Procurement's Year in Stories: March 2024
What is Danone's Global Strategic Partnerships Programme?
Global food giant Danone launched its 'Partner for Growth' programme with the aim of identifying and developing partnerships with key suppliers and procurement partners to unlock powerful growth opportunities.
The strategy is designed to help drive greater collaboration, innovation and efficiency to realise sustainable growth across the value chain.
The programme is changing how Danone collaborates with its partners by leveraging opportunities driven by consumer trends and insights to foster mutual growth.
Danone Manifesto Ventures, the company's corporate venture arm, will also play a role in this transformation by assisting in the introduction of promising emerging brands, concepts, or capabilities to the market.
An early collaboration in the programme is with key bioscience partner Chr. Hansen. The partnership will let both organisations push boundaries of innovation in the dairy and plant-based categories by using Chr. Hansen's leading bio-solutions capabilities and leveraging both companies' extensive culture collections.
Vikram Agarwal, Chief Operating Officer at Danone, said: "Anticipating and seizing opportunities is at the heart of the Renew Danone strategy, and is what Partner for Growth is all about.
"A structured, holistic and mutually-beneficial approach to transform the way we work with partners, to take advantage of short-term opportunities and prepare our brands and categories for sustainable growth in the long-term.
"It will help us leverage more from our supplier and partner ecosystem to drive shared business growth rather than using a traditional linear approach. It's how we'll stay ahead of emerging trends, serve our customers and consumers better and unlock sustainable growth."
Nike exceeds US$1bn diverse supplier spend two years early
Nike launched its Business Diversity and Inclusion (BDI) programme in 2021, laying out a five-year roadmap to creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce, including businesses in its supply chain and those it sources from.
The programme works to mirror the brand's procurement base with its consumer base. Nike's wealth of indirect suppliers — the companies it contracts to provide goods and services outside of its core product supply chain — are seen by the company as important players on its team which fuel the brand's innovation and creativity.
Nike set a framework to spend US$1bn with diverse-owned suppliers by 2025 as part of the programme. Its latest financials, for FY23, show that the brand has not only reached that milestone two years ahead of schedule, but managed to surpass it considerably, spending US$1.4bn.
During FY21, that figure stood at US$282m, and rose to US$495m and US$600m in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
This achievement is largely due to expanding how we engage suppliers in all areas across Nike – from Marketing to Security – as well as helping our suppliers in adopting some DEI best practices when they subcontract parts of their business that affect ours.
John Donahoe, President and CEO of Nike, said in the company's FY23 report: "Through our commitments to equity, accessibility and sustainability, we created meaningful change and paved the way for future generations to be able to enjoy sport."
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