Promoting Diversity Within Our Supply Chain
Hershey's 2019 Sustainability Report
Hershey actively supports an inclusive marketplace through our supplier diversity program that creates business opportunities for qualified and diversely-owned enterprises. Besides enabling us to represent and better understand our consumers, diverse supply chains drive innovation and fresh thinking and reflect our diverse employee base, cementing their pride and sense of engagement in working for our company.
To promote and educate on supplier diversity across our business, we operate a Supplier Diversity Roundtable with representatives from each procurement area, as well as our Manufacturing Alliances. We also have access to a searchable supplier database to help identify diverse suppliers.
Additionally, our procurement contracts request that our suppliers utilize diverse suppliers and report their diverse spend attributable to Hershey. To ensure compliance, we track quarterly the internal reporting of diverse spend of both Tier 1 suppliers (those directly supplying us with goods and services) and Tier 2 suppliers (those who supply our Tier 1 suppliers).
Currently, we track spending with minority, women, veteran, LGBTQ and disability- owned businesses. Hershey annually reports this performance through our DiversityInc submission. In 2019, we developed a new Supplier Diversity Strategy, which we will be launching in 2020, paving the way for further growth and development in addition to internal and external engagements.
