Amid increasing geopolitical instability and climate related risks that inevitably enhance vulnerabilities, and exploitation risks for some of the people within our end-to-end supply chain, Direct Produce Suppliers (dps) remain focused on our strategy and values of Operating Responsibly to maximise our positive, social and ethical impacts and minimise our environmental footprint. Our commitments include applying the principles and practice of ethical trade to ensure trust, transparency and drive improvements to protect and respect human rights.

The UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires dps to demonstrate actions to reduce modern slavery, human trafficking and forced labour risks across the supply chain each year.

To demonstrate our on-going commitment and transparency: dps have published our full Modern Slavery statement in the following locations: UK Government Modern Slavery Registry and PDF ‘dps 2022-2023 Modern Slavery Statement Final’.

Our 2022 – 2023 statement refers to the financial year ending 30th September 2023 and includes the action implemented to identify, mitigate, and prevent modern slavery risks in our own operations and upstream supply chains.

We are cognisant that there is still much work to build on our approach to tackling modern slavery and preventing exploitation, but are confident that the steps we have taken over the last 12 months are having an impact and are critical in moving us in the right direction:

1. Renewed our ethical trade and human rights due diligence framework to include strategic pillars relating to modern slavery, worker voice and grievance mechanisms
2. Developed our Human rights risk assessment tool incl. new modern slavery and climate change related indicators.
3. Identified our 10 countries with highest inherent forced labour / modern slavery risks to prioritise action plans.
4. Maintained Stronger2gether Advanced Business Partner status,
5. Continued to measure our effectiveness, progress and impacts against our new KPIs.

In the coming year, we are optimistic that our plans will enable us to continually involve our approach; by finalising our incident response management and remediation policies, implementing derisking actions to address the most salient modern slavery risks by country, crop, and vulnerability and driving engagement internally, aligned with UK anti-slavery day in October 2023.

This statement has been approved by the dps Board of Directors.

Paul Beynon
dps Group CEO
March 2024

Working together with our supply chain partners, we aim to have a restorative impact on the planet so that we can secure a sustainable future for generations to come.

Our Environmental Sustainability Commitments

We will minimise our environmental impacts by:

• Reducing our end-to-end Food Waste
• Removing Plastic Packaging and improving Recyclability
• Protecting and restoring Biodiversity
• Implementing Water Stewardship practices
• Minimising office, manufacturing, and agricultural Waste through the principles of Circular Economy
• Creating a roadmap to achieve Net Zero by 2035 across our own operations and a greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reduction target aligned to Science Based Target initiative (SBTi).

Our environmental commitments aim to contribute directly to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs): Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action, Life on Land, and Partnership for the Goals.

Our global supply chain is directly impacted by the effects of climate change, and we recognise the importance of collective action to protect natural resources. In November 2021 dps joined the WRAP Water Road Map as supporting suppliers to increase resilience in water stressed areas by improving water quality and availability, and working in collaboration with other businesses, aim to achieve a shared target of sourcing 50% of the UK’s fresh food from areas with sustainable water management.

SDG Goal 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production, is particularly important to dps. In 2017, we adopted SDG 12.3 to halve food waste in our operations and have a roadmap to deliver this commitment by 2025.

dps are UK WRAP – IGD Food Waste Reduction Roadmap signatories, we report on our food waste annually which further embeds our commitment to halve supply chain food waste from farm to fork. We work closely with our suppliers and customers to reduce food waste across the supply chain and by partnering with redistribution charities such as FareShare and City Harvest we are able to prevent food waste by making sure that surplus food, perfectly fine to eat reaches the people that need it most.