Sustainability report

President and CEO: Making better happen for people and planet This special time of significant opportunities has moti- vated us to look closer at our reason for being and how we as a company can benefit both people and planet. Uncovering the AAK purpose During the year, we engaged in dialogue with over 1,000 AAK employees, asking questions like: What makes you proud to work for AAK? A key insight was that AAK is known for constantly trying to make things better and more sustainable. We also learned that our decentralized business model makes us good at getting things done. These insights inspired us to uncover the AAK purpose: Making Better Happen™ and sustainability is at the heart of our purpose. Sustainability is embedded in everything we do – ensuring responsible supply chains, minimizing our environmental impact and being a knowledgeable partner on sustainability solutions for our customers. Our purpose is rooted in a strong belief that honesty and transparency drive progress. In this Sustainability Report, we share our performance, ambitions and insights on sustainability. We are open about our challenges and risks related to sustainability, as well as the opportunities to drive our growth and competitiveness. I invite you – all of our stakeholders – to join us on our sustainability journey. The Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges for society and businesses in 2020. As we now look to 2021, we have a unique opportunity to build back better. As signatories of the UN Global Compact, as well as the UN Global Compact’s Statement for Renewed Global Cooperation launched in 2020, we at AAK are committed to playing our part to steer our world onto a more equitable, inclusive and sustainable path. A year of raised ambitions During 2020, we took important steps to raise our ambitions and intensify our sustainability work. • We reached out to many of our key customers with deep-dive interviews about their sustainability to identify areas where we can further improve. • We updated and strengthened our framework for integrating sustainability into our business model – the AAK House of Sustainability. This updated model will further build commitment and mobilize action throughout our organization. • We strengthened our processes for measuring, evaluating and reporting on our sustainability performance. • We identified climate risks, frameworks and actions that can enable us to effectively reduce our climate impact. • We have also begun the process of setting tar- gets for CO 2 emissions that will be submitted for approval by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). The journey towards sustainable palm oil The raw materials that we source and process are an important part of AAK’s sustainability impact. Palm oil, in particular, is one of the world’s most important vegetable oils, bringing affordable nutrition and func- tionality as well as a way out of poverty for millions of people in poorer regions of the world. But there are also risks of negative impact related to the palm oil supply chain. Because of the complexity of the palm oil supply chain, which involves millions of smallholder farmers, the environmental and social risks associated with it can only be solved by working together in cross-industry initiatives. At AAK, we engage and collaborate with AAK Sustainability Report 2020 2