Hershey’s believes on building Milton Hershey’s legacy on commitments to customers, community and children because “we provide high-quality Hershey products while conducting our business in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable manner.”
They have Corporate Social Responsibility priorities and for goal for improvement concentrated around the following four areas:
Marketplace – engage in fair and ethical business dealings through responsible sourcing, through alignment with our customers and through our promise to our consumers.
Environment – practice environmental stewardship throughout our value chain, including product design, sourcing and efficient operations.
Workplace – foster a desirable place to work to engage employees, who contribute to our continued success.
Community – work to positively impact society and our local communities.
According to their scorecard they have improved the market place through integrity of supply by revising suppler code of conduct which can be found at http://www.thehersheycompany.com/hersheys-partners.aspx
For the environment they have many programs to conserve energy and become greener. One of these ways is in January of this year their Reese’s plant in Hershey, PA became a zero-waste- to landfill operation.
They are promoting employee health welfare in the workplace through investment in wellness programs such as Hershey’s Lifestyle Returns program. Finally for their community, in 2009 they pledged to give $1 million dollars to the Penn State Hershey’s Children’s Hospital over the course of the following 5 years. For more examples for how Hershey’s is acting responsibly visit their scorecard for Corporate Social Responsibility : http://www.thehersheycompany.com/assets/pdfs/hersheycompany/scorecard2010.pdf
Although Hershey’s claims to be socially and ethically responsible according to laborrights.org most of their cocoa is sourced West Africa, a region plagued by forced labor, human trafficking and abusive child labor. While this occurs the corporation fails to act responsibly because they lack a system in which they ensure its cocoa purchases from this region are not tainted by labor rights abuses. To make matters worse they have not been transparent with the suppliers of the cocoa in order to prove that the chocolates we all enjoy were not made under conditions involving child labor. They have fallen behind the completion not being involved with the Fair Trade Certified cocoa as only one line in 2006 included this cocoa. Meanwhile its competitors have all taken part of this including many small local companies have been offering 100% Fair trade for years now. As a result they have launched in March 2011 CocoaLink, a mobile technology program to bring our farmer education program to cocoa farmers in Africa. Even so I believe they should do more than that such implementing on of their top sellers with Fair Trade Certified cocoa.
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