Reviewing Water Stewardship Strategy for Food and Beverage Supplier

Situation

A large food and beverage supplier want to define what the company’s Water Stewardship Strategy could look like with the aim of integrating water stewardship into regular business processes so that it becomes an everyday, “business as usual” consideration. Also, to enable the organisation to participate in the CDP Water programme and to respond to the CDP’s Water Questionnaire.

Solution

Anthesis reviewed the Water Stewardship Strategy on behalf of the food and beverage supplier. This was with the intention of effecting a deeper understanding of the operational and supply chain risks posed by current and future water scarcity and increasing regulation and devising a programme of preventative and corrective actions.

Key services included:

• Performance of a water risk assessment to identify the principle water risk ‘hotspots’ at individual manufacturing facility sites and within the company’s supply chain. Through this we identified the priority issues that consistently affected the principle locations across the value chain.
• Development of a ‘Roadmap’, with high level recommendations on preventative and corrective actions to ensure water is managed sustainably.

Our team created a series of infographics depicting the manufacturing facilities and Tier 1 suppliers that are at risk. This was complemented with a high level executive summary report that told the story of how we executed the project and outlined the methodology we adopted. The key project outputs were:

• Identification of target locations in which water stewardship can be delivered.
• Recommendations for how best to use capital investment for adaptation measures as part of the company’s Water Stewardship Strategy.
• An improved Environmental Resources Management (ERM) system that blends and synchronises water risk with broader commercial risk.

Impacts

Our assessment was the key first step to enabling four internal teams to identify the actions required to demonstrate best practice, beyond being an efficient water user. Our analysis is the starting point enabling the company to understand where the opportunities for building resilience exist, and a programme is now being developed to agree the targets for 2017-2018.