Touton’s cocoa expansion backed by strong sustainability goals

Touton supplies responsibly sourced cocoa, coffee, vanilla and natural ingredients on a global scale but revealed it is now increasing engagement in commodity-producing countries through processing operations in cocoa.

Although anchored into the reality of its complex operating environments, the report underlines Touton’s approach and illustrates its engagement to build sustainable value chains.

“Managing risks is what we do, day in and day out. This year again, flexibility was of the essence. We dealt with the pandemic, freight, and geopolitical crisis. We also accelerated our investments within producing countries and into the sustainable and digital management of our supply chains. In the face of constant uncertainty, we must go beyond being simply good traders of cocoa, coffee, vanilla, and ingredients​,” said Patrick de Boussac, CEO of the Touton Group.

Touton’s major achievements highlighted in the report include:

Carbon:​ Completed a comprehensive carbon footprint assessment to define Touton’s roadmap, compatible with the 1.5 degrees Paris trajectory; embedding digital mapping and agroforestry into every supply chain

Living Income:​ setting up traceable and certified multicommodity supply chains to facilitate income diversification; collaborating with youth and startups to offer new economic and financial opportunities as well as professional farming services

Sustainable products:​ recording constant progression for sustainable volume sourcing thanks to a stronger collaboration with all supply chain actors and significant efforts to ensure products’ quality (ISO 9001, FSCC 22000, etc.)

Talent nurturing:​ employees’ protection and development through training and empowerment, based on responsibility and internal staff mobility

Exemplary business practices:​ strengthening the reliability of our value chains by training and monitoring employees and suppliers for responsible practices and ethics.

“To keep building the sustainable trust relationship with producers and clients, our CSR approach continues to focus on people​,” said Joseph Larrose, Touton Deputy Managing Director. "From producers to employees, we are nurturing and building on their expertise to champion exemplary business practices. We are strengthening our data systems and innovative sustainability programmes to better deliver on our Human Rights and United Nations engagements, as well as our due diligence expectations​.”