Yili Group

Stakeholder engagement
The company discloses an overview of the issues raised during its stakeholder engagement activities.

Plastic use and packaging waste
The company partakes in activities related to plastic use reduction and transitioning towards sustainable packaging. It also discloses quantitative data with regards to plastic use reduction and use of sustainable packaging.

No leading practices were identified in the nutrition area.

Child labour
The company verifies the age of workers recruited in its own operations.

Farmer and fisher livelihoods
The company offers long-term contracts to farmers and has introduced financial products to provide financing guarantees for dairy farmers. Also, its milk source manager in Bayannur, Mongolia, proposed to set up a dairy cooperative based on the “crowdfunding model”, bringing together more than 230 farming households to become shareholders. It provided subsidies for cow purchases and offered financial support, signed Fresh Milk Purchase and Sale Agreement and supported the cooperative to formulate policies to assist households in a vulnerable position.

Act ethically
The company has a grievance mechanism for stakeholders to raise concerns and complaints regarding bribery and corruption.

Provide and promote decent work
The company has 45.45% women on the board.

Governance and accountability for sustainable development
The company has an opportunity to link performance criteria in senior executives’ remuneration policies to targets and objectives which cover environmental and social issues. Furthermore, it could disclose whether its highest governance body has expertise with respect to the company’s most material sustainability topics.

Lobbying and advocacy
The company has an opportunity to report on its lobbying and advocacy practices on sustainability-related issues, and whether these activities align with its sustainability strategy.

Stakeholder engagement
The company has an opportunity to disclose its process for engaging with stakeholder groups, including engagement frequencies and channels, beyond its materiality assessment.

Sustainable development strategy
The company states that it has a materiality assessment but could further disclose its process for identifying and prioritising its most relevant sustainability topics and impacts, including how regularly the assessment is undertaken. Furthermore, it has an opportunity to disclose group wide targets on key sustainability topics for the most material parts of its value chain and to report consistently against all its targets.

Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
The company has reported a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, decreasing from 2,010,000 tons in 2020 to 1,880,000 tons in 2021. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the company has disclosed specific quantitative reductions for its scope 1 and 2 emissions. It does disclose its Tier-1 goal of reducing carbon emissions per ton of dairy products on an annual basis, aiming to decrease GHG emissions per ton of dairy products to 183.47 kg CO2e/t by 2025. However, this intensity-based target may not meet the requirements of the indicator. Additionally, no evidence was found to indicate that the company has established targets for reducing its scope 1 and 2 emissions.

There is an opportunity for the company to report its progress towards these scope 1 and 2 targets and align them with a 1.5-degree trajectory. Furthermore, it has the potential to reduce its scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions and should consider disclosing a time-bound target for this reduction. Similarly, it can consider reporting progress against these scope 3 targets and aligning them with a 1.5-degree trajectory.

Animal welfare
The company has an opportunity to set animal welfare targets applicable to all species, geographies and products.

Ecosystem conversion
The company has an opportunity to disclose its efforts to avoid ecosystem conversion, including deforestation or restoration. It could develop a strategy and publicly report on specific, time-bound targets.

Fertiliser and pesticide use
The company has an opportunity to disclose targets to optimise the use of fertilizers and minimise the use of pesticides in its production and/or sourcing practices, and report progress against the targets.

Food loss and waste
The company has an opportunity to disclose its food loss and waste (FLW) reduction targets and report progress against these targets. Additionally, it can consider aligning its FLW reduction goal with SDG12.3, which aims for a 50% reduction by 2030.

Protein diversification
The company has an opportunity to set a sales-based target to increase alternative proteins across its portfolio, as well as report progress against this target.

Soil health and agrobiodiversity
The company has an opportunity to enhance its disclosures relating to soil health and agrobiodiversity.

Accessibility and affordability of nutritious foods
The company has an opportunity to disclose its commitment and commercial activities to improve the accessibility and affordability of nutritious foods.

Availability of nutritious foods
The company provides examples of reformulated products. However, there is potential for improvement in reporting its overall efforts to reduce sugar, salt, and fat, and/or increase the presence of positive nutrients in its entire portfolio. Additionally, there is an opportunity for the company to establish nutrition criteria and to set a sales-based target to increase the proportion of more nutritious products.

Clear and transparent labelling
The company has an opportunity to disclose how it provides nutritional information on its products and how it supports consumers with making healthy food choices through its labelling schemes.

Food safety
The company has an opportunity to disclose its commitment to food safety and demonstrate that its operations and supply chain adhere to food safety standards.

Responsible marketing
The company has an opportunity to disclose its commitment to responsible marketing and its marketing activities to promote healthy food options.

Child labour
The company has an opportunity to make a commitment to prohibit child labour and implement an age verification system for its supply chain. Additionally, it should provide evidence of how it helps its suppliers build capacity to prevent child labour impacts.

Farmer and fisher livelihoods
The company has an opportunity to demonstrate how it identifies living income benchmarks and assesses living income gaps for some regions or commodities.

Forced labour
The company has an opportunity to disclose forced labour requirements for its operations and supply chain such as a prohibition to pay recruitment fees, to retain workers’ personal documents or to restrict workers’ freedom of movement. Further, it could provide evidence of how it builds the capacity of its suppliers to prevent forced labour impacts.

Health and safety of vulnerable groups
The company has an opportunity to recognise and assess the health and safety risks to vulnerable groups, such as migrant and temporary labourers, women and young farmers. Furthermore, it could provide evidence of support activities that improve the health and safety of vulnerable groups.

Land rights
The company has an opportunity to disclose a commitment to respect ownership and use of land and natural resources and related legitimate tenure rights. Furthermore, it could describe a process at its operations and supply chain level to identify legitimate tenure rightsholders when acquiring, leasing or making other arrangements to use land and to negotiate with them to provide adequate compensation.

Act ethically
While the company prohibits bribery and corruption, it has an opportunity to formalise this commitment in a public policy document. Besides conducting regular audits of corruption and business ethics to oversee employee business conduct, it could the process to identify its bribery and corruption risks and impacts in specific locations or activities covering its own operations. Moreover, it could also include anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in its contracts with business relationships. Additionally, the company has an opportunity to have a policy setting out its lobbying and political engagement approach and to disclose a publicly available policy statement that specifies that it does not make political contributions. Lastly, it could disclose its expenditures on lobbying activities and disclose that it requires third-party lobbyists to comply with its lobbying and political engagement policy.

Provide and promote decent work
The company respects the health and safety of workers, but it could formalise this commitment in a public policy document and that could include a requirement of its suppliers to respect the health and safety of their workers. Additionally, it could disclose how it monitors the health and safety performance of its business relationships and it a time-bound target for paying all workers a living wage. Moreover, it could disclose how it determines a living wage for the regions where it operates, as well as how it works to support the payment of a living wage by its suppliers.

Furthermore, the company has a statement on gender equality and women’s empowerment, it could formalise this in a public policy document along with the bound targets on gender equality and women’s empowerment. It could also disclose the ratio of the basic salary and remuneration of women to men in its total direct operations workforce for each employee category, by locations of operation.

Respect human rights
The company has an opportunity to disclose a policy statement committing to respecting human rights and the ILO fundamental rights at work in its operations and supply chain. Additionally, it also has the opportunity to describe a comprehensive process for identifying human rights risks and impacts across all its activities and supply chain, as well as assessing and identifying what it considers to be its salient human rights issues. The latter could include a description of how relevant factors, such as geographical, economic and social, are taken into account. Furthermore, it could also reveal a global system to address its salient human rights issues by preventing, mitigating or remediating them.