37 Sedex Testimonials

“Improving education and access to healthcare among vanilla farmers are important objectives in themselves – but they are not philanthropy. We believe that these programmes create shared value, for us and our business partners as well as the communities we work within.”

“We would like to see Sedex become a de-facto standard.”

“We may be newer to the sustainability space than some, but we share the same challenges—navigating complex regulations while ensuring meaningful progress.”

"The recent and continuing supply chain challenges highlight the importance of embedding further resilience into our supply chain. We consider Sedex a powerful tool to achieve this by gaining better data and insights into our suppliers’ operations and establishing a broader set of values upon which we do business."

"The Sedex Ethical Trade Manager has played a vital role in establishing our business human rights KPIs, working with our supply base to drive improvements and raising knowledge and understanding internally, to ensure human rights is embedded within our purchasing practices."

“Many of our construction contractors became a Sedex member and then had a SMETA audit for the first time. This enabled Whitbread to proactively engage with suppliers on ethical issues.”

"Howdens is a local business with a global supply chain. It was founded on the principle that the business should be worthwhile for all concerned. The supply chain risk assessment is an essential step to fulfil our commitment that we act responsibly and in a sustainable manner. Radar is a very useful and user-friendly tool that helps to identify and understand risks across your supply chains. You can analyse and drill down to important issues and plan where to focus your efforts on due diligence activities and development plans. As the tool contains risk data based on independent and reputable sources, the reliance on self-assessment information is reduced."

“The Sedex membership is essential to align our definitions and methodology with reputable frameworks. Using Sedex, we screen all new and active suppliers to identify possible sustainability risks that suppliers might be exposed to, considering the country and sector where different commodities are sourced from. This allows us to engage with the most relevant suppliers for risk management, identify areas for improvements and see if suppliers live up to our requirements regarding labour rights, health and safety, and the environment.”

“Kindness is a word we use a lot at Oliver Bonas. It is in fact right at the heart of our company values to ‘Work Hard, Play Hard and Be Kind’. This means it stretches across Oliver Bonas, from the way we work with our suppliers to how we like to treat our customers. Kindness is also something we think should extend far beyond our day-to-day, affecting people who don’t directly work or shop with us. At Oliver Bonas, we are committed to sourcing the highest quality products from many countries with diverse cultures and economies. We value long-standing trusting relationships with our suppliers and we commit to working in a transparent and open manner with them all. We became members of Sedex because we wanted to reduce the administrative burden on our suppliers. The system allows us to track any ethical audits our suppliers have already obtained and gives further visibility of factory and workforce details.”

"As part of our sustainability strategy, we are proud to become a member of Sedex. It’s incredibly important for us to understand our supply chain and do what we can to continuously improve our ethical performance."

"With the business built upon strong ethical values from the beginning, it was important for us to strengthen our commitments and formalise our CSR strategy. The Sedex Consultancy team helped us to create a new Responsible Sourcing and Environmental strategy, offering their expertise and guidance whilst engaging with teams from across the business for their input. With their insights, we were able to realise where our initial focus should be targeted and we were also able to create a clear roadmap outlining our goals for the next five years."

“Sedex’s platform has been instrumental in transforming our approach to responsible sourcing. By integrating sustainability data into our daily operations and engaging our suppliers in continuous improvement, we’ve not only enhanced our risk management but also strengthened our entire value chain.”

"Responsible sourcing is at the heart of Waitrose & Partners as we are a co-owned business that prides itself on ensuring the lives of all workers is respected. We are able to champion responsible sourcing through ethical supply chain due diligence by using Radar, as it allows us to analyse site-level risk assessments to ascertain where there are risks and how salient they are. We then use this information to determine audit frequency for the next stage of our ethical compliance programme."

"Radar is an integral part of our supplier risk assessment and management process. We use the tool to build visibility of suppliers’ risk levels across nearly two hundred work sites, and can monitor these at scale. We create a criticality grid using the risk scores to help us focus our risk management activities. If suppliers are in a high-risk zone, we conduct corporate social responsibility (CSR) audits and develop action plans to reduce the level of risk at work sites."

“Responsible and ethical sourcing is important to our business. Sedex enables us to network and develop new relationships and better links us with our buyers and suppliers. As a supplier in a very remote location, managing relationships is very important to us, and we really value the connectivity the Sedex platform provides for our supply chain.”