Reduce water use intensity by 15% across our manufacturing facilities by 2025 (per metric ton of product made).

-8.70%

Reduce water use intensity by 20% in high-risk watershed areas by 2025 (per metric ton of product made).

-16.07%

Water Use & Conservation

Water is fundamental to all life and business either directly or indirectly. Making high-quality products requires that we begin with high-quality ingredients, of which fresh quality water is a key input. As a food and beverage company, having access to sufficient amounts of high-quality fresh water, both now and in the future, is critical to our business. Water is used in many areas of our value chain. It is a vital input for growing various agricultural ingredients we use in our products. We also use water as a direct ingredient in many of our products and as a key part of our manufacturing, cleaning, and sanitation processes. Access to high-quality water is pivotal for us to achieve our high standards of food safety and quality. High-quality water will continue to be a vital component throughout our value chain.

Kraft Heinz is committed to water stewardship in each aspect of our business. Within our operational boundary, we are committed to reducing our water use intensity by 20 percent across manufacturing facilities in high-risk watershed areas and 15 percent across all manufacturing facilities by 2025 with a 2019 baseline. Our water reduction strategy consists of a variety of aspects, including partnerships with water efficiency experts, water recycling programs, and best practice sharing among our global facilities.

Across our supply chain, we manage water risk as part of our commitment to supplier sustainability. In general, all Kraft Heinz suppliers are asked to abide by our Supplier Guiding Principles, which include stipulations on responsible water stewardship. For key commodities, we have more in-depth mechanisms to oversee water stewardship such as our Sustainable Agricultural Practices Manual, sustainably-sourced tomatoes goal, and grower audits.

2022 Progress

In 2022, we improved water use intensity by 8.7 percent (all facilities) and 16.07 percent (high-risk watershed areas) compared to our 2019 baseline. We achieved this through furthering our water recycling and efficiency programs and rolling these programs out globally.

Our Escalon facility in California is a long-time champion of water circularity and has incorporated innovative ways of improving its water footprint. The facility produces approximately 200-350 million pounds of tomato products each year which go on to make many products such as tomato paste, puree, and pizza sauce for our food service customers. Recognizing that tomatoes are made of approximately 95 percent water, the facility developed innovative ways to extract and reuse this excess water through evaporation to run boilers and the facility’s can washing system. The facility generates approximately 600,000 gallons of water from tomatoes daily when at full capacity, which significantly reduces its reliance on Escalon’s municipal water supply. The facility also redirects excess solid waste from the tomatoes to other beneficial uses such as soil amendments and animal feed resulting in virtually no tomato-related waste at the facility.

Improving Water Use at our Shanghai Facility

An excellent example of how we’re achieving this progress is in our Shanghai facility that makes many well-loved products for the Asia Pacific region such as our Master brand soy sauce. The facility successfully reduced their water intensity by 20 percent compared to their 2019 baseline, three years in advance of the 2025 goal. The team follows three simple principles: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and achieved the goal through effective condensate recovery, a bottle rinsing recycling program, ‘clean-in-place’ recycle and optimization, environmental management system digitalization and better measurement and monitoring practices which together save approximately 66 million liters of water a year.

Looking Ahead

At Kraft Heinz, we are always striving to further understand risks and manage water stewardship across our value chain. We intend to update our global water risk assessment of our manufacturing facilities in 2023 and release a global water policy in the next few years. We will share more details in future reporting.

*Please note that environmental data for years between the base year (2019) and reporting year are not recalculated for acquisitions and divestitures as per our Basis of Reporting for key ESG indicators.

Water Risk Assessment

We conduct a water risk assessment of our global manufacturing operations every 2-5 years with interim assessments as needed. These assessments leverage the World Resources Institute's (WRI) Aqueduct tool along with the subject matter expertise of an external consulting partner. We then evaluate our watershed conditions to validate economic scarcity factors not fully addressed by the database indicators. For each of our evaluated facilities we identify physical, reputational, social, and water quality risks.

Our water risk assessment was last updated in 2020. As of December 2022, of the 78 manufacturing facilities we operate, 18 facilities had some degrees of elevated water stress. Water use from these facilities is derived from approximately 63 percent municipal, 27 percent bore, and 9 percent surface. In addition to water reduction targets, we also developed a plan that focuses on high-risk areas to drive improvements and mitigate risks, and to provide updates into our ongoing risk evaluation. We evaluate any interim mitigation strategies as needed. We are planning to update our water risk assessment for our manufacturing facilities in 2023.