After water, tea is the most popular non-alcoholic beverage in the world.

Unilever purchases around 12% of the worlds black tea supply. Much of this is for Lipton, the worlds leading tea brand

Case study: Lipton

The story.
When Michiel Leijnse became Unilevers global brand development director in 2005, his brief included refreshing the high-profile Lipton tea brand. Mr Leijnse who had worked on Unilevers Ben & Jerrys, the pioneering sustainable ice-cream brand and his team soon realised there was an opportunity to win market share by making the brand 100 per cent guaranteed environmentally and socially sustainable. They also realised the move could include other well known Unilever brands, such as PG Tips and Lyons.

Our commitment
We sell some of the most popular tea brands including Lipton, PG Tips and Brooke Bond. Lipton is the world's best-selling tea brand, available in over 100 countries and with sales of around 3 billion a year. Lipton offers both leaf and ready-to-drink tea in a wide range of varieties and flavours.

We source tea from many thousands of suppliers around the world: large tea estates, some of which we own; smallholder farmers; and third-party suppliers and processors.

In 2007 we became the first major tea company to commit to sustainable sourcing of tea on a large scale. Our sustainable sourcing commitments now form part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.

The challenge.
To be credible with consumers, the move meant certifying the plantations where Lipton tea came from as sustainable, converting the whole supply chain to sustainable methods, and telling consumers about the change more or less all at the same time. Liptons is a mainstream brand with such a large global market share that making it totally sustainable would potentially affect world tea markets.

The strategy.
First, Unilever sought third-party certification of plantations. Potential partners were assessed according to factors such as recognition by consumers, capacity, flexibility to certify large and small suppliers, ability to work with local organisations to train employees, and ability to recruit and train teams of regional auditors. Unilever picked the Rainforest Alliance, a US-based international non-governmental organisation set up to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods. Rainforest Alliance certification requires meeting standards in worker welfare, farm management and environmental protection. Then Unilever publicly announced two targets: all Lipton Yellow Label and PG Tips tea bags sold in western Europe would be certified sustainable by 2010; all Lipton tea sold globally would be certified by 2015.

What happened.
Unilever and the Rainforest Alliance started with big tea estates in Kenya, where sustainability initiatives had long been under way. Some big Kenyan suppliers had good standards and could be certified easily. But when the initiative moved on to work with smallholders in other countries, the team discovered that conditions for rollout differed in complexity from country to country. Supply bases were sometimes more fragmented, and legal frameworks varied. It became critical to adapt procedures to the varying contexts and to develop a network of additional partnerships with experienced local organisations.

In Argentina, for example, Unilever and the Alliance teamed up with local organisation Imaflora, a non-profit that promotes conservation, to help deal with about 6,500 loosely organised farmers who had little experience in applying best practice in agriculture. Once the certified tea started to appear on the shelves, first in Europe and then the US, consumer campaigns got under way. As Mr Leijnse noted: Where a link between the brand and certified sustainable tea could be made, sales and market share went up. Unilever also discovered that the sustainably produced tea appealed to new consumers in Italy, for example, it attracted younger customers. The effects were felt inside and outside Unilever. Internally, the expansion to other markets accelerated as marketing teams in Japan, Australia and the US introduced certified tea ahead of schedule. 1. Externally, meanwhile, a surge in demand for certified tea was taking place, thanks to the involvement of the Ethical Tea Partnership. The ETP had been set up by the industry in 1997 to improve supply chain issues. The ETP and the Rainforest Alliance decided to collaborate in 2009, to build capacity within the industry for a move to certified sustainable production. Other tea producers began to negotiate certification targets too.

Our goals are:

to source the tea in all Lipton tea bags from Rainforest Alliance Certified estates by 2015 to source 100% of Unilevers tea, including loose tea, sustainably by 2020.

We will achieve this goal by sourcing from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms or from farms verified against our Sustainable Agriculture Code. Rainforest Alliance is an international environmental organisation. We decided that their certification scheme was the most appropriate because of its comprehensive approach towards sustainable farm management, covering social, economic and environmental aspects. This is in line with the way we have been managing our own Sustainable Agriculture Programme for over a decade.

Progress in 2010
During 2010 we further increased the quantity of sustainable tea used in our brands. By the end of the year over 20% of our tea came from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms. In 2011 we aim to increase our sustainable tea purchases to 25%. Achieving this steady progress in volume keeps us on track to reach our 2015 goal of using Rainforest Alliance Certified tea in all our Lipton tea bags and our longer-term goal to have all our tea produced sustainably by 2020.

In the first half of 2010, we achieved our interim target of sourcing all the tea for our PG Tips and Lipton Yellow Label tea bags sold in Western Europe from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms. The Rainforest Alliance certification seal appeared on a number of new products in Europe, North America and Asia. We also continued to communicate our sourcing commitments to consumers through information on our packaging. We are seeing good sales results in these markets and in Australasia.

Leading the industry

In 2007 we were the first major tea company to commit to sourcing tea sustainably on a large scale. We have worked hard to engage farmers and build relationships with producers so that we can move towards meeting our sourcing targets. Our efforts have been a catalyst to the industry and other tea companies have followed our lead. The tea industry as a whole is now moving to sustainable farming practices. The journey began at our own tea estates in Kenya and Tanzania. These were the first to achieve Rainforest Alliance certification in 2007 and 2008 respectively.