Our First Stakeholder Progress Report

Today Coca-Cola European Partners has published its first ever Stakeholder Progress Report.

The report highlights the improvements we have made relating to sustainability in its broadest sense - from our governance and people programmes, to our drinks, packaging, water, climate and communities. 

When I became CEO of CCEP one year ago, I was motivated by two key ambitions. First, I wanted to grow the company in a way that fulfilled its potential while respecting its heritage. Second, I wanted to do it in a way that would make me, our employees and our stakeholders feel proud.

Our stakeholders - both inside and outside the business - want us to fundamentally be a good business, but to more meaningfully influence some of the biggest issues facing society today.

They want to see leadership from us on packaging, the sugar and calories in our beverages and the impact we have on our communities. We are hard at work transforming this into a set of targets and commitments that we will publish in our new sustainability plan later this year.

But before we set goals for the future we had to know where we are today. With merging three bottling organisations, it has taken us a year to gather and analyse the data needed to establish the baseline of our performance. This is what we’ve released today in our Stakeholder Progress Report.

Here are some highlights. We have:

• Reduced the calories across our portfolio by 7.9%
• 35% of the volume of our products in our portfolio are no- and low-calorie
• Reduced our carbon footprint by 42.6% since 2010
• Continued to ensure that all of our packaging is recyclable, and in 2016, 21% of our PET was recycled PET
• Donated approximately €6.6 million to our communities and our people have spent 10,000 hours volunteering for local causes

The report sets out the foundations we will build from in every relevant area, from governance to environmental performance, from transforming our drinks portfolio and packaging to diversity.

Continued progress requires leadership, dedication and collaboration and all credit rests with the passion and commitment of our employees and the great partnerships that we have developed with suppliers, customers, local communities, NGOs and stakeholders. 

There’s still considerable work to be done and I am excited about what we can achieve. I look forward to sharing more on our new sustainability plan once it’s released later this year.

Damian Gammell

CEO