“Responsibility is more than just a word”

Achim Lohrie, head of Corporate Responsibility at Tchibo, on sustainability in practice.

Achim Lohrie has been head of Corporate Responsibility at Tchibo since 2006. In this interview, the 52-year-old tells us about the progress that has been made on sustainability at Tchibo during this time, the limits he meets in the course of his work – and the aims he is pursuing.

The Corporate Responsibility department was founded in 2006. What was its aim?

Tchibo has grown at a breathtaking speed over the last few decades, undergoing a transformation from a German coffee roasting company to a globally active industrial and retail giant. Our responsibility for people and the environment has increased in proportion to this growth. For this reason, the company integrated sustainability into its corporate strategy in 2006, setting up the Corporate Responsibility department, which reports directly to the CEO. Our guiding principle is the requirement to take environmental and social factors into account in all our business activities. This is a course of action that also makes our business sustainable for the future.

In what way?

Let me give you an example: Coffee is an agricultural product and needs particular climatic conditions to produce optimum yields. Climate change will affect cultivation conditions in such a way as to impact negatively on yields and quality when it comes to the coffee harvest. We need to act if we want to continue supplying our customers with top-quality coffee in the future. We need to train coffee farmers to make their coffee plants and their cultivation methods more resilient to the consequences of the climate change that is now inevitable: some ways to do this might be to plant trees to provide shade and implement a range of methods to prevent soil erosion. In addition to this, we need to show coffee farmers how to limit their own impact on the climate – and we have to take heed of this ourselves too, in our coffee roasting and retailing activities. We might do this, for instance, by ensuring we impact as little as possible on the climate when we transport goods, using up-to-date roasting technology, switching over our fleet to low-consumption vehicles and using energy from renewable sources at our sites.

So to sum that up, a good five years ago you began the process of taking a holistic, systematic approach to corporate responsibility at Tchibo. What are the principles you base your actions on?

Three clearly formulated principles form the basis of our approach. First: Taking responsibility is an integral part of Tchibo’s business strategy. Second: For coffee and consumer goods, we pay attention to environmental factors across the entire product life cycle – from the use of resources and production by our suppliers all the way to the product’s eventual disposal. Third: We are uncompromising in our orientation towards our customers’ needs and requirements and those of the groups that represent their interests in society.

Where are you with all this today? Have there been setbacks as well as progress?

Corporate responsibility is firmly rooted in our company and our employees bring it to life each and every day. The results of our activities prove that responsibility is more than just a word. For example, we have been able to continuously increase the proportion of sustainably cultivated raw coffee in the coffee we process and that of the consumer goods in our range produced in environmentally and socially responsible conditions. Additionally, we have a comprehensive training programme in place to support the implementation of social responsibility standards in the production plants run by our consumer goods suppliers, and the electricity we use at our sites comes solely from renewable sources. But we also come up against limits, which in our view we will only be able to overcome shoulder to shoulder with all other players in society. These include issues such as working with our Asian suppliers to secure living wages and employees’ right to join unions and conduct collective bargaining, and eliminating agricultural child labour in developing countries.

What are your aims for the future?

We have set ourselves an ambitious goal: We want our products and significant processes to be the best they can be in relation to environmental and social criteria and we want our stakeholders in society – our customers above all – to see and appreciate this. We want them to automatically associate sustainability with the Tchibo brand.

How do you intend to achieve this goal?

We place particular emphasis on long-term, transparent business relationships with our suppliers, in which we work with them as partners. Over the last five years, we have learned that such relationships are key in establishing the right conditions for developing sustainable products and processes and in speeding up this process. Further, we are working on extending and deepening dialogue with our stakeholders in society. If we manage this, we will be able to successfully tackle those challenges we would not be able to overcome alone.