Strategy
We are confident we are uniquely positioned for growth by leveraging our strengths, our positive momentum, and focusing on the following six strategic priorities as our guiding principles:
REFRESHED ESG FRAMEWORK
We engaged in a comprehensive ESG transformation over the past year involving all parts of the organization to evolve our sustainability strategy and break the ceiling on sustainability initiatives—to be at the forefront of market, regulatory, and consumer trends. We sought to ensure our practices are aligned not only with local requirements, but also with world-leading best practices across industries, so we could establish a new frontier for our local markets on ESG trends and commitments. Our overarching vision is to become a global leader on sustainability and elevate ESG practices in Latin America and the world.
ESG Transformation Methodology
Aligned with our mandate to make a difference in ESG, we divided the top-down, bottom-up ESG transformation into five distinct phases to develop and refine our sustainability strategy. These phases not only defined the priorities for our sustainability strategic corridor, but also the concrete ambitions and commitments for key priorities within our strategic framework, along with the changes to our ways of working necessary to ensure the strategy can be properly executed for years to come.
new esg
strategy phases
Phase 1:
Setting the ESG Strategic Framework
Our initial phase required us to determine the topics where we had the largest impact on our society and for our business continuity. To do so, we identified and drew insights from stakeholder groups to inform our new strategic ESG framework, ensuring that we understood their highest priority topics.
In setting our framework, we applied a robust baseline of our internal operations across sustainability areas. Through detailed benchmarking on our current state of operations, we finalized our ESG framework with refreshed priorities across environmental, social, and governance pillars.
Phase 2:
Developing Holistic Evaluations
We developed a sustainable projects financial evaluation and prioritization methodology under a joint effort among our financial, project management, and core sustainability teams. Our holistic model seeks to quantify several intangible and long-term value drivers, including the cost of externalities such as carbon emissions. These drivers are typically underrepresented in traditional projects, but are especially relevant for ESG investments.
Phase 3:
Ambition Setting
With a robust baseline in place, we conducted external market research, drew from our conversations with key stakeholders, and evaluated industry benchmarks to discover what goals we wanted to achieve across each material topic in our ESG framework. Setting ambitions relative to these benchmarks followed our holistic view on ESG. Establishing these ambitions required understanding what world-leadership meant for each of our signature topics. The process of developing and tailoring our ESG goals along each topic was our ambition setting phase.
Phase 4:
Roadmap Development
With ambitions established, we set plans across the organization to ensure that we achieve these goals in time, and that all priorities have concrete and clear paths of execution. We complemented each ambition with a roadmap of investments and operational requirements that we needed to execute every year to timely reach our goals. Recognizing that roadmaps are only an initial estimate of how we will achieve our goals, we will continuously revise these roadmaps as markets mature, regulations change, and new technologies arise.
Phase 5:
Operating Model
To stay up to date with rapidly evolving trends, our ESG strategy requires change within our organization to be executed effectively. While developing our plans, we considered the interdependencies and implications that our ESG initiatives would have on our operations. As a result, we designed changes to our ways of working, governance, and people enablers to ensure the strategy is well executed for years to come.
ESG Framework
After several iterations, we developed a refreshed framework for our sustainability priorities, with environmental, social, governance, and transversal priorities. Our environmental pillar seeks to improve our relationship with our environment, focused on strong climate action, circular economy, and water efficiency. Our social pillar seeks to improve our impact on all of our stakeholders, including our nearby communities, our value chain, and our talent. Our governance pillar seeks to ensure we are accountable to our stakeholders, which includes managing compliance and cyber & data security issues, ensuring transparency, and developing the internal governing bodies and accountability to support this level of commitment. Transversally, we consider the effect our internal and external actions have on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we consider the enablers that can help us execute the overall ESG strategy effectively.
For more information see →Future Ready Sustainability Strategy
UNITED NATIONS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
We are committed to contributing to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While many of our actions contribute to the 17 SDGs, we are convinced that we can have a larger impact on the following nine goals through our strategic framework and initiatives.
We are working with FEMSA Foundation on initiatives and social programs in our communities, focused on early childhood and healthy lifestyles.
Through our external and internal social priorities, we continue to focus on the health, safety, and wellbeing of our employees, customers, consumers, and communities. By prioritizing their health and safety, we reinforce our company’s commitment to delivering economic value, while generating social and environmental wellbeing. In addition, we offer a total beverage portfolio, including our growing zero- and low-sugar portfolio, and we carry out responsible marketing strategies for our products.
Aligned with our ambition to improve gender diversity at all levels of the organization, we are developing and deploying initiatives to increase women’s representation across our operations. By 2030, our ambition is for women to represent 40% of leadership and management positions. We are also carrying out programs to foster women’s financial and digital empowerment within the traditional trade.
We are committed to ensuring the efficient use of this natural resource, conservation of water basins, and safe access to drinking water for our communities and ourselves. By 2025, our ambition is to develop with our communities and stakeholders one access or replenish project in each of our priority sites to achieve the return of 100% of the water we use.
We strive for energy efficiency across our value chain. We further integrate renewable sources of energy and technologies to reduce our CO2e emissions—aligned with our commitment to break the ceiling on climate action. Our operations’ energy consumption focuses on a comprehensive strategy that encompasses our value chain.
We aim to achieve sustainable economic growth through efficient resource utilization, promote a work environment that offers comprehensive professional development, create jobs in emerging markets, and apply sustainable sourcing principles. In addition, we develop initiatives in our communities focused on empowerment to foster resilience and reactivation of local economies.
We continually work to improve our ESG performance and foster industry innovation, especially in the areas of water stewardship and energy efficiency, while reducing our carbon footprint across our value chain. We complement these programs with digital and innovation training to develop local suppliers.
Our work with small local businesses across our rich value chain of suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders seeks to improve their financial and digital inclusion, while we work to provide our communities with safe water, improved sanitation, and hygiene education.
Aligned with our community engagement priority, we are determined to advance the development of the communities where we operate. With this mindset, we will collaborate with our communities across all of our operations to develop sustainable solutions that address local needs.
We hold ourselves to high standards of transparency and authenticity in our external communications, including reporting the progress on our commitments and other material topics identified throughout the year. We are confident that, with the support and co-responsibility of all of the stakeholders across our value chain, we will fulfill our 2030 ambition of collecting 100% of the PET bottles we place in the market through a concerted market-based approach to the circular economy.
By 2030, to break the ceiling on climate action, we are committed to decreasing our scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50%, and reducing 20% of our entire value chain emissions. To reach our interim and final ambition on CO2e emission reduction, we set initiatives to migrate relevant operational assets to lower emission alternatives, as well as setting various initiatives to tackle emissions across our value chain.
Given the growing urgency of shared water risks and the need for systemic action across the value chain, our holistic water strategy is focused on water efficiency, replenishment, and access. We consistently lead our industry peers on water efficiency, and continue to invest in minimizing our use of water. Moreover, our social water stewardship strategy protects people’s right to water, and aims to guarantee this resource for current and future generations.
Our corporate governance and the way we conduct our business is in full compliance with applicable regulations in all of our countries of operation, with our Code of Ethics as our compass. With our suppliers, we further apply guiding principles that focus on strategic input categories, including areas such as human rights, environmental protection, and labor rights.
We recognize that complex, ever-changing challenges require innovative solutions that can only be achieved and put into action together. We embrace this reality, and we partner with other companies, governments, NGOs, and institutions to maximize our impact.
