safety, health and comfort of the animal. In addition, that managers
and caretakers be thoroughly trained, skilled and competent in animal
husbandry and welfare, and have good working knowledge of their system and the livestock in their care.
10. Education—We will strive to provide consumers, employees, our
communities and the media accurate, useful and timely information
about all of the areas listed in this document.
11. Governance—We will strive to regularly review our progress toward these goals by conducting self-audits and being transparent with
all employees and the public with the results. We will actively engage in
communication across the trade to solve sustainability-related challenges and will facilitate dialogue regarding action.
Clif bar tracks their organic purchases through weight.
How the Metrics Work
For companies that have not implemented a formal sustainability
strategy, figuring out where to start is often the most difficult task. Sustainability metrics provide a framework for a company to view environmental, social and financial performance across its entire operations.
Clif bar reports on their reduction in CO2 emissions.
Every industry has specific aspects to
its business that must be considered
when evaluating sustainability performance. For instance, a company in
IT will be focused on different metrics than a farmer or food processor.
SFTA exists to support the entire organic food industry in becoming
more sustainable, therefore the development of industry tools that foster
collaboration and shared best practices is paramount.
To understand the effectiveness of
the SFTA metrics, one can take a single declaration and look at the overarching commitment. Each
declaration provides subcategories of
qualitative and quantitative metrics.
Qualitative metrics are narratives
that detail the steps the company is
taking in each declaration area. This
includes creating policies to help
transition from basing sustainability
efforts on informal, often sporadic actions to formally adopting official sustainability metrics that can be
measured and managed.
For example, a company may have
chosen to purchase recycled content
packaging when possible, but this
does not move the company forward
in systematically creating goals and
holding themselves accountable to
making all purchasing decisions toward best practices. Instead, a company has a qualitative metric to
develop a task team to research recycled packaging.
Quantitative metrics vary depending on what is being requested, either
total or aggregate numbers, normalizing numbers to get a per unit impact
assessment or a percent breakdown
of different impacts. These hard
numbers can be difficult for companies to access and therefore become
the focus for the organization to create systems for gathering the data
sets. In the case of packaging, the
quantitative metric might be to increase recycled content by at least 25
percent annually.
