Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable Agricultural Practices Manual

Sustainable farming practices do more than save important natural resources. They also have the potential to considerably increase crop yields and provide growers and their families with greater economic opportunity. Kraft Heinz has taken significant steps to strengthen our Sustainable Agriculture Practices Manual (SAPM) and is working in partnership with growers to implement those practices.

To reduce the burden on growers, allowing them to focus on the continuous improvement philosophy we promote, we elected to benchmark our SAPM to SAI Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment (FSA), the recognized industry tool for assessing on-farm sustainability. We achieved an equivalent performance level of FSA Silver. This enables growers to demonstrate compliance with our requirements through the adoption of the FSA itself or through other benchmarked standards that meet the minimum performance level of FSA Silver.

We continue to work with our suppliers to achieve and maintain FSA Silver certification or other benchmarked standards through audits and ongoing verification. In 2023, we leveraged new integrated digital systems and enhanced traceability efforts to improve the quality of the source data we use to calculate our progress against our Heinz ketchup tomato goal. This means that, in 2023, we purchased a volume of sustainably sourced tomatoes equivalent to 66% of the volume of tomatoes used in Heinz tomato ketchup. We’re continuing to work toward our 2025 goal and have roadmaps in place to help several of our tomato suppliers obtain FSA Silver certification.

Building the Regenerative Capacity of Agriculture Through a Global, Farmer-Centered, Industry-led Initiative

The long-term resilience of agriculture arguably now depends on how quickly we can develop regenerative systems that benefit soil health, biodiversity, water supply, climate resilience, and grower livelihoods. Kraft Heinz is a founding member of SAI Platform’s Regenerative Agriculture Program along with approximately 30 companies from across the agricultural value chain. The purpose of the program is to build industry alignment, reduce duplication, and amplify impact through the creation of a universal framework with locally implementable indicators, improving the accessibility and applicability of regenerative agriculture principles, practices, and most importantly, positive outcomes on farms. The program will work to scientifically validate regenerative principles, engage with farmers, and develop a mechanism for corporations to verify and communicate regenerative impacts to external stakeholders.

Throughout 2023, Kraft Heinz continued to participate in the Regenerative Agriculture Program Steering Committee and, along with the group of Founding Members and the SAI Platform Secretariat, worked to engage relevant industry stakeholders and other SAI Platform members and working groups.

Sustainable Agriculture Initiatives

Kraft Heinz and Environmental Defense Fund join global food companies to form Dairy Methane Action Alliance at COP28

Agriculture accounts for almost 40 percent of human-caused methane emissions, with dairy alone making up nearly 10 percent of global methane emissions. In 2023, Kraft Heinz became a founding member of the Dairy Methane Action Alliance (DMAA), a global coalition of major food companies, as well as the Environmental Defense Fund, which have stepped forward to catalyze accountability, transparency and ambitious climate action within the food industry. As part of the Alliance, launched at COP28, Kraft Heinz has committed to providing transparent, annual reports on total methane emissions in our dairy operations, and developing an action and transition plan for reducing methane emissions in our supply chain by the end of 2024. The Environmental Defense Fund and Ceres will hold signatory companies accountable as their plans are implemented.

Heinz asks museum visitors to “Picture a World Without Soil”

In 2023, Kraft Heinz tried new ways to draw attention to the growing problem of worldwide soil degradation. In one innovative effort, partnering with the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, Heinz borrowed Van Gogh’s brush to raise awareness about soil degradation. The three-day immersive campaign, created by purpose consultancy Revolt and launched by MARCO, was timed to coincide with the Spanish tomato harvest. The exhibition imagined what Vincent Van Gogh’s 1890 landscape of lush wheatfields “Les Vessenots in Auvers,” would look like if painted 50 years from now—in a world of cracked, dry ground devoid of fertility.

Reaching more than 2,000 museum visitors during the three-day campaign, the collaboration between Heinz and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum was an example of how the museum continues to create meaningful narratives around its collections to support the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The exhibit also presented information on Kraft Heinz’s collaboration and farmer support to protect good food for generations to come. Working with the Vázquez family in Badajoz, teams have worked together to improve soil health implementing sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices like crop rotations, and cover cropping.

Wattie’s joins six-year carbon-positive regenerative farming project in New Zealand

Approved for co-funding by the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Future Farming Fund in 2023, the Hawke’s Bay Future Farming Charitable Trust and LandWISE have begun a six-year ‘Carbon Positive’ project to assess the economic and environmental impacts of adopting regenerative farming within a typical New Zealand cropping system on longer-term cropping soils. Heinz Wattie’s is an active participant and supporter of the demonstration farm research trials, along with McCain Foods and other government, commercial and industry stakeholders. Agronomists from Wattie’s are involved in the project’s steering group and operations advisory group and will play a key role in testing the regenerative, conventional and hybrid treatments for Wattie’s chosen crop of tomatoes for the 2023-2024 growing year of the project.

Heinz Educates Consumers about Soil Health

Heinz sent an S.O.S. to the gaming community about the rapid decline of the Earth’s healthy soils by creating a Fortnite game called “SOS Tomatoes.” The cross-platform game takes players on a tomato-growing journey on a one-of-a-kind island inspired from our tomato farms around the globe—from the greenhouses where the tomatoes are germinated to the fields where the seedlings grow into mature plants. Players were challenged to run faster than the speed of soil degradation as a way to illustrate the rapid rate at which soil health is declining while also learning about some of the sustainable and regenerative practices that Heinz supports in the real world such as cover cropping, crop rotation and maintaining soil cover. Playing in the virtual world had benefits in the real world through financial contributions from Heinz to a soil health program for tomato farmers of Heinz tomato ketchup in California.