The State of Children’s Rights and Business 2022

This year, Global Child Forum is benchmarking some of the world’s most influential companies within Food, Beverage & Personal Care – assessing to what extent they addresses children’s rights in their public reporting. The benchmark scores reveal how well they perform in relation to industrial sectoral and regional peers.

Preliminary scorecards were sent to all included companies in June 2022, giving companies the opportunity to give feedback and respond to our screening.  Based on the company’s score (0-10), companies are considered either as Beginners, Improvers, Achievers, or Leaders.

To see the top 100 best performing companies, click here.

In collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, Global Child Forum has benchmarked nearly 3,000 of the world’s largest companies latest years. You can see previous reports here.

If you have any questions or would like to get in touch with us, please email benchmark@globalchildforum.org.

Methodology

The scores are based on assessment covering four impact areas:

• Governance & Collaboration: Company commitment & Engagement
• Workplace: Company operations & Supply chains
• Marketplace: Product safety & Marketing
• Community & Environment: Contribution & Impact

The impact areas are based on the Children’s Rights and Business Principles.

Due to updated industry weightings and the impact area ‘Governance & Collaboration’ (new for this year’s benchmark), the 2022 overall scores are not directly comparable with the overall scores given in previous benchmarks. However, we have re-calculated specific company scores from the Global 2021 benchmark, as well as the Tech & Telecom deep dive, to make company comparisons possible. The re-calculated company scores can be found on each specific company score page.

If you want to know more about these changes and how to compare your score from a previous benchmark, please contact benchmark@globalchildforum.org.

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Selection of companies

In 2022, Global Child Forum has chosen to benchmark a specific sector; Food, Beverage & Personal Care – including 310 of the world’s most influential companies. Please see above for a complete list will all the companies. All companies in this study are included on the World Benchmarking Alliance’s SDG2000 list[1].

Scoring is based on publicly available information (in English), collected between March and June 2022. All companies in the study were informed of their scores and given the opportunity to provide feedback on their results in early Q3 2022.

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Industries included in this study

The Food, Beverage & Personal Care sector[2] is comprised of four industries:

• Food & Beverage. The Food & Beverage industry includes 172 companies producing food and beverage products that are typically sold through other retail outlets.
• Agriculture products. This industry includes 61 companies producing food commodities, oils, oleochemicals, fertilisers, animal feed and fibre.
• Retail. This industry includes 50 companies which primarily are retail supermarkets selling food, beverages and personal household products.
• Personal & Household Products. This industry includes 28 companies producing cosmetics and personal hygiene and household products sold to customers through other retail outlets.

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[1] In 2020, Global Child Forum joined the World Benchmarking Alliance and adopted their SDG2000 as the universe from which companies are selected for our Corporate Sector and Children’s Rights Benchmarks.

[2] The benchmark uses an adapted version of the Refinitiv TRCB Sector Classification system for classifying sectors and industries. A company can only belong to one sector and one industry. Companies are classified based on available information about their main business operations/source of revenue.

Disclaimer