Sustainability & Transparenz

We pay the so-called Living Income Reference Price (LIRP) for our cocoa, which is intended to ensure a standart of living. We remunerate the necessary additional payments through our partners, who also make the corresponding payments.

With his mechanism, if the price falls sharply, as e.g. as in the Ivory Coast in 2021, we pay the Farmgate reference price, at which the cocoa farmers receive a premium to be better protected. Our beans come from Ecuador and the Ivory Coast. The beans can be traced back to the cocoa farm.

Our promise: We are working on further increasing the traceability of product and cash flows and would like to be able to allocate our beans down to the tree in the future. We also monitor international raw material prices and maintain internal resources to analyze the origin and flows of all ingredients.

Environment & Climate Protection

Sustainable management has been an important part of our family business culture from the very beginning. As a family company in the second generation, we have already implemented numerous internal measures to avoid climate-damaging emissions. These include our internal travel guidelines, our purchasing strategy and our partnerships with sustainability experts. Furthermore, MADAME CHÉRI has switched completely to 100% renewable electricity since 2010. Our Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions are currently being analyzed on the basis of numerous databases and possible compensations are being worked out. We committ to compensate our CO2 footprint over our full company life cycle.

Our philosophy regarding packaging is: as little as possible, as much as necessary. Chocolate is a natural product that needs to be packaged well for quality reasons. To compensate for the environmental impact, we take on PreZero program.

Animal welfare

We analyze compliance with animal protection legislation in the supply chain. Since the only animal soruced ingredient in our whole product portfolio is milk, the complexity is relatively low, but due to the market organization and regulation for dairy products, it is often not possible to access the producers directly. We are currently working on certification from the Animal Welfare Initiative.

Transparency

We update this scale regularly and thus ensure that our target achievement rate remains transparent. Since our demands grow with us, we try to increase the number of certifications in our company, but this is often very complex, time-consuming and sometimes also non-transparent. The FAQs on the homepage are based on inquiries that focus on ethical issues from our supply chain. As the topic is becoming more important, we would like to be able to respond even faster to inquiries about sustainability in detail at MADAME CHÉRI in the future.

Corporate governance

Value-oriented corporate management is becoming increasingly important. We at MADAME CHÉRI are convinced of that and act accordingly. We regularly exchange ideas with external sustainability consultants. For example, we use them to analyze human rights and environmental risks in the supply chains of ingredients for new products and our existing varieties. Our sustainability scale is a key control tool for us to assess where we currently stand and where there is potential for improvement.

With the Governance Code for Family Businesses, a commission of well-known entrepreneurs and scientists has developed guidelines for the responsible management of family businesses. At the heart of the code is the clear commitment to responsibility as a company owner. Our corporate governance code serves as an individual quality touchstone for entrepreneurial activity in order to ensure the long-term survival of the family business and to operate sustainably.