Sweet Stakeholder Relations at Orkla Confectionary & Snacks?

Silje Johannessen, sustainability manager at Orkla Confectionary & Snacks, was lucky to find a seat on the tram towards the Orkla headquarters in Oslo. She had a busy week ahead of her and took up her mobile to check her calendar and email. On top of the inbox was a reminder to provide the central sustainability team with input to the stakeholder analysis in the sustainability report.

After a recent reorganization, Orkla Confectionary & Snacks is one of 12 companies making up the large Norwegian conglomerate Orkla group. Orkla has a strong position in several categories of consumer goods in the Nordics and Baltics as well as some other countries, selling pizza, snacks, biscuits, soaps, cleaning products, and other things.

Orkla Confectionary & Snacks has 13 factories in the Nordic countries, Iceland and the Baltics, producing and selling chocolate and confectionary, biscuits and snacks such as potato chips and peanuts. Important brand names are Kalev, Smash!, Kims, OLW and Göteborg Kex, among others. The company has more than 3000 employees and around 700 million Euros per year in sales, with around 100 million Euros in profits. The most important customers of Orkla are the supermarket chains in the markets.

Orkla headquarters has a sustainability team in charge of coordinating sustainability work and reporting on sustainability for the whole group. Each of the 12 companies is responsible for their own sustainability processes and performance, including stakeholder mapping and stakeholder dialogue.

Orkla Confectionary and snacks have important impacts on their stakeholders. Their products are delicious, but unhealthy. They are a big buyer of chocolate, and indirectly cocoa, which is grown by smallholder farmers mainly in the Ivory Coast. Orkla does not buy directly from the smallholders, but through suppliers in Europe. They are an important local employer but has closed factories and concentrated their production in fewer and larger sites.

Johannessen made a mental note to herself to discuss whether they should argue for the inclusion of cocoa growers in the stakeholder analysis and dialogue. She knew that several of the Orkla companies had issues in the supply chains, where working conditions and pay sometimes was poor. But was it realistic to establish a real dialogue with cocoa farmers?

Exercises

Make a list of Orkla Confectionary & Snacks’ stakeholders. Should cocoa growers get status as a stakeholder?
Discuss how the company can implement the stakeholder dialogue with the different primary stakeholders
Evaluate the company’s positive and negative impact on the primary stakeholders. Is there any stakeholder that should get “better treatment”?