People are at the heart of Sourced with Care. Every day in gardens and farms around the world, hundreds of thousands of people are growing, tending and harvesting the finest ingredients. Without these people, their skills and the environment where our ingredients grow, a cup of Twinings tea would not be possible. Sourced With Care is our way of recognising the vital role that these people and their communities play through programmes that aim to drive positive change through empowering women, supporting incomes, and improving living standards. These are some of our programmes:

Most tea estates are usually in quite rural areas, where access to safe and dignified sanitation is often an issue. To help address this we work with our suppliers to accelerate the building of sanitation facilities and awareness on hand washing and good hygiene practices. Since 2010 we have built over 3,000 toilets, providing safe, long-lasting and dignified sanitation to over 18,000 people in India and Sri Lanka, and continue to do so in India and Kenya.

Rooibos, a key herb for Twinings, is grown primarily in Cederberg, South Africa, in remote communities that tend to be far from any medical facilities, including hospitals. To help address this, Twinings partnered with The Pebbles Project to provide access to medical care, funding a Mobile Health Clinic which now visits the Roobios farms, which means that these workers and their families, who live on the farms, do not need to travel to more populated areas to access basic services. The Clinic provides workers, which are predominantly female, and their families, with wellness screenings, routine health check-ups, primary healthcare support, health and wellness workshops and over-the-counter health products. As well as providing better access to health care facilities, The Pebbles Project also aims to provide farm workers and their communities with information on topics such as sexual health, dental care and maternal health, increasing awareness and empowering individuals to take control of their and their family’s health.

As the majority of those working in the tea estates are women, we have a number of programmes focusing on empowering women and as part of that, making sure they are aware of their rights as workers. For example, we have recently extended our Community Development Forums (CDFs) model to Indonesia where we are working with the ETP, Care International and other likeminded brands to support the implementation of CDFs on three tea estates that we source from. The CDF helps to address these issues by training female tea pluckers in leadership skills and women’s safety and through open dialogue with management gives them a platform to be heard. The programme also focuses on human rights and promotes the representation of women in workers’ unions and leadership committees in the workplace. The success of the CDF model relies heavily on direct community participation and over three years it aims to embed the CDF open dialogue structure in the estates, so that it out-lives the length of project.

In India, we are members of the Women Safety Accelerator Fund (WSAF), a collaboration led by IDH, and funded by the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) and a number of other brands and retails. The WSAF is designed address women’s safety and gender-based violence in the Indian tea sector, by ensuring women are socially, economically and politically empowered in rural spaces, that are free from sexual harassment and other forms of violence. WSAF does this through a series of awareness and training sessions, while also providing support to women who have experienced issues.

We have also developed a specific Gender-Based Violence and Harassment (GBVH) policy and implementation toolkit for suppliers. This policy, which we are rolling out to our suppliers, starting in Kenya initially, sets out the standards which we expect them to comply with, including requirements to introduce GBV preventative measures, carry out training, and operate effective grievance mechanisms.

In our supply chain, where the vast majority of our emissions are, we need to work collaboratively across the sector with our stakeholders, advocating the importance of setting carbon reduction targets and assessing their emissions and decarbonisation strategies.

We’re also working hard to minimise our packaging materials, using less and where possible using more sustainable alternatives, increasing the recycled content and removing single-use plastic, and in doing so also making sure more of our packaging is recyclable. By 2025, we have committed to ensuring that all our consumer packaging is recyclable or reusable and our tea bags are compostable. We have already made significant progress but recognise that there is always more work to be done.

When it comes to logistics, it accounts for a very small part of our Scope 3 emissions. We ship our raw ingredients from our sourcing countries to our production sites rather than air freighting them. When it comes to products being transported to customers, we’re looking at using ways to optimise our inbound and outbound journeys, minimising the use of empty trucks; using jumbo trailers, thereby reducing the number of journeys we have to make; as well as switching from road freight to rail freight; and looking at alternative fuels, to reduce our emissions.

We source our tea and herbs from gardens, estates and smallholders in more than 40 countries. Farming communities, especially smallholders, are increasingly on the frontline of climate change and climate-related environmental challenges, like water scarcity and poor soil health. Therefore, we will continue to work in partnership with suppliers and farmers to support change in communities where we source our tea and herbs from through specific projects that aim to reduce carbon emissions and improve biodiversity and soil health.

For example, we recently launched a three-year pilot programme in Argentina which will work with 100 tea farmers to gain a better understanding of their emissions and the impact training and implementation of more sustainable farming techniques can have on tea growing communities. The techniques used include testing different land management approaches to improve soil health and biodiversity, for example incorporating trees amongst tea rows; efficient use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, as well as switching to organic alternatives; and integrated pest management techniques. We will then use the learnings for this programme to inform our strategy to reduce our Scope 3 emissions, with the aim of rolling out this pilot and its findings to our other sourcing countries.

In doing so, we hope that it will help support producer’s livelihoods while at the same time playing a part in reducing the carbon emissions in our supply chain.