December 10, 2020
Sustainability can mean different things to different people. Broadly, at OSI, we think about it as being aware of our impacts and committing to addressing the impacts that are most important to us and our stakeholders.
We determine what these priority areas are through an extensive process called a Materiality Analysis, which aims to identify and understand the economic, environmental and social issues most relevant to OSI. We conducted materiality analyses in the past to determine OSI’s six sustainability priority areas: Workplace, Community, Animal Welfare, Antibiotic Stewardship, Conservation and Climate Change.
But we know that priorities change. So when we set out to prepare our recently published ,,2020-2021 Global Sustainability Report, we repeated the exercise, analyzing everything from executive and stakeholder feedback to media attention, in order to reassess shifting priorities and refine our areas of focus.
As we’ve done in the past, we analyzed issues based on two dimensions: those most “material” or important to OSI’s business success, and those most important to a range of outside stakeholders.
DETERMINING WHAT IS OF IMPORTANCE TO OUR BUSINESS AND STAKEHOLDERS
We defined “importance to business” as the extent to which topics are both relevant to OSI business operations and important to address, according to an extensive internal evaluation. This evaluation included interviews with executives about risks and opportunities, analysis of audit results, employee surveys, and an assessment of the sustainability priorities we had previously set.
To determine the top sustainability priorities of outside stakeholders, we identified and analyzed the top issues motivating industry influencers to engage with OSI. The influencers included key customers, suppliers, non-governmental and community organizations, industry trade groups, competitors, as well as media. We gave feedback from the most important stakeholder groups more weight.
MAPPING SHIFTING PRIORITIES
With all the information gathered, we then plotted the results on a graph, with “Importance to Business” serving as the X axis and “Importance to Stakeholders” as the Y axis.
The graphed results gave us a visual guide to the most important economic, social and environmental issues to our business. The top 11 issues, according the analysis, are:
It also highlighted for us some notable shifts in several areas compared to previous analyses: Workplace safety has become the top business priority, growing in importance to both OSI stakeholders and internal representatives. This information prompted us to revise the sequencing of OSI priorities in our report.
The analysis also found that climate change has risen in relevance, while a range of new issues are of emerging importance: responsible sourcing, farmer livelihood, consumer food choice, sustainable packaging, industry leadership and partnerships. This information guides our ongoing dialogue with stakeholders and has prompted us to refine our strategies accordingly.
SUSTAINABILITY PRIORITIES
We used results from the materiality analysis to reorganize the most significant material issues into three priority groups: Social Responsibility, Sustainable Supply and Environment.
These groups, collectively, contain a total of six company priorities that build on the Sustainability Vision that OSI has been communicating to our stakeholders and supply base over the past few years. Highlighting specific priorities advances our approach by defining the opportunities where we can drive meaningful and sustainable impact toward our long-term goals.
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