From its origins, Symrise Pet Food has included sustainable development in its strategy, an initiative based on the desire and willingness to valorize local side-stream raw materials while being close to customers. 

 

The sustainability roadmap of Symrise Pet Food is based on four pillars: Footprint, Innovation, Sourcing, and Care. Those four pillars address the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, at the same time ensuring a successful and exciting sustainable journey to the company’s stakeholders.

Through programs such as the “whole portfolio” environmental impacts assessment and improvement, the “Zero waste to landfill” project, the “Zero plastic” project, and many others, Symrise Pet Food strives to answer to the societal stakes our world is facing.

Symrise Pet Food commitments for 2020-2025

Symrise Pet Food defined 16 commitments to 2025, in line with Symrise objectives.

Discover each of them:

Footprint

Minimize our environmental footprint across the value chain.

 

Programs initiated on every Symrise Pet Food site to improve environmental efficiency will actively continue to better manage energy and water efficiency, reduce and recover waste, and contribute to climate change reduction.

Symrise Pet Food will pursue efforts toward water saving, but also improvement of water treatment quality by reducing the COD* to limit damage to the ecosystem. And because the best waste is waste that is not produced, Symrise Pet Food will continue its waste reduction and valorization program from previous years. Four Symrise Pet Food sites are already “zero waste to landfill!”

Taking advantage of an energy utilities efficiency program and renewable energies introduction, Symrise Pet Food will reduce its energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions per ton produced, contributing within Symrise to reach the Paris agreement on climate change mitigation by 2025.

* reflecting organic pollutants within wastewater

2025 Commitments

-4%

of water consumption/ton of finished product/year

-4%

of the COD in wastewater/year

-4%

of waste generation/ton produced/year

-5.6%

of GHG emissions/ton produced/year

100%

share of electricity from renewable sources

Innovation

Maximize social and environmental performance of our products

A responsible company has a duty to stakeholders to be efficient and effective. As a leader, Symrise Pet Food will keep driving the market by constantly innovating.

In addition to proposing new products to the market, Symrise Pet Food considers its responsibility over the whole value chain through circularity—ensuring economic, social, and environmental well-being from value proposition to consumption—and will assess its entire portfolio according to environmental criteria.

The company will also accelerate the launch of new products with improved environmental performance using the Eco-Design Matrix.

2025 Commitments

>15%

of total sales from new products*

100%

of new products assessed according to environmental criteria

1

new eco-design development program followed / year / region

*relative to market launch in the past three years

Sourcing

Maximize sustainability of our supply chain and raw materials

The impact of raw materials accounts for 80% of a product's footprint. Symrise Pet Food raw materials sourcing is monitored to calculate environmental impact, where both transportation distances as well as packaging play a role. Without compromising its quality standards, Symrise Pet Food is deeply committed to valorization of side streams from its partners’ activities.

Responsibility toward our stakeholders also implies the duty for Symrise Pet Food to secure sourcings and make them more sustainable: Ethical commitments through labor practices, business code of conduct, and animal welfare are asked from our suppliers.

2025 Commitments

>90%

of raw materials are locally sourced

Continue

our sourcing activity in terms of side streams

100%

of Supply Budget will be covered by Responsible Sourcing agreement letters

Care

Improving well-being in our stakeholder communities and employees

Safety, health, and well-being of employees are essential and contribute to the pride of belonging to a sustainable company. This is why Symrise Pet Food will pursue its actions toward employees and within its local communities.

Embracing its 100% SAFE vision, Symrise Pet Food will reinforce its safety policy through a strong prevention program. The company is also implementing coverage for all its employees (Deeply Healthy Program) worldwide, according to local standards and best practices.

And because care is also about simple actions, all Symrise Pet Food employees will benefit from at least one health initiative per year (Simply Healthy Program). These actions led by Symrise Pet Food’s Susty Ambassadors Network cover preventive health care information and actions from nutrition to sleep quality, sport practices, or heart disease prevention.

2025 Commitments

<1.5

Accident frequency rate by 2025

100%

employees covered at the right level, defined according to local standards and best practices

1

initiative on health per site per year

100%

of our sites are Sedex** registered

100%

of employees informed of Symrise Code of Conduct

** Sedex is the world’s leading ethical trade service providers

Symrise Pet Food key initiatives for more sustainable business

Symrise Pet Food Product Life Cycle

The product life cycle approach aims to consider a product over its whole life at every stage, from extraction of raw materials to usage and recycling.

Symrise Pet Food is born from the valorization of co-products of agro-agri industries and is therefore based on a circular economy model. It strives to provide sustainable added-value at each stage of the products’ life cycle.

Discover Symrise Pet Food product life cycle

The Eco-Design Matrix

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) consists of evaluating the environmental performance of a product throughout its value chain. 

Symrise Pet Food developed a tool – the Eco-Design Matrix – which assesses and allows to improve the environmental impacts of products throughout their life cycle, from sourcing to customer delivery. Guidelines from LCA methodology of the ISO14044 and pet food Footprint Product evaluation group of the European Commission were followed.

This tool allows Symrise Pet Food to know, for its whole SPF portfolio, the footprint data on seven impacts and at each of the main four life steps (Sourcing, Manufacturing, Packaging, and Logistics). Comparison and evaluation of new products is possible, leading to improved methods. 

With the eco-design matrix tool, we found a new driver of innovation,” explains Aurélie de Ratuld, Symrise Pet Food Global CSR Manager. “Indeed, we are now able to select ingredients and design new products taking into account not only functionality and economical performances but also environmental impacts over the life cycle.

“Zero waste to landfill” approach

Landfills have important impacts on the environment and human health. Finding other ways to valorize waste instead of landfilling is essential to limit our environmental impacts.

To reduce its footprint, some Symrise Pet Food sites initiated a “Zero waste to landfill” approach, which is achieved when more than 90%* of generated waste is not landfilled. 

In 2019, four sites out of 17–China, Thailand, Spain, and Languidic in France, reached the “Zero waste to landfill” objectives! In coming years, new sites will be able to reach this goal too, taking advantage of their countries’ consideration of this major stake and onboarding of new valorization streams.

*Regarding some waste characteristics (e.g. hazardous), local stakes (e.g. recovery plants available around the site) and local regulation, an objective of 100% would not have been reachable for most of our sites.

“Zero plastic” policy in Asia Pacific

According the WWF report on plastic, by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. Every company has a stake in preventing this.

Concerned by this danger, Symrise Pet Food Thailand developed a “Zero plastic waste policy”. The first step has consisted of reducing the amount of plastic the company generates in its value chain, and, for those that cannot be avoided, to use packaging that is 100% recyclable or reusable. 

In a second step of the project, Symrise Pet Food Thailand tackles the collection & recycling of local plastic waste, which pollutes the ocean. The team, working closely with the Second Life project team, aims to collect, recover and recycle plastic waste as much as plastic packaging the company consumed in 2020, thus offsetting the impact of its production!  

New factories with high sustainability standards

In 2019, Symrise Pet Food initiated a new concept of eco-friendly factory that paved the way to the future industrial projects. 

The Colombian factory was the first to benefit from new building standards that follow LEED certification standards, reaching the GOLD level. 

The Colombian site has been thought out with a full CSR approach, from the conception of the building to the products coming out of the factory, the well-being of the workers, and the involvement within the local communities,” says Christophe Salaün, Symrise Pet Food Colombia General Manager.

Since then, the Chinese new site also granted Silver LEED certification, while all new sites - in Brazil, Mexico, Australia... - follow the same path.

Discover our global network

* The LEED certification is based on criteria organized in 7 categories that address key aspects of green buildings. 

An internal network of 35 sustainability ambassadors

To bring its commitment to life at every layer of the organization, Symrise Pet Food has created an internal network of 35 sustainability ambassadors in the 13 countries. They act as the ears and voice of sustainability at the site level. They organize events on sustainability topics to raise awareness of all employees regarding Symrise Pet Food stakes within our four pillars and are involved in the Simply Healthy program. With their sensitivity and inspiring simple actions, they demonstrate the importance of taking action.