Partnership & technology-led traceability

Gaining greater visibility of our supply chain is crucial: it helps us identify issues on the ground and remediate them effectively, often in partnership with our suppliers, NGOs and government stakeholders.

Unilever has a four-step programme in place to drive a traceable palm oil supply chain:

• Trace palm oil back to an identified universe of palm oil mills: this requires that our direct suppliers disclose the universe of mills where their palm oil originates. We can trace the universe of mills associated with 97% of our core volumes, linked to more than 1,500 mills. In February 2018, we became the first FMCG company to publish comprehensive supplier and mill data.
• Identify environmental and social risks associated with plantations: visibility of mills enables us to monitor plantations with our partnership with Aidenvironment and to build roadmaps with suppliers to ensure that mills can comply with our Policy.
• Target our sustainability investments to agricultural areas where our raw materials are grown. We partner with a diversity of stakeholders including suppliers, NGOs and governments to ensure the long term sustainability of our palm oil sourcing and to support transformation within the community and environment that is part of a diverse oil palm growing landscape.
• Support inclusive business models for smallholders: taking a landscape approach presents an opportunity to improve smallholder yields and leads to more effective programmes for including smallholders into sustainable supply chains.

We are actively developing and deploying technologies that have the potential to disrupt and transform supply chain traceability and transparency. We are investing in satellite data, geolocation, blockchain and AI, working with major tech firms and innovative start-ups to build new approaches to monitoring and traceability, extending from mill to plantation or crop source.

We are working with partners to find new ways of gathering and interpreting data. Visibility of the supply chain through to the smallest supplier will radically improve our knowledge of what is happening on the ground. We can then monitor land use, manage risks and direct investment into sustainability activities. Satellite and radar technology is already being deployed to give us early warning of deforestation. We work in partnership to support organisations, such as the World Resources Institute (WRI) Global Forest Watch platform, that make land use monitoring publicly available.

We believe that, alongside gaining a better understanding of our palm oil supply through mapping, we’ll make greater progress towards transformation by sharing the information we have.

We’ve also shared the names and locations of more than 1,500 mills and 150 palm oil facilities (such as refineries and oleochemical plants sourcing from many mills) that were declared by our direct suppliers. These form our ‘mill universe’ of our direct and extended supply chain.

An additional 158 palm oil mills were declared by our suppliers in 2019 but have now been suspended by Unilever due to verified grievances or that it could not be confirmed that these mills were in compliance with the Unilever Sustainable Palm Oil Sourcing Policy (USPOSP) at a group level. Please note that we are not making any accusations of legal wrongdoing with this separate suspended mill list but are sharing that we have sight of data that indicates that certain supply sources are not in compliance with the USPO.

Mill locations are an important indicator of where palm fruit is processed and therefore tell us more about where oil palm plantations are located. See our full palm oil mill (PDF | 506KB) and palm oil facility list (PDF | 198KB).