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1161 SA UV cases 01Unchaining Value July 2008 www.sustainability.com/unchainingvalueSustainAbility / UNEP / UNGC
Case Study
Unilever
Case Study
Unilever: Partnerships for Supplier 
Capacity-Building
Project
Farmer field schools 
and Lipton tea
Illustration
Capacity-building
Unilever is the world’s largest buyer of
black tea and purchases 12% of the global
supply each year. It sources from a variety
of growers: independently owned estates,
smallholder farms and its own estates. 
In 2002, Unilever published sustainable
agriculture guidelines for tea cultivation
and has been working to roll these out, but
faced difficulties in reaching geographically
widespread smallholder farmers,
particularly in Kenya, the world’s largest
exporter of black tea.
Some 60% of Kenyan tea is grown by
smallholders, whose output is almost 
40% lower than large estate yields, largely
thought to be due to the high cost of farm
inputs, poor husbandry practices and low
farmer morale. Adoption of good practices
to improve yield was slow as the main
communication route to farmers was via
the Kenyan Tea Development Agency
(KTDA), where each ‘field officer’ dealt 
with at least 1,000 farmers.
Unilever developed a program to work 
with KTDA to transform its outreach to
smallholders by developing farmer field
schools, which would serve to roll-out
Unilever’s tea sustainability guidelines and
help smallholders achieve better financial
returns as a result. The program is managed
and funded in collaboration between
Unilever, KTDA and the UK Department 
for International Development (DFID).
Before launching the three-year program 
in March 2006, Unilever spent five years
building the relationship with KTDA and
seeking a public sector funding partner,
which was not easy given the scale of the
initiative. Part of DFID’s contribution has
been funding for a baseline study and
experienced trainers to enable Unilever 
to expand the scope of the initiative to 
a far wider audience.
The first farmer field school was started 
in August 2006, with another 20 launched
over 2007, with sites chosen for their
geographic reach and accessibility. Over 
the next three years, Unilever will assess the
impact of the farmer field schools against
the DFID funded baseline study. So far, three
of the four established farmer field schools
have shown substantial potential for
generating higher income, with the fourth
being fairly successful from the start.
Unilever also believes the initiative has
helped imbue a sustainable agriculture
philosophy throughout its operations.
On the back of the success of the farmer
field schools, the Unilever black tea
sustainability program added another
commitment in the summer of 2007: 
to achieve Rainforest Alliance certification
of its Lipton brand tea globally by 2015.
Believing that consumers now see
sustainability as a brand enhancement,
Unilever’s Lipton marketing team decided 
to find a way to communicate credibly to
consumers the work that the organisation
was already engaged in. 
It chose Rainforest Alliance for its
comprehensive approach to social and
environmental issues, its ability to work 
on an international scale with both large
plantations and small farmers, and its
market-based approach.
The existing relationship between Lipton
and KTDA helped to facilitate discussions
on Rainforest Alliance certification, as 
KTDA did not initially trust the certification
process. Rainforest Alliance auditors have
begun making site visits to Kenyan growers,
and other tea farms in Kenya, Tanzania,
Malawi, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka 
will follow.
Insights:
— Indigenous expertise can be greatly
enhanced with the right type of
thoughtful corporate intervention.
— Effective capacity building needs to
combine locally relevant initiatives 
and partners with the benefits of scale
and reach.
— Successful supply chain sustainability
initiatives can lay essential ground for
developing brand-enhancing partnerships
that will help drive consumer loyalty.
As corporate supply chains grow ever 
more vast and global, smart business
strategists must equip themselves to
anticipate and manage an array of
environmental and social impacts,
dilemmas and trade-offs outside the
company's direct footprint. 
Unchaining Value, a report by
SustainAbility, the UN Environment
Programme, and the UN Global Compact,
explores a variety of best practices, 
drawn from different sectors. 
The report illustrates how multinationals 
like IKEA, Unilever and Hewlett-Packard 
are working with suppliers towards a 
shared understanding of the role of
sustainability in supply chain management
and the mutual value to be achieved. 
Included in the report are several case
studies that illustrate a range of benefits
that companies — and their supply chain
partners — can realise from a collaborative,
proactive and sustainability-minded
approach to management across the 
chain, such as improved engagement &
communication, capacity building,
efficiency improvement, resilience, 
and risk avoidance.