Ahold announced it has started to offset its palm oil usage in private label products by purchasing GreenPalm certificates. Palm oil and its derivatives are used in on average 30 percent of Ahold’s private label products in Europe and the US.
Lodewijk Hijmans van den Bergh, member of the Corporate Executive Board, said: “Ahold is fully committed to supporting the efforts to make the production of palm oil sustainable. Securing enough GreenPalm certificates to cover the requirements of our businesses is a further step to meet our objective of using only sustainable palm oil in our private label products by 2015. This step means our customers can be confident that their supermarket offers them private label products which are produced in a sustainable way.”
GreenPalm is a certificate trading programme allowing palm oil producers to earn more for their crop through sustainable farming by selling certificates. The programme is endorsed by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which is designed to tackle the environmental and social problems created by the production of palm oil. The RSPO, of which Ahold is a member since 2007, aims to move towards an industry-wide approach to sustainability in palm oil cultivation.
Ahold will continue to purchase GreenPalm certificates until it can replace palm oil with certified sustainable palm oil in all of its products.