An Executive Memo Regarding Sustainability Methods within The Hershey Company

Hershey Company is a food manufacturing company producing chocolates. It is one of the largest manufacturers of chocolate and candy. The company is focused on maintaining its repute and market position and in this regard its main objectives are to promote health benefits of its products, encourage consumers to change their mindsets that chocolates are unhealthy and to maximize the sales of its products by spreading awareness. The following are the company’s mission and vision statements.

Mission statement

Bringing sweet moments of Hershey happiness to the world every day

Vision statement

Continuing Milton Hershey’s legacy of commitment to consumers, community and children, we provide high-quality HERSHEY’Sproducts while conducting our business in a socially responsibleand environmentally sustainable manner.

The relevance of Hershey’s mission statement in regards to sustainability is that it points out the need for good business practices because customers are always attracted to business practices that meet their desires. People partake of chocolates because they want to enjoy the sweetness it brings. Hershey Company, through its mission statement, believes in its products to meet the needs of their customer every day and thus sustainability.

The vision statement is strongly captured because it does not only talk about the company’s products but also considers the company’s innate role to provide its products in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner. The vision statement is therefore relevant because its message covers for sustainability for which the company seeks to address. The message also alludes to the possibility of embracing change because it focused on continuing the legacy of Hershey by producing quality products and this is in consideration to changes that my occur as the company progresses.

Methods of used by Hershey Company to measure sustainability

Sustainability reporting

Sustainability reporting refers to the development of reports that shows the economic, social, environmental and governance aspects of an organization. It is informed on a detailed evaluation and assessment of a company’s operations to help find the loopholes and challenges that the company should seek to address. Hershey Company uses sustainability reporting to measure sustainability in terms of production and returns. This enables the company to adjust on key areas that are critical to general performance of the company.

Triple Bottom Line Accounting

Triple bottom line accounting is an evaluation that goes beyond the ordinary calculation of profits, revenues and returns on investment. It attempts to generate a comprehensive investment results that encompasses alongside performance, people and planet (environment). Hershey Company employs triple bottom line sustainability framework to evaluate its performance. The company measures the three aspects of its performance, that is, social, environmental and financial dimensions. The results of this evaluation enables the company to forecast its market in terms of how much it should produce and what improvement it should make to meet the sustainability demands.

Internal and global challenges

Innovation and sustainability has never been as important as it is today. In this era of globalization, it is not all about importing products but rather how we come up with better products; collaborate with other organizations to develop valuable markets that encourage sustainability and innovation. However, it is important for a company to evaluate and analyze its internal and global changes before making decisions on sustainable changes.

Today the world is experiencing exceptional change ranging from constrained resources, population growth, increased connectivity to heightened demand. These are global challenges that the company must consider before resorting to sustainable changes. While innovation may be fundamental in achieving sustainability it is equally important for the company to consider growth patterns that are not dependent on constrained resources.

Besides the global challenges, it is also imperative for the company to check on its internal challenges including but not limited to the risks associated with its move to embrace sustainability changes. Although the company may work towards mitigating known risks, the pathway to achieve sustainability lies in the company’s ability understand where risks may emerge from as well proactive measures needed to address them (Herman, 2011).

Determine the types of change your organization could experience, and evaluate the cost of these changes

Change in production techniques

The company is likely to experience change in its production techniques. The obvious change would be an increase in resource productivity. This basically means that the company would produce more goods and services with lesser materials and energy as well. Sustainability demands conservation of resources while at the same time optimizing production. The cost impact of this sustainable change would rest on two things, cost of production and financial returns. It is evident the cost of production would go down since the company would cut the expenditure in procuring raw material and increase efficiency in production by minimizing wastes.

Employee engagement

The company will have to engage their employees to encourage sustainability change within the company. This may result to formation of teams to instigate positive change within the company. Reorganization of employees will result to significant organizational change. The company may also be forced to have a team to foresee the implementation of sustainable changes within the organization. This will financially impact the company in terms of paying for the above mentioned services and sourcing experts to implement the changes.

The financial program that may support the triple bottom line concept is the metric analysis of consumer income. The triple bottom line concept works on the premise of analyzing the 3ps, which are people, profit and planet (Timothy, 2015). Consumer income patterns are therefore critical in the measurement of the performance of the company in terms of sustainability. The company can us this financial program to calculate its expected returns so that they carry out inventory control and how much to produce to optimally meet the demand. In essence, this program is important in achieving sustainability since it controls production by not only reducing waste but also ensuring efficient use of energy.

Recommendations

Technological change

The company should embrace technological change by adopting recent methods manufacturing chocolate and candy. Additionally, it is important for the company to update its information system and adopt relational data management systems to make management process efficient. Sustainability can only be achieved with a management system that focuses on open innovation and the drive to accept new ideas.

Production change

With the global pressure for companies to embrace sustainability in their production processes, Hershey Company should not be left behind. The company should consider employing production methods that minimize waste, energy usage while at the same time optimizing production that is environmentally and socially acceptable. I therefore recommend the company to reorganize its production system and adopt a modern production system that may see the company achieve sustainability.

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