Materiality

Our materiality assessment was done together with Nutreco. The materiality assessment was based upon 293 responses to a questionnaire sent to 700 stakeholders (a 42% participation rate). Of these responses, 35% were internal stakeholders and 65% external, of which 40% were Nutreco customers. NGOs academics, suppliers and management are also represented. A demographic analysis of participants is shown below.

Our RoadMap to 2025 will be based on this materiality assessment, which addresses the major issues perceived by our stakeholders to be important or to be issues we can have influence due to our position in the food value chain. The materiality assessment does not reflect whether an issue is material or not for society. In other words, a low material score on issues such as water use, waste generated or energy does not mean that these issues are not important for our planet, but rather that stakeholders do not believe Skretting and Nutreco have a potentially game-changing role in mitigating them. For example, we do not use enough energy or water to be a major influencer on these impacts.

The lower-tier score on “climate change” resulted from a misunderstanding of the scope of the issue. Respondents did not consider Nutreco’s role in influencing the climate change impacts of its suppliers, and instead only considered Nutreco’s relatively low manufacturing footprint. Nonetheless, at Nutreco, we assume our role as a good corporate citizen to responsibly address even issues with low materiality.

Respondents by stakeholder group

Results of materiality assessment

Here are the results of our materiality assessment, which uses a scale of 1.0 to 4.0. If an issue scored less than three (3.0) we arbitrarily judged that, though it may be important, Nutreco’s role in it is non-critical (in comparison to other industry sectors); issues scoring between 3.0 and 3.4 were considered important and material to Nutreco; and issues scoring greater than 3.4 were considered highly important and highly material for Nutreco to take priority action on.
Though we will address all issues highlighted in our materiality assessment, we will focus our resources on having a transformational impact on the highly material issues.