CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

CHOCO Group UAB
Corporate Social Responsibility and Horizontal Principles Policy

Our Corporate Social Responsibility

Sustainable operations are among the key operational principles and strategic goals at CHOCO Group. We take responsibility in all areas where our operations affect our business partners, clients, regular people or the environment. Responsible operations are the principle that we follow in our endeavors to keep our promises regarding quality, transparency and equality, thus also ensuring the future of our company.

With respect to this ideology, we have developed corporate social responsibility guidelines that set forth how we keep our obligation to be socially responsible.

Our general concept of sustainable operations encompasses the following six main horizontal strategic principles: environmental protection; resource preservation; fairness; healthy lifestyle promotion; and dialogue and social engagement. Following these horizontal strategic principles will ensure the implementation of our social responsibility to the environment, people and our clients while continuing our regular activities and seeking our strategic goals.

Gender Equality

We contribute to the implementation of the horizontal strategic principle of fairness by ensuring gender equality at our company and the supply chain. This means that we guarantee fair work and social standards and work possibilities to all our employees and the supply chain staff.

Ensuring gender equality at the company

Irrespective of their sex, gender identity and sexual orientation, all our employees have equal rights to employee selection, professional development and their direct duties and responsibilities. Employee rights and obligations are set forth in their employment agreements and work regulations. The salaries of our employees depend solely on the type of work they do and their performance.

Ensuring gender equality in the supply chain

Our goal is to ensure gender equality across all our partner businesses and we demand the same from our suppliers. Our business partners have undertaken to prevent any type of discrimination in terms of sex, gender identity or sexual orientation and to guarantee that their employees experience no sexual harassment, physical or emotional violence at their workplaces. Equal opportunities are an integral part of all our agreements with business partners. To ensure the proper implementation of these principles, our business partners are required to provide certain information upon request and to permit visits to their companies.

Equal Employment Rights for Immigrants

Our goal is to ensure that the citizens of Lithuania and immigrants who have come to Lithuania looking for work opportunities have equal employment rights at our company. Everyone has equal rights to employee selection, professional development and direct duties and responsibilities. All our employees do their best to help new workers integrate into our team irrespective of their nationality, language, customs or beliefs. Our expectations and requirements to employees are the same to Lithuanian citizens and employees of other nationalities.

Environmental Protection and Resource Preservation

We aim to ensure that our operations have no negative impact on the environment. We work towards this goal by introducing trusted technologies available in the market that allow us to renounce fossil fuel, to use renewable resources to the maximum and to introduce resource-preserving solutions within our company. We encourage our employees to give their recommendations on how to handle production processes better for the purpose of preserving energy resources used in the production and administrative activities.

We also seek to reduce the size of our packaging and organize the supply of raw materials and products with the minimum use of fossil fuel. We search for business partners that are interested in developing reduced packaging solutions and renouncing disposable plastic packages.

Healthy Lifestyle Promotion

Our goal is to ensure that our trademark products have certain qualities promoting healthy eating habits. The assortment of our products carries the following brands deemed nutritionally valuable: BIO, VEGAN, NO ADDED SUGAR or less sugar, PALM OIL FREE, enriched with nutritional ingredients (PROTEINS, VITAMINS, MCT, etc.)). We promote the idea of healthy snacks and invite our partners to contribute to the development of snacks that contribute to healthier eating habits.

Social Dialogue and Social Engagement

We take part in various initiatives and projects with the goal to actively promote changes beyond our company as well. We aim to participate in the initiatives that either contribute or do not contradict the implementation of our horizontal strategic principles. We are mainly involved in projects promoting entrepreneurship and initiatives among young people (supporting the BONUS model) by looking for solutions to resource preservation, environmental protection and climate change, improving the community health care and delving into other important horizontal strategic principles. We join communicate with social and business partners, start initiatives and encourage our partners, suppliers and clients to join joint initiatives.

The guidelines have been prepared based on the information available at www.oecd.org.

Procedure for Filing and Reviewing Complaints and Recommendations

In the event that the company seems to deviate from the listed horizontal strategic principles, employees, partners, suppliers and clients can file complaints and/or recommendations on how to improve our policy. Complaints and recommendations can be submitted by e-mail at info@chocogroup.eu or by phone at +370 640 55252.

Our company ensures anonymous internal complaint filing and impartial review of all complaints. Employees who give notices about any breaches will not be discriminated and those who give substantiated recommendations will be duly encouraged and rewarded.