Our Materiality Assessment

In spring 2022, we conducted a materiality assessment to identify the most important sustainability topics to us as a business and to our stakeholders.

The results of the assessment will shape our sustainability strategy, drive our engagement with stakeholders and help us prioritise areas of focus, target setting and guide our reporting and disclosure moving forward.

Our Approach to Materiality Assessment

Ahead of performing the assessment, and in order to identify material sustainability topics, we considered those that we were already working towards as part of our Making a Difference plan. We also performed additional desk based research from leading sustainability reporting frameworks and peers on those topics that are deemed to be important within our industry as well as obtaining feedback from investors and other stakeholders, including key management, on thematic sustainability topics.

In conducting the assessment we surveyed 276 people from our six stakeholder groups and asked them to rank 31 sustainability topics in order of importance.

Our Materiality Assessment Findings

Key topics identified as part of the assessment such as animal health and wellbeing, human rights and equality in the workplace are fully aligned to our Making a Difference plan and will continue to form the basis of our engagement with stakeholders. Our findings showed that there is increasing demand from stakeholders to understand our environmental strategy, including our approach to climate change, responsible consumption and production and biodiversity. Our community related philanthropic actions are established and appear to be well understood.

Outlook

Our focus will remain on those topics deemed to be of most importance to our stakeholders. We will continue to engage with stakeholders and embed sustainability into the DNA of our business, but acknowledge that we will need to remain agile and adapt to new demands, legislation, changing trends and technological advances, all of which will result in the evolution of our Making a Difference plan over time.