Working with customers to maximise our positive impact
We see our customers as a key resource in our work to change consumer attitudes and behaviour, particularly around responsible drinking. Likewise our customers are increasingly seeing their suppliers, including Diageo, as resources to improve their own sustainability performance. While we already partner with many customers, we look forward to further collaboration on our broader sustainability and responsibility programme.
Our customers range from global retailers to convenience stores, bars and restaurants to governments (‘control states’ in the US). We collaborate with our customers to help promote issues of sustainability and responsibility with their shoppers and drinkers. Our work this year has been primarily with large global retailers on programmes addressing responsible drinking and in some cases, environmental sustainability.
Responsible drinking
Following are some of the customer partnerships we have worked on this year in an effort to reach consumers on issues of responsibility drinking:
- Real: In Poland we partnered with Real, part of the Metro Group, to spread the message ‘Alcohol is responsibility’. The campaign won approval from consumers and was described by Metro Group as an example of best practice in corporate social responsibility. Read more.
- Retailer 18+, a project implemented in partnership with major off-trade retailers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, designed to restrict underage drinkers' access to alcohol products.
- Walmart: we partnered with Walmart Brazil to launch a programme to prevent alcohol sales to minors and to train staff on the importance of checking identification.
- US alcoholic beverage control states: certain U.S. states have a monopoly on selling some or all categories of alcoholic beverages. In this way, these ‘control states’ are main customers for Diageo. This year Diageo worked within control states to implement a variety of local social responsibility projects aimed at combating underage drinking and over-consumption. Among the states we’ve worked with this year are:
Environmental sustainability
We have also been working with customers on environmental sustainability issues. Following are some examples of our work this year.
- Carrefour: Smirnoff worked with Carrefour to promote recycling by putting a branded recycling machine into stores, rewarding consumers for returning bottles.
- Walmart is working with Diageo and other key suppliers to ensure that the products they buy are manufactured to high environmental standards and that brand containers and outer packaging are both efficient and sustainable. This is being reinforced by Walmart’s introduction of a sustainability scorecard that assesses each product line for its environmental impacts.
Also, last year, Diageo’s brand teams worked to develop sustainable packaging guidelines that, in addition to reducing our own environmental impact, aim to help our customers reduce theirs as well. Read more.