SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

Cultivating Ingredients Better

The quality and integrity of our products depends on a sustainable supply chain with successful and thriving farming communities and ecosystems.

We believe sustainable agriculture offers solutions to interrelated issues such as human rights, water security, climate resilience, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction and women’s empowerment. We are working with our suppliers and a range of partners to create systemic change in our agricultural supply chain.

64% of our global priority ingredient volumes were sustainably sourced to our leader standard*, in line with our Principles for Sustainable Agriculture (PSA)

*Leader standard represents supply volume verified to a company-approved, third-party validation that is aligned with our PSA.

Progress By Ingredient

Fresh soil used to cultivate a wide range of ingredients

Sustainable Ingredients

We source a wide range of ingredients from agricultural raw materials such as sugarcane, sugar beet, corn, fruits, coffee, tea and soybeans from complex global supply chains and an expanding range of new ingredients like nuts, herbs and dairy.

Ensuring these ingredients are produced in a way that respects farmworkers and their communities while also protecting ecosystems is important to us.

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Principles for Sustainable Agriculture (PSA)

We are committed to working with our suppliers to promote sustainable agricultural practices and build supplier capabilities to meet the standards for human and workplace rights, environmental protection and responsible farm management.

Read Our Principles

Farmer driving farming machinery to plow soil

Engaging our suppliers

We do not buy agricultural raw materials directly from farms, but mostly processed and refined ingredients from suppliers. Therefore, it is very important to us to work with our suppliers to achieve our vision of sustainable agriculture and to work with them to engage their farm base, with an emphasis on collaboration and continuous improvement.

We are exploring ways to integrate sustainable agriculture issues in our supplier audit procedures, for example when we audit our Supplier Guiding Principles and food quality requirements at the processing facilities.

We are also committed to collaboration across the wider industry and support credible third-party standards to simplify assurance and certifications for the farmers in our supply chain. For example, the Farm Sustainability Assessment of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, the Bonsucro sustainable cane standard and Rainforest Alliance certifications are three of the leading standards we support.

In addition, we engage directly with farmers in key sourcing regions to help address material issues in our agricultural supply chain.

To provide greater insight and transparency of our ingredient supply chain, please find here a list of Tier 1 suppliers, representing the top 80% of global spend for our 4 top priority ingredients by volume, being sugar (sugar cane and sugar beet), corn (HFCS) and orange juice.

Connections to Other Sustainability Priorities

Our sustainable agriculture strategy is linked to our other priority sustainability workstreams including water, climate change, waste, women’s empowerment and human rights.

Climate Change

As climate change leads to more erratic and extreme weather, sustainable agricultural practices play a vital role in promoting resilience across our supply chain and in the communities that provide our agricultural ingredients.

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Water

Around 92% of our bluewater footprint is related to the ingredients used in our products. Through our sustainable agriculture principles and standards we support better water management across the farm, for example by enhancing soil organic matter to hold more moisture, improving soil structure to help prevent flooding and erosion and by improving irrigation efficiency. This also mitigates the effects of drought and supports the resilience of farmers and farming communities.

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Agriculture is a source of greenhouse gas emissions and accounts for 10-15% of our carbon footprint. The practices encouraged in our Principles for Sustainable Agriculture are designed to reduce those emissions and to support healthy soils that ultimately will be capable of sequestering and storing carbon.

Animal Health & Welfare

Our business is working constantly to offer consumers new, great-tasting products. We are actively working with our global dairy businesses and suppliers on implementing relevant farm standards and procedures and to develop continuous improvement plans.

Together, we have worked with internal and external stakeholders to develop our first Animal Health and Welfare principles. We also collaborate with other companies in the SAI-Sustainable Dairy Partnership to develop an industry-wide dairy sustainability model.

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Human Rights

Respecting human rights in our business and supply chain is a core value of The Coca‑Cola Company. We use human rights due diligence to proactively identify and manage risks to people in our agricultural supply chain. As part of this process, we have conducted 20+ human rights studies in key countries that supply sugar, one of our biggest commodities, to our company. We identified human rights risks, particularly in small, independent farms and with third-party labor contractors and have undertaken specific remediation efforts and actions to integrate this knowledge into the policies and practices of mills and farms in our supply chain.

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Women's Empowerment

Women are significant contributors to the Coca‑Cola system around the world, including in our agriculture supply chain, where women play significant roles in production and post-harvest processing. We are building on the momentum created by our decade-long 5by20® program and working toward a shared future that enables access to more equal opportunities.

In 2022, the Coca‑Cola system spent approximately $900 million with diverse Tier 1 suppliers in the United States.

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