Description
Danone S.A. is a French multinational food-products corporation based in Paris and founded in Barcelona, Spain. It is listed on Euronext Paris where it is a component of the CAC 40 stock market index. Some of the company's products are branded Dannon in the United States.
As of 2018, Danone sold products in 120 markets, and had sales in 2018 of €24.65 billion. In the first half of 2018, 29% of sales came from specialized nutrition, 19% came from waters, and 52% came from dairy and plant-based products.
In the 2010s, reports indicated that Danone engaged in unethical marketing of infant formula in China, Indonesia, Turkey, and India.
Corporate social responsibility
Danone operates several funds including: danone.communities, created in 2007 to finance social business, the Danone Ecosystem Fund, created in 2009 to provide support to Danone partners including farmers, subcontractors, and vendors, and Livelihoods, created in 2011 in order to finance environment-related projects (such as peasant agriculture, deforestation, access to energy in emerging countries) and in return provide investors with carbon credits with strong social intensity.
Danone's corporate social responsibility programs were influenced by former CEO, Antoine Riboud, and a speech he gave on 25 October 1972 known as the "Marseilles speech".
In this speech, he stated that growth should not take place without corporate social responsibility. He was the first CEO to publicly state that human and environment aspects of a company should be take into account. These ideas laid the ground to Danone's dual project (economic and social).
Antoine Riboud also developed profit-sharing with employees and reduced work time in the 1970s and early 1980s.
