Supporting sustainable wine production

Ensuring an ethical production process and offering consumers a wider range of choices, such as organic options, is also central for Anora. When a wine’s sourcing process gets underway, Anora ensures that the wine producers comply with environmental, quality and safety standards. To guarantee this, Anora is committed to complying with a number of quality, environmental and safety standards and certificates and with comprehensive responsibility principles. These include the ethical principles of the amfori BSCI initiative for responsible sourcing as well as Fairtrade and Fair for Life certifications.

“If we observe shortcomings with a producer we are in business with, we also have a duty to guide and support the wine producers in steering their operations in a more ethical and ecological direction. The experiences we’ve had in this cooperation have been very positive,” says Petra Gräsbeck, Anora’s Sustainability Director. "As a major Nordic buyer, our decisions carry a lot of weight with producers."

Anora’s own Chill Out wines represent Anora’s sustainability thinking in wine production. The Chill Out product range includes Faitrade-certified as well as organic wines from different parts of the world. The producers of the wines accepted into this product range have demonstrated their commitment to sustainable wine production in the entire production process – from improving the well-being of their employees to sustainable viticulture.

Sustainability is also considered in the packaging of these wines, taking into consideration the increase in recyclability and the reductions in carbon footprint. The bottled range is mostly in PET bottles, pouches or BiB (back-in-box) packages.

Certification and audits guarantee a wine’s sustainability

The amfori BSCI initiative aims to engage the member companies to monitor the responsibility of their entire supply chain. Anora has implemented the responsible sourcing principles of the amfori BSCI initiative already since 2012 and joined the initiative in 2017 to increase its know-how and possibilities for developing responsible sourcing – including as the implementation of human rights, environmental responsibility and occupational safety principles – over the long term.

Audits pertaining to social responsibility are conducted at Anora’s suppliers within the framework of the amfori BSCI initiative. The audits often focus on countries defined as risk countries by amfori BSCI. Suppliers are evaluated on the basis of the realisation of ethical criteria and, based on the evaluation, suppliers must draw up remediation plans, the realisation of which will be assessed in follow-up audits.

“The auditing is carried out in the spirit of continuous development. The aim is to develop suppliers’ responsibility rather than breaking off the business relationship when shortcomings are detected. This however requires the supplier to be willing to develop their own operations and receive feedback,” says Gräsbeck.

For Anora, participation in amfori BSCI means the ability to influence the responsibility of its supply chain and organise and schedule responsibility audits more efficiently, which directly impacts the effectiveness of the work. amfori BSCI offers education to both Anora’s employees and representatives of Anora’s supply chain to develop their own responsibility expertise. In addition, amfori BSCI offers its members an extensive databank on capacity building and previous audits and their results, giving insights into other members’ measures to promote responsibility.

Anora has also prepared separate guidelines for its suppliers and subcontractors (Anora Code of Conduct for Suppliers and Subcontractors) and included this Code of Conduct in its sourcing contracts since 2017. The Code of Conduct is largely based on the same international conventions and principles as amfori BSCI’s principles.