Sustainability

What is Material 

to us?

Whilst identifying which sustainability topics were most important to us, we looked both at our customers’ operations as well as our own. 

In 2018, we conducted a number of interviews with key stakeholders in the dairy industry as well as with employees at DeLaval. We looked at what was material for both our customers’ operations and our own. The external stakeholders included dairy processors, industry associations, global organisations, academic institutions, NGO’s and customers. Internally, we carried out interviews with a wide audience of employees across DeLaval. In addition, we engaged in in-depth discussions in 2019 with farmers across Europe via the EDF (European Dairy Farming) organisation.

The result of these discussions showed us the main sustainability challenges facing European dairy farmers. These topics are also relevant for our customers in other parts of the world. These topics are still relevant today and we continue to have
an ongoing dialogue with internal and external stakeholders.

Priority areas

Based on the customer’s main challenges and our own materiality index, we identified 10 key areas of priority in 2019. Each priority area is driven by a member of our Group Management.

In 2020, the owners of each priority area created working groups and have set goals for the area.

The graph below shows what areas key external and internal stakeholders are most important to us.