Governance

Nutreco, our parent company, is a global leader in animal nutrition through Trouw Nutrition division, and in aqua feed through the Skretting division. In addition, it has NuFrontiers, an arm working to identify, develop and invest in next-generation breakthrough innovations throughout the value chain.

The CEO of Skretting is a member of the NELT, led by Nutreco’s CEO. The NELT has approved a new sustainability governance that aims at embedding sustainability deeper into our business through:

Commitment at the top: Nutreco’s Corporate Sustainability Director reports to Nutreco’s CEO.
Accountability will rest in the NELT: Sustainability goals will be included in the annual and long-term incentives bonus remuneration plan for top management.
Strategic leadership: Nutreco provides guidance on strategy, while execution will be at division level.
Alignment across Nutreco: The divisions will work together to provide a clear and aligned execution plan for the different topics of Roadmap 2025.
Change management: Nutreco will support Roadmap 2025 through a focus on the “people side of the implementation”.

Ethics and compliance

Following the introduction or the new Code of Conduct in the second-half of 2019, covering all new Ethics & Compliance (E&C) policies adopted over the last three years (read story in our Sustainability Report 2019), the focus in 2020 was on fully embedding the new standards into business operations. Although COVID-19 hampered physical contact with OpCos to a large extent, the E&C function managed to launch several initiatives to vitalise the policies in the business. E&C rolled-out the Nutreco Compliance Risk Management Framework to all OpCos, which reconciles E&C policies and control activities to be performed in the OpCos and reports on this to E&C. This helps the business to put E&C policy requirements into daily practice and enables E&C to see where support is required. The framework produces semi-annual reports and generates action plans for OpCos where needed.

Although COVID-19 hampered physical contact with OpCos to a large extent, the E&C function managed to launch several initiatives to vitalise the policies in the business.

During 2020, through multi-functional cooperation, we also developed and introduced a new Code of Conduct for Business Partners. This document replaces our previous Supplier Code of Conduct and will be applied not only to raw material suppliers, but to a wider set of third-party relationships. It enables us to engage with our business partners on sustainability, compliance and integrity issues, and we will only conduct business with companies or individuals that comply with the standards set out in this code.

At the same time, we welcome dialogue about our requirements and expect all business partners to actively address and mitigate non-conformities. These efforts adhere with the guidelines from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ILO and OECD and strengthen our approach with regards to protection of labour rights in our supply chain. Measures to address the above mentioned guidelines have also been included in Nutreco’s Sustainability RoadMap 2025.

Additional E&C efforts included for instance the development of a Conflict of Interest disclosure tool, carrying out a thorough “soft controls” survey for selected OpCos, and handling of various “SpeakUp” cases that were reported via our internal SpeakUp tool or other channels.