Human Rights

At Mondelēz International, we are committed to making our snacks the right way, protecting the planet and respecting the human rights of people in our value chain. We use the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as a framework for preventing and addressing associated risks.

In line with the UNGP framework of ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’, we have the appropriate policies in place, and we acknowledge our responsibility to respect human rights by avoiding the infringement of the rights of others, addressing negative impacts with which we may be involved, and providing access to effective remedy if violations have occurred.

Our Corporate Responsibility Guidelines and Code of Conduct guide everything we do as we strive to ensure that human rights are respected within our own operations and our upstream supply chains. We also seek to do business with partners who share the same commitment.

We have reiterated this commitment through the adoption of the Consumer Goods Forum’s Forced Labor Priority Industry Principles, and our signature to the UN’s Women’s Empowerment Principles.

Our annual Human Rights Due Diligence report demonstrates the practical, business minded, proactive, ongoing human rights due diligence to identify and mitigate potential and actual human rights impacts within our own operations, and work with our business partners through our supply chain to achieve the same. One example of how we identify potential human rights impacts is through AIM-PROGRESS of which we are a founding member. The Sedex Member Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA) protocol evaluates our internal manufacturing sites and suppliers against a common set of corporate social responsibility standards for the consumer goods industry. This process supports the identification of potential risks and helps guide our approach for impact mitigation and monitoring.

In 2016, we partnered with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to assess the long-term sustainability risks of our agricultural commodities supply chains. The prioritized risk assessment run by WWF examined agricultural commodities by source country based on publicly available, secondary data, covering our largest raw materials volume and spend.

As a large purchaser of cocoa products for decades, we have undertaken various initiatives and entered into several partnerships to address the sustainability of the cocoa supply chain. Since 2012, we have leveraged Cocoa Life, a holistic sustainability program backed by a $400 million investment, to address human rights risks associated with labor in the cocoa supply chain. Cocoa Life aims to create empowered cocoa farmers in thriving communities. We partner with farmers, communities, local governments, suppliers and NGOs and invest directly in cocoa communities to promote women’s empowerment, child protection and education, and improve livelihoods. To strengthen our approach, we commissioned human rights consultancy Embode to undertake child labor assessments within cocoa sourcing communities in Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia. Based on Embode’s recommendations, we are working together with government authorities, suppliers and NGOs to harness the strengths of Cocoa Life’s community model and bolster our approach to child protection.

Our Palm Oil Action Plan requires suppliers to respect the labor rights of all workers, including migrant workers within both their own operations and through their supply chains. We require suppliers to provide annual assurance of continuous improvement in this area, verified by third party labor rights experts. The action plan also requires suppliers to better understand the type of small holders within their supply base and their progress against sustainability outcomes.

We are committed to meaningful engagement with all potential and actually impacted rights holders, particularly those who are traditionally excluded or marginalized, including women, children, migrant workers and indigenous peoples. Through our Compliance & Integrity program, we are committed to ensuring the availability of accessible grievance mechanisms (e.g., Integrity HelpLine and WebLine) for our own employees, contractors, and subcontractors, as well as anyone to use for raising any concerns and to better enable Mondelēz International to appropriately redress human rights impacts which we have either caused or contributed to. We are also committed to ensuring we don’t unreasonably inhibit access to other forms of remedy for potentially and actually impacted rights holders.