Responsible Operations – making sure our day-to-day business is safe and carbon responsible

Thai Union is one of the world’s leading seafood processers. Our operations go far beyond simply sourcing fish and other seafood products and providing them to consumers. Thai Union maintains factories, offices and warehouses all over the world, from Asia-Pacific, to Europe and the United States. This means that we have a real duty to make sure we operate ethically and safely, upholding our duties to our workers, consumers, our local communities and the planet. Since we launched SeaChange®, our global sustainability strategy, in 2016, Responsible Operations has been a key pillar of our sustainability operations.

This isn’t an easy task, with so many locations and different stakeholders to work with. However, no matter the location the fundamentals remain the same – workers should be able to return home safely at the end of each work day, and we need to rise to meet the challenges of global warming and protection of our natural resources. The oceans are vital to our business and climate change can threaten our survival through rising ocean temperatures, ocean acidification and plastic pollution.

And this is not something we’re doing alone. Since we launched SeaChange®, we’ve been fortunate to work with a number of key partners, both from the public and private sectors, as well as NGOs. In 2017, we joined forces with the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) to create a wastewater and biogas project at our Indian Ocean Tuna (IOT) facility in the Seychelles; worked with the Royal Thai Government to join the Thailand Voluntary Emission Trading Scheme (Thailand V-ETS); and became the first food producer and first Thai-listed company to join EP-100, a Climate Group global initiative on smarter energy use. As part of our work with EP-100, we’re participating in the Cooling Challenge, with a commitment to double energy productivity by 2041 from our 2016 baseline.

Of course, we’ve also been working closer to home to uphold our commitments to reduce greenhouse gases and water consumption, and reduce waste-to-landfill, achieving year-on-year drops every year since 2016. We’ve also committed to ensuring 100 percent of our branded packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025. We’ve been working hard on this and have been talking to a number of potential partners and suppliers to achieve this goal and develop a packaging road map across our brands. We’ve also kept driving our Sunseeker project to place solar panels in our factories. You can read more about our progress against all these goals in the Responsible Sourcing section of our 2019 Sustainability Report.

We’re getting ready to launch the next phase of SeaChange® and, while we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, we know there’s a lot more to be done. Climate change and packaging are two key issues that we’ll be paying even more attention to for the next five years of our sustainability strategy and we’ll even include United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) 13: Climate Action as one of our focus SDGs. It’s a long journey to keep improving, but it’s one that we’re looking forward to continuing.