ESG Development in Food & Bev update

This week, we are continuing with the updates we’ve been making to our ESG Development Heatmaps, focusing this time on the Food and Beverage sector. As we have done before, we only focused on (1) companies listed in the Mexican Stock Exchange and (2) publicly disclosed materials.

Food & Bev

What can we read from this heatmap?

1. Bachoco and Lala formalized and improved their sustainability reports. With it, 58% of the sector published formal sustainability or integrated annual reports in 2020 (up from 42% in 2019).
2. Bachoco published its first materiality analysis. FEMSA and Coca-Cola FEMSA updated their previous assessments (from 2012). With this, 42% of the companies in the sector have updated materiality analyses available (vs. 17% last year).
3. Bimbo is the first company in this sector to report KPIs for all its material topics. There still aren’t any companies reporting goals for all their material topic KPIs.
4. Arca Continental formed a new Sustainability Committee. Bachoco reported it was going to launch one this year (which we probably will see in the next annual reporting cycle).
5. There still aren’t any companies in the sector who have published full TCFD analyses yet.
6. Arca Continental and Bimbo joined Coca-Cola FEMSA in the group of companies that have committed to the Science Based Targets initiative.
7. FEMSA was the first company in the sector to publish a full set of SASB indicators. Coca Cola FEMSA published a partial set of them too.

There was good progress in the formal materiality process for the industry as well as in formal ESG reporting, even if there are still several companies who are yet to start this journey (or at least publicly announce it). Around one third of these companies are inching closer and closer to establishing and publishing KPIs and goals for their material topics, but we are still far from the ideal scenario even in some very visible names.

TCFD remains unchartered territory for Food&Bev companies, despite a third of them going through other formal climate-related assessments such as CDP and SBTi. We would expect that over time reporting under the TCFD framework is adopted too, since investors pay so much attention to these analyses that force companies to think about climate change on different levels.

I hope you found this interesting. As usual, if there is anything we can help you with, or if there is an ESG topic you would like to know more about, please let us know.

Best,

Marimar

CEO, Miranda ESG