AAK engages 86,000 women in sustainable sourcing

AAK’s shea sourcing programme in West Africa has grown and now includes more than 86,000 local women. The company will give a lecture on how to create sustainable supply chains at the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit in Paris.

On October 22 AAK Sourcing Director Henrik Vingaard enters the stage at the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit in Paris. He will explain how to create sustainable supply chains, with a positive social and economic impact on local communities. In 2009, AAK established a shea solidarity programme in West Africa called Kolo Nafaso, which means “the house of shea kernel benefits”. The objective is to create a win-win situation for AAK and the collecting women and their families. Today, the programme engages and empowers more than 86,000 women and the number is growing every year. The programme is inspired by fair trade principles. It fights poverty and improves local living conditions while ensuring shea availability and high quality.

Thanks to its functional and green profile, shea is widely and increasingly used in all kinds of cosmetic applications. AAK Personal Care has launched several successful shea products in recent years, for example Lipex SheaLight (named best Sustainable Ingredient at the Sustainable Beauty Awards 2014) and Lipex SheaClear.

Natural and Organic is also the overall focus at in-cosmetics Asia, 4-6 November in Bangkok. Jarek Tabor, Technical Manager at AAK Personal Care, will participate in a roundtable discussion on some of the key challenges faced by operations in the natural and organic cosmetics industry.

More information about AAK’s sustainability profile and CSR approach is found in AAK’s Sustainability Report 2014/2015, which was published recently. Read the report here: http://ebooks.exakta.se/aak/2015/sustainability/