SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
SUSTAINABLE AND RESPONSIBLE PROCUREMENT
Raw cashew nuts are predominately grown in economically fragile areas. Our intent is to procure the nuts in a manner that safeguards the communities’ social fabric and environmental resources.
As a processor, we depend on our procurement supply chains to process the finest quality cashew kernels. Our goal is to secure high-quality raw cashew nut from as close to the source as possible. This involves partnering with smallholder farmers to help improve their productivity, profitability and providing good working conditions which attract and retain people in agriculture.
We source almost 90% of our requirement through our Direct Procurement Programme spread across 6 countries, working closely with commercial and smallholder farmers.
We firmly believe that addressing the economic, social and environmental challenges within the local context is important to creating thriving supply chain systems and ensuring the reliability of supply of high quality raw cashew.
Objective
Alphonsa Cashew Industries Sustainable and Responsible Procurement Guidelines for Direct Procurement Programme is based on our Human Rights, Labour and Environmental Policies and reflects our commitment for human rights across our value chain. All of our suppliers are required to implement and follow our Sustainable and Responsible Procurement Guidelines.
We work very closely and extend our full support to small holder farmers who face difficulty in implementing and following our guidelines due to financial and infrastructure difficulties. All of our suppliers including small holder farmers and aggregators are required to disclose the primary source of origin of raw cashew nut supplied to us.
Enabler
Farmer Management System
Farmer Management System (FMS) is a cloud application that comes under the sphere of our Procurement Management System, a powerful gamut of applications that is the prime enabler of our Direct Procurement Program giving us and our customers complete visibility over the supply chain. FMS has been built in-house using a comprehensive framework that includes metrics from Sustainability and Responsibility parameters including Food Safety, Social, Environment, Labour, Human Rights and Economic indicators. The system draws insights from our extensive years of experience on the ground in six origins spread across West and East Africa.
Traceability
We are committed to creating a transparent and traceable value chain. Our ownership or active presence in every stage of the cashew value chain enables us to develop transparent sourcing networks with full case-level traceability to the raw cashew source. Supply chain transparency serves as the foundation for our traceability system and also for assessing and monitoring risks, as well as enabling engagement with our suppliers to support improvements for all supply chain stakeholders.
Sustainable Development Goals
The UN Global Compact requires us first to do business responsibly and then pursue opportunities to solve societal challenges through business innovation and collaboration – both important contributions to the SDGs.
Principles
Download our Sustainable and Responsible Procurement Handbook.
Procurement across 6 origins in Africa.
The broad procurement origins, producing the finest quality raw cashew nuts, in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, ensure an uninterrupted and reliable supply of raw cashew nut all-year-round.
Explore our sustainable and responsible value chain
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