Rankings Highlight General Mills' Continued Progress and Commitment to Human Rights

This week, the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) was launched. General Mills was part of this pilot benchmark which evaluated the top 98 companies across agriculture, apparel, and extractives (those industries considered at highest risk). A collaborative initiative led by investors and human rights organizations, CHRB is the first public benchmark that ranks companies on their policies, practices and actions on human rights. To learn more, see their press release.

Based on CHRB's assessment, General Mills scored above-average overall and in our industry, coming in at #22 out of 98 overall, and #8 out of 35 in our industry. These scores reflect our continued progress and commitment to human rights.

In the last two years, we published our Policy on Human Rights, released our Slavery and Human Trafficking statement, updated our Supplier Code of Conduct, and expanded our global audit work.

“These updates were supported by mandatory training for all global sourcing employees," said Bethany Fitzgerald, who leads the Global Responsible Sourcing Program for General Mills. "In addition, we created a country risk heat map within our spend visibility dashboard to help buyers understand our highest risk categories and supplier locations while they develop category strategies, make buying decisions, and form risk mitigation plans.” While our performance is above average relative to our peers, we know there is more to be done across our supply chain. “We were not surprised by our results, which highlighted areas that we were actively looking to enhance," said Fitzgerald.

"Last year, we searched for a third party with expertise and global presence that could help us increase our scope and impact in protecting human rights. An agreement was signed in November 2016, and we have been busy building our new program, to be launched this summer." Increasingly, we are seeing more attention paid to human rights and expect this trend to continue. The authors of this benchmark consider this a public call to action, highlighting that all stakeholders in different roles need to step up and use these results to drive improved corporate human rights performance. We know that the protection of human rights is critical to our business, and we remain committed to treating the world and its people with care.