Customers

Our network of retail customers

Our products reach shoppers through a network of customers, from multinational retailers, wholesalers and distributors to small independent shops. International retail customers such as Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour and Metro predominate in the US and Europe and have a growing presence in developing markets. In 2009, around a fifth of our worldwide sales were channelled through ten major retail chains.

We also sell products through a more diverse group of distributors, wholesalers and small, independent outlets and kiosks, particularly in developing and emerging markets. Meeting the needs of these different types of retail channels will contribute to our growth in these markets.

Our products are sold in more than ten million small shops in Africa and Asia alone.

Our goal is to ensure that Unilever is the partner of choice for our smaller as well as our large international customers. With our expertise, wide-ranging portfolio of products and international network of businesses, we are well placed to work with retail groups in innovative ways to meet shoppers' needs.

Working with customers on sustainability

The past few years have seen many of our most important international customers taking a strong stance on sustainability issues, with some ambitious targets in areas such as energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste.

The sustainability strategies of global retailers can have significant impacts on their supply chains. We welcome this development as a powerful driver for improving sustainability knowledge and performance across a wide range of companies and sectors.

With our long-standing activities in the area of sustainability, we not only respond to the growing requirements of customers, but share our expertise and explore opportunities for joint initiatives. Thus, we are increasingly engaging with retailers on sustainability issues, sharing our experience and knowledge in areas such as sustainable agriculture and measuring the lifecycle impacts of products. We work together to deliver innovative in-store programmes that help to educate shoppers.

Working as an industry on sustainability

We support industry programmes that bring together manufacturers and retailers to collectively address sustainability.

• Continuing our relationship with Walmart

We continue to provide expert support to Walmart's sustainable value networks (SVN). We participate in four of these 13 SVNs, which aim to bring Walmart's suppliers together to share best practice. In the Food & Agriculture SVN, Unilever has taken the lead in water by developing a reliable way to measure how efficiently suppliers are using water to grow crops. We ran an irrigation study among Californian tomato growers, the results of which contributed to a sustainability scorecard for Walmart suppliers.

• Continuing our relationship with Tesco

Unilever's CEO Paul Polman and Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco have established a joint industry group to develop a 'common business language' and common metrics for packaging in the context of sustainability.

The Consumer Goods Forum

2009 saw the formation of the Consumer Goods Forum, a new industry association that brings together nearly 400 member companies from across the industry and from all regions.

Governed by a board of 25 manufacturer CEOs and 25 retailer CEOs, the Forum aims to help the industry improve the way it meets the changing needs of the world's consumers. It will do this through increasing industry collaboration on non-competitive matters to bring efficiency and simplicity for our consumers and through supporting the exchange of knowledge and good practices.

Sustainability is one area that the Forum will particularly focus on. Paul Polman co-chairs a sustainability steering group with Sir Terry Leahy. They have set out the vision for the sustainability programme to drive and communicate sustainability improvements throughout the value chain of the consumer goods industry by:

• addressing sustainability challenges that impact our industry

• bringing global alignment and standards to non-competitive areas such as ethical sourcing

• developing and agreeing methodologies and metrics that measure sustainability improvements in our industry.

The Forum is already progressing two sustainability projects – the Global Packaging Project, which provides a framework and metrics for considering packaging and sustainability, and the Consumer and Climate Change Project, which will explore how our industry can work with consumers on this most challenging of issues.

The Steering Group includes representation from retailers ranging from global companies, such as Walmart and Carrefour, through to smaller national companies, such as Waitrose and Sobeys, and from a wide range of global manufacturers including Nestle, Coca-Cola and Kraft.

Europe

Working in close co-operation with the Walmart Group, in the summer of 2008 we set up 'sustainability kitchens' at ASDA superstores around the UK. The objective was to encourage shoppers to make environmentally friendly changes, eg washing laundry at 30°C, which could also save them money. As part of this activity, ASDA ran a promotion on selected Unilever brands with strong sustainability credentials such as Hellmann's, Persil and PG Tips, resulting in a significant sales increase during the period.

Latin America

Our brands Knorr, AdeS, Omo and Rexona are working in partnership with one of the biggest retailers in Brazil, Pão de Açúcar, to promote CEMPRE, a packaging recycling scheme for shoppers. Since the launch of this initiative in 2001, 110 recycling stations have been established in 31 municipal districts across eight states, working in partnership with 33 waste collection co-operatives to recycle over 32 000 tonnes of packaging since the start of the initiative.

Asia

We were asked by SM, the largest retailer in the Philippines, to help develop an environmentally focused campaign to change the way shoppers use, reuse and dispose of plastic bags. Together, we established the CARES (Concerned and Responsible Eco-Shoppers) campaign, launching a reusable and recyclable shopping bag – the Green Bag. In one year, the reuse of shopping bags increased threefold.

This campaign has since evolved into different projects to engage consumers to continually reuse shopping bags. World-renowned Filipino visual artist Manuel Baldemor created a design for the Green Bag that was made available nationwide. Currently SM Supermarkets is making a renewed effort to change shopping habits by enforcing the strict use of reusable shopping bags on certain days of the week. This initiative has so far resulted in 3.3 million fewer plastic bags being used.