Almost all of General Mills’ water use occurs in its supply chain as farmers around the world grow crops for the company’s food products.
“Ninety-nine percent of our water footprint is upstream of us,” General Mills chief sustainability officer Jerry Lynch said in an interview. “It is largely about how we grow food and use water to grow food. So it’s a really important piece of the pie — and with water you see the impact very quickly and clearly.”
This is part of the reason General Mills and a half-dozen other food and beverage giants yesterday announced commitments to work with thousands of growers in their global supply chains to reduce water use and pollution impacts. For General Mills, this includes developing water stewardship plans by 2025 for the company’s most material and at-risk watersheds globally and partnering with NGOs, farmers and other stakeholders on sustainable sourcing in high-risk water regions.
The seven companies — Diageo, General Mills, Hain Celestial, Hormel Foods, Kellogg, PepsiCo and WhiteWave Foods — are participants in the AgWater Challenge, an initiative organized by Ceres and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). As part of the challenge, companies must submit detailed sustainable sourcing and water stewardship plans meeting specific criteria. Ceres and WWF will evaluate and report on companies’ progress against their commitments in one year.
Failing to address water management poses major business risks. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of the world’s freshwater use. And one-third of the world’s food is grown in areas of high water stress or competition.
While Lynch won’t put a dollar figure on General Mills’ water risk, the CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project) has said a water supply shortfall represents a $63 trillion risk to business and communities by 2030. Food and beverage companies are already acutely aware of this risk as drought in California and India drives commodity prices up and threatens their business operations in water-scarce locations.
To address and mitigate agricultural water risks, these seven companies have made a series of commitments including:
For example, General Mills, with support from NGO partners WWF, Rainforest Alliance and The Nature Conservancy, mapped regions where the company’s priority ingredients faced the greatest threats from water shortages. The company then completed a global water risk assessment of all production facilities and growing regions to give a clear picture of the most at-risk watersheds within the supply chain. Now it can target the most material and at-risk watersheds.
“We used these five areas to help make sure we’re not recognizing any company commitments that we don’t think are strong enough,” said Ceres water and agriculture expert Eliza Roberts in an interview.
And because it’s easy to commit to better water stewardship, but much more difficult to make progress on water management goals, Ceres and WWF say they will hold these companies accountable to their pledges.
“We are going to follow through. One checkpoint is our Feeding Ourselves Thirsty report,” Roberts said, referring to Ceres’ 2015 report that ranked the nation’s 37 largest food companies on how effectively they are managing freshwater supplies. “We are going to release another version in the spring and all of the companies being recognized as AgWater Stewards will be benchmarked. Additionally, we’ve committed to returning to these commitments a year from now and producing a document about where these companies are.”
General Mills’ AgWater Stewards commitments build on the company’s 2013 pledge to sustainably source its top 10 ingredients — palm oil, fiber packaging, wheat, oats, sugar beets, vanilla, cocoa, dairy, corn and sugarcane — representing more than 50 percent of raw material purchases, by 2020.
A year later the company published a water policy that aims to improve the health of watersheds that are critical to the General Mills’ business.
And about a week ago General Mills announced its involvement with the California Water Action Collaborative, a 20-member group that aims to advance water security in the state. Other members include members include Anheuser-Busch, Alliance for Water Stewardship, Campbell Soup Company, the CEO Water Mandate, Coca-Cola, Driscoll’s, Ecolab, MillerCoors, Nestlé, Sustainable Conservation, The Nature Conservancy and WWF.
The group has identified four initial projects that it will pursue. One of these is a farmland groundwater recharge project to boost San Joaquin Valley groundwater supplies. The project involves applying excess floodwater to active and fallowed farmland, and allows water to percolate down to refill aquifers.
General Mills is helping fund Sustainable Conservation, the NGO leading this effort.
“We are trying to show farmers that we can flood cropland that’s not currently in production — for example, an almond orchard — let it seep into the ground and use it as a storage facility rather than build more reservoirs that are very expensive and take up more land,” said General Mills’ Jeff Hanratty, applied sustainability manager, in an interview.
Hanratty and Lynch won’t say how much General Mills plans to invest in these and its other water stewardship efforts. Lynch says its more about industry leadership.
“A big part of our water stewardship goal is water leadership, to step up and say this is important and even if we’re competitors we should all work together,” Lynch said. “That is what is starting to occur.”
