We brew beer with natural ingredients.
We need cereals, predominantly barley,
for brewing and hops for flavour and
bitterness. For the continuity of our business,
we need access to sufficient, high quality
raw materials at an acceptable price.
As the world's population continues to rise
and many people see their wealth increase,
demand for foodstuffs is increasing rapidly.
At the same time, the quantity of arable
land has remained more or less stable.
With biofuels putting extra pressure
on the availability of land for foodstuffs
in 2008, prices rose significantly.
What we did and what we delivered
We are constantly broadening our supplier base for raw
materials by trying to find suppliers close to our breweries.
We have a number of programmes where we support local
farmers in becoming a supplier to Heineken. In Africa,
we use a fair amount of locally grown rice, maize and
sorghum to brew our beers, mainly involving local
smallholders (see also www.heinekeninternational.com
under corporate responsibility).
In Greece we launched a programme to engage local
farmers in barley farming. We have also established
three-year contracts with individual barley farmers to
help sustain our supply for the mid-term.
Across the business, we invested in programmes and
technologies to increase efficiency in the use of the raw
materials that we buy. Extract losses in our brewing and
packaging processes are key performance indicators,
and therefore a focus in the TPM improvement programmes
of our breweries. A global hop programme has resulted
in increased yield and efficiency in the use of hops.
Keeping barley farming a valuable proposition for farmers
is vital. Our Skylark project was a quest for sustainable
arable farming, which resulted in the definition of important
sustainability indicators. In 2008, we summarised the key
findings of the Skylark project and published these in an
international brochure in English, Dutch and French,
AGRICULTURE
