From farm to shelf: Unilever’s push for 85% local sourcing by 2025

702’s Bongani Bingwa speaks with CEO of Unilever South Africa Justin Apsey.

Listen below:

Unilever is teaming up with small businesses to increase its local sourcing, empower women, and help smallholder farmers get their products onto bigger shelves.

Through its Partners for Purpose programme, it works more closely with suppliers and partners.

With partners like Just Pink, Temon and Afro-Zonke, they have focused on localisation and job creation in South Africa.

“We invested with them [Afro-Zonke], together with some other partners, and we were able to take a mineral processing, which we were importing from Brazil, bring it to South Africa… they are now exporters.”

– Justin Apsey, Unilever South Africa CEO 

Apsey says Unilever makes 95% of its products locally, but 40% of the raw material used are imported.

Its target for local sourcing is 85% by the end of 2025.

“I think the hardest part is the eco-system. People get very focused on ‘can I import that’ or ‘can I export that’… the question is how can you do in a way that it answers the societal challenges in South Africa, and embraces the environment that you are in?”

– Justin Apsey, Unilever South Africa CEO 

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the discussion.