About us
The Global Platform for Sustainable Coconut
The Sustainable Coconut Partnership is the global platform for coconut sustainability and is a multi-stakeholder initiative aiming to build a responsible and resilient coconut sector that solves a generational challenge of sustainability for millions of coconut farmers.
The platform is uniting the industry’s stakeholders to drive positive impact for farmers’ livelihoods by establishing industry-wide best practices and impact programs. The Partnership works across all coconut products and production countries of our members and has an initial focus in South East Asia.
Governed as an industry led partnership, the organization has a view to open its governance to all stakeholders, it welcomes like-minded industry and producer members as well as affiliate members from civil society, associations, financial institutions, trade bodies, service providers, academia, research organizations and governments.
The organization enables pre a competitive collaboration that equips the private sector with means to support farmers and producer associations towards sustainability at scale.
From the Roundtable meetings...
...to the Sustainable Coconut Partnership
Initially dubbed “The Roundtable on Sustainable Coconut”, this platform started as a meeting series in 2019 organized by Barry Callebaut with the support from US Aid. It brought together over 80 buyers, processors and other actors actively involved in coconut supply chains to collaboratively find solutions and share investment approaches in establishing cost-effective sustainable coconut value chains and support farmers livelihoods. It now plans to formalize as an impact organization “The Sustainable Coconut Partnership”.
The Partnership is taking shape in 2023 after 7 roundtable meetings to catalyze responsible coconut production and market transformation at scale by establishing industry-wide best practices and impact programs and further harmonizing industry requirements to their supply chain partners.
It is supported by The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and BSR who acts as secretariat. The organization is led by Gregory Bardies, the founder of the Roundtable on Sustainable Coconut meeting series and a Steering Committee comprised of AAK, Barry Callebaut, Ferrero Nestle and Unilever. The Steering Committee represents 17 signatories of the sustainable coconut charter who collectively decided to set up this partnership after agreeing that further pre competitive investments are needed from the industry and stakeholders for a responsible and resilient coconut sector that drives positive impact for farmers’ livelihoods, the climate and the environment.
The formation of the initial steering committee has been facilitated by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH as part of a development partnership on sustainable coconut (oil) production under the develoPPP programme. As part of this, GIZ will furthermore continue to support the organization of the Roundtable meetings.
