About our corporate responsibility report
The purpose of Ahold’s 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report is to provide a fair and balanced view of Ahold’s corporate responsibility strategy, practices and performance for the period from December 31, 2007 to December 28, 2008. The preparation of this report was overseen by the Ahold CR Steering Committee and the CR Steering Committee Data & Reporting and the final report has been endorsed by Ahold’s Corporate Executive Board.
This is the seventh corporate responsibility report that we have published and, as of 2007, we publish a corporate responsibility report on an annual basis.
Scope
Our reporting systems facilitate the collection of qualitative and quantitative information from our operating companies. This report covers our operating companies and ICA. The data excludes the entities Ahold Coffee Company, Peapod, Etos, and Gall & Gall, unless indicated otherwise in the report. Financial data included in the paragraph Highlights includes all these entities except for ICA.
For the purpose of this report, we report on the indicators specific to:
- stores (owned and franchised);
- transportation (owned and outsourced) from distribution centers to stores;
- distribution centers (owned and outsourced; for Albert Heijn the four outsourced distribution centers are excluded).
We consider these locations and activities to represent the main part of our operations. Direct store deliveries, business travel and offices are not in scope for this report.
Process
Ahold follows the third generation guidelines (G3) of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). During 2008, we continued to gain more insight into the best way to measure our data. We have improved our alignment of definitions with GRI G3 Guidelines and implemented a reporting system to consolidate the data from our operating companies. As a consequence, we have been able to improve the consistency and reliability of our data.
Because this year’s scope is significantly broader than for the 2007 report and definitions have been updated, the data reported over 2008 is not comparable to previous years without extensive explanations or adjustments. For that reason, we have not included 2007 data as a comparison to this year’s reported data.
At each operating company, a designated content owner is responsible for coordinating the corporate responsibility data compilation and reporting to the Ahold Corporate Center. These content owners are responsible for accurate, complete and timely reporting in line with the various procedures, definitions and guidelines as issued by Ahold Corporate Center. The data provided by ICA has been adjusted to align with Ahold’s definitions.
This corporate responsibility report includes – among others – data on healthy living, organic and Fairtrade products, percentage of GFSI-certified corporate brand products, fuel consumption, gas consumption, electricity consumption, total leakage of refrigerants and leakage percentage, our total CO2 emissions, the total water consumption, the total weight of waste, the donations we gave and the total workforce.
Where needed and reasonably possible, extrapolations or estimates have been applied. For example, extrapolations of franchised stores are based on comparable owned stores. The report data were subject to internal review procedures. With respect to the data of outsourced distribution centers in the United States, third-party data is included which was not subject to our internal review procedures.
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