Doing good while doing well has been at the heart of Britvic’s ethos since the creation of The British Vitamin Product Company back in the 19th century. This continues to this day. We want to make a positive contribution to the people and the world around us.
Accordingly, our sustainable business practices, which we call Healthier People, Healthier Planet, are embedded in every element of our business strategy. Our focus on the vitality and wellbeing of both people and planet is fundamental to Britvic’s resilience, to giving consumers great tasting healthier drinks, to nurturing our employees, supporting our communities, and rewarding our investors.
As such, our evolved sustainability strategy underpins our business strategy in two fundamental ways:
1. Healthier People
highlights our commitment to promoting the health, wellness and wellbeing of our consumers, communities and employees
2. Healthier Planet
seeks to minimise the environmental impact of our business and consumer brands
Consumer health, packaging and water are recognised as key priorities and as ever, our commitment to carbon reduction remains resolute. Increased focus is on the positive impact we can have on nature across our value chain through our commitment to regenerative agriculture.
And we recognise the importance of a diverse, inclusive and healthy workforce to grow and thrive in a global market as well as playing an active role in the communities we serve. We regularly measure our own progress against these issues and apply an external lens by aligning our progress to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Consumer health and wellness is central to our mission as we continue to offer healthier choices, without compromising on taste. Whether it be through our family favourite brands or in our new growth spaces, we lead the industry in low and no calories per soft drinks serve, and we are evolving our portfolio to offer more products that are better for you, adding functional benefits such as vitamins and minerals.
Our Healthier Consumer Choices strategy focuses on three key activities:
- Champion healthier and functional soft drinks choices
- Innovate and deliver products we continue to be proud of
- Continue to lead in no/low sugar
We are proud of the strong portfolio we have across our markets, supporting our ambition of help our consumers to live healthier lives.
We have set annual targets against this for many years with a 2025 target of fewer than 30 calories per 250ml serve.
To grow and thrive in a global and expanding market, against ever stronger competition, we need diverse talent with fresh thinking and bold ideas. It is this talent that sets us up to get ahead and stay ahead.
Therefore, connected to every aspect of our business strategy is healthier employees. We honour our employees by constantly striving to create a high-performance culture, leveraging wellbeing and inclusion to benefit healthier employees, while also representing and contributing to the communities where we operate. We strive to have a highly motivated and engaged workforce, who value Britvic as a refreshingly dynamic place to work.
We know that diverse ideas and insights significantly improve how we work, not only to improve our speed, agility and responsiveness, but also to create greater efficiencies to fuel our growth. Consistent with our fervent wish to create a better tomorrow, we recognise the importance of employee health and wellbeing and have created Working Well principles that are embedded across Britvic. We know that great talent decides to join and stay with companies that offer a positive contribution to society, companies that value non-financial performance alongside financial, and companies that want to give back and are unafraid to lead with their heart as well as their head. To attract and retain the very best talent it is critical that we place a premium on creating and sustaining a truly inclusive culture and champion employee health and wellbeing.
With the growth in packaging has come an unintended consequence, packaging waste. As an industry leader, we play a crucial role in dealing with this issue. We are a trusted partner to our customers through our engagement and commitment to reimagining packaging as we aim to create a world where great packaging never becomes waste.
We are doing this in several ways, including increasing recycled content in our packs, gradually reducing our dependency on single use plastic, leveraging science and academic partnerships to deliver our products through circular and reuse systems, and expanding our expertise in dispense solutions beyond the bottle.
We work in close collaboration with our industry peers, government and the waste management sectors to improve infrastructure and systems to promote better material recovery, and as part of this we advocate for industry run deposit return schemes in our operational markets.
Water is our most important ingredient and a precious shared resource which is coming under increasing pressure across the markets in which we operate. It is vital to the ecosystems, local economies and communities in which we live and work, and especially to growing many of our ingredients. Constraints on the quality and quantity of the water available could limit our ability to operate effectively. Managing our impact on water, and being good water stewards, is one of our highest environmental priorities. At Britvic we take our responsibility for strong water management seriously and we are looking at ways to improve our efficiency across our manufacturing sites, respecting our local water catchment areas and working towards replenishing every drop of water we use in our factories, with a drop in the natural environment.
Britvic's strong contribution to the communities where we operate, enables more people to enjoy life’s everyday moments. Deeply connected to one of our core values, We care, focusing on sustainable communities allows us to support social equality and emotional resilience and agility in young people.
Regenerative agriculture represents our commitment to positive impact and interaction with nature across the value chain. This issue is burgeoning and wide reaching: including biodiversity, where we’re taking steps to help nature flourish in and around our manufacturing sites; ensuring sustainable affordable ingredients and a sourcing strategy in line with regenerative agricultural principles and protected human rights across our supply chain.
With suppliers ranging from orange farmers in Spain to data analysts in London, advertising agencies in Brazil, and can converters and filling line manufacturers around the world, who we work with and how we work, can make a difference. We are always keen to share our expertise with our suppliers and learn from them alongside all industry players, in order so we can all benefit and grow together.
Cutting carbon emissions is a foundation of any responsible business operating today, this is no different to Britvic. In December 2019, we were proud to be the first UK soft drinks company to have a 1.5°C target verified by the Science Based Targets initiative, publicly committed to reducing our operations emissions by 50% and our upstream and downstream emissions by 35% by 2025.
We are fully committed to our science-based targets and we are exploring a range of opportunities to reduce our carbon emissions through three main activities: improving energy efficiency in our operations; utilising low carbon technology and/or energy sources; and working in partnership with our key suppliers to reduce carbon emissions in our supply chain.
Our commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions across our value chain by 2050 is unwavering.
