.

Our approach to ethical sourcing comprises:

SUPPLIER CODES OF CONDUCT
We expect our suppliers to share our vision for ethical sourcing. This is laid out in our Supplier Codes of Conduct and various ethical sourcing-related position statements, to which suppliers are required to adhere. These form part of the supplier onboarding process, are included in our supplier contracts, and are made available on our supplier portals, and customer-facing websites.
MONITORING OF SUPPLIERS AND ETHICAL AUDITS
We monitor our suppliers’ performance through various social and ethical audit programmes. We are members of SEDEX, a web-based platform for sharing responsible sourcing data on supply chains. We are working on converting our suppliers, including their factories and farms, where relevant, to SEDEX Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA), one of the most widely used ethical audit formats in the world. We also mutually recognise several other audits to allow factories to focus on improvement rather than additional costs, audit fatigue, and disruptions.
PARTNERING
We partner with best-in-class organisations, standards, and certification schemes to tackle complex and systemic issues to further strengthen our responsible sourcing, as well as our relationships with our suppliers.
BUILDING AWARENESS AND CAPACITY
We ensure ongoing training of our staff, our suppliers, in human rights, ethics, and responsible commodity sourcing, to drive progress in our ethical sourcing commitments. Training is determined based on gaps and opportunities identified by staff, or based on common risks found in audits.