Can you talk about you or your company’s efforts relating to renewability, sustainability or other environmentally- friendly activities?

LDC is committed to building a safe and sustainable future inspired and driven by our over 170-year heritage. We are passionate about creating fair, sustainable, farm-to-fork value for all our key stakeholders, which includes our people, our customers, our partners, and the communities in which we operate.

We are committed to sustaining a growing population that respects our planet’s finite natural resources. To this end, we continually monitor the way we operate to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. For example, from 2016 to 2022, we helped over 13,000 farmers in Indonesia transition to organic agricultural practices and achieve multi-certification for coffee harvests in North Sumatra.

We also support early-stage companies that share our vision for a safe and sustainable future through transparent supply chains, responsible sourcing, and ethical production. In 2022, for example, LDC invested in ProfilePrint, a start-up developing new approaches to grading and pricing raw ingredients like coffee beans.

Why are in-house lawyers well-placed to drive change in their organisations?

As trusted advisors to the company’s leadership team, in-house lawyers are in a unique position to translate organisational goals into meaningful and intentional actions. In addition to possessing deep knowledge of legal and regulatory requirements, in-house lawyers also have an intimate understanding of how the organisation works. This provides us with the perfect combination of granular transparency and technical skills needed to identify potential risks and opportunities both within and outside of the organisation.

Additionally, many initiatives today, especially those related to ESG, must be embedded at the very heart of corporate strategy and business function buy-ins. In-house lawyers play a key role in guiding new policies that are in the best interests of the company, working with its different departments to support solutions derived from a broad perspective of the organisation.

It can be difficult to truly measure a company’s track record and accomplishments in terms of their environmentally friendly behaviour. What do you think has, until now, been mostly missed when discussing how green a company is?

Yes, it is difficult to measure a company’s track record and accomplishments in terms of their environmentally friendly behaviour. There is often greater focus on a company’s quotable environmental impact metrics, such as their carbon emissions statistic, and less on their measurable sustainability across the lifecycle of their products or services. This is why LDC is focused on a responsible supply chain, working extensively with partners like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Better Cotton Initiative to ensure we are sourcing and processing sustainable materials across the entire supply chain.

Measuring the ‘greenness’ of a business is often an issue of under-reporting, as many companies do not report ESG data in the same way they report financial data. This gap can often be attributed to the lack of a standardised measurement framework which often makes it difficult to uniformly assess a business’ sustainability efforts.