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REPORTS

Sabirlar: Milestone 1 Evaluation

Sabirlar Findik İhracat Ltd. Şti. (Sabirlar), a privately held and family-owned hazelnut processing company, joined FLA in February 2019. Since then, Sabirlar has continuously improved its supply chain traceability, identified farm-level non-compliances, and worked on remediation. This report details FLA’s evaluation of Sabirlar’s governance at the headquarters level (Milestone 1). 

Highlights of Sabirlar for Milestone 1 – Governance and Alignment include:

  • Strong Senior Management Commitment: Sabirlar has built a sustainability program from scratch since joining FLA. The company developed its own code, fully aligned with the FLA CoC, and hired a lead to coordinate the sustainability department staff and program activities. It started to publish sustainability reports on its website as of 2022.
  • Supplier Engagement: Sabirlar only works with “approved suppliers’’ who are committed to compliance with the Sabirlar code and regularly monitors their activities, practices, and the farms they source from. In return, the company supports suppliers in different ways, such as providing consultancy on agricultural practices, organizing farmer trainings to boost quality and increase yields, and giving premiums.
  • Traceability and Risk Assessments: Sabirlar was one of the first member companies to disclose its sourcing profile on its website.  According to its disclosure, the company achieved 95% traceability to its hazelnut farms in Türkiye as of 2022 and is committed to 100% traceability in the future.
  • Remediation: Sabirlar has been an active participant in FLA’s Harvesting the Future (HTF) project since 2019. The HTF project takes a collaborative model among stakeholders, in which buyers and suppliers, CSOs, and the Turkish government are working together to create large-scale changes on child protection and responsible recruitment through a multi-commodity, multi-company, and multi-geography approach.
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Consultation with civil society has been the key element of Sabirlar’s activities from early on.  Sabirlar prioritizes eliminating child labor in its supply chain and facilitating children’s access to education; to accomplish this, the company works with external experts. It has partnered with a number of CSOs since 2019 and opened summer schools in the sourcing region.