Hershey Foods has been telling concerned consumers and investors for over a decade that they would work to source their cocoa in a more responsible manner, yet nothing has happened. They have fallen behind competitors who are all making strides in this area.
The “Still Time to Raise the Bar: The Real Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company” published in 2011 by Global Exchange, Green America, International Labor Rights Forum details Hershey’s extensive labor and sourcing issues. The four biggest issues are transparency, sourcing, green washing and certification. The report shows that much of the cocoa used by Hershey is from West Africa, an area overrun with forced labor, abusive child labor and over all poor working conditions. Currently Hershey’s doesn’t have a system to guarantee that their cocoa is not coming from these farms. This ties in to their transparency issue. Hershey does not identify their suppliers, making it impossible to ensure that the cocoa is not harvested in appalling conditions. To combat this issue, many organizations are calling on Hershey to adapt to Fair Trade standards set by an independent Third Party group. Finally, Hershey has donated generously to local charities around the company’s headquarters and to programs in West Africa. However, the concerned customers are calling on Hershey to change their whole policies instead of just writing a check to make people believe they a socially responsible company.
This “real CSR report” demands that Hershey enact a number of policies to improve their supply chain and benefit people around the world. The first demand is to take urgent action to eliminate vile labor standards that are in violation of international human rights standards. Some of the ways to do this is to trace the supply chain to the actual farms and targeting the farms that are using forced or child labor and demand that they stop these practices. The next order is to have one of the top selling Hershey’s products to be 100% fair trade certified by 2012 and then add one more 100% fair trade product every two years. The end goal is to have all of Hershey’s cocoa to be fair trade by 2022.
Hershey’s makes great strides in their local community in terms of social responsibility by donating to many of the local charities and mainly the Milton Hershey School. However, there are still other areas the company needs to improve on. Plants in the United States have been closing at a rapid rate, with at least 8 closing since 2007. This includes the first factory in Hershey, PA. Thousands of people have lost their jobs while Hershey’s moves their work to Mexico. Recently, Hershey came under fire for using a third party distributor that pays international students unfair wages. These students were brought over via the J-1 program with the hopes of learning English and American culture. However, instead of learning anything, they spent their hours packaging Hershey’s products, working abnormal hours, and being paid unreasonable wages. When the students staged a walk out of the distribution center in the town next to Hershey, it quickly became a national issue. While it was the third party distributors that hired these workers it further shows how unaware Hershey is in regards to their supply chain. Hershey’s issued a statement “As a good corporate citizen, we expect our vendors to treat employees equitably and fairly. We will continue to work closely with all vendors to ensure this is the case.” Lastly, while Hershey donates money to the MHS, the money goes through the Hershey Trust. The trust has recently come under fire to making questionable investments when the money could be given to the children. They purchased land for well above the asking price and had many board members that benefitted from the deal which is a clear conflict of interest. The trust recently spent millions of dollars on renovating the local country club which was nice but not necessary.