Sustainability: Promoting Responsible Consumption

Promoting Responsible Consumption

Our role begins by ensuring that our brands are packaged and promoted to a consistently high standard everywhere in the world.
Promoting Responsible Consumption
Promoting Responsible Consumption

Alcohol in Society

Promoting responsible consumption is one of the six key areas of Edrington’s new sustainability strategy.

Edrington has built a successful business based on the quality of our brands, consumer trust and responsible self-regulation. Our role begins by ensuring that our brands are packaged and promoted to a consistently high standard everywhere in the world. We train employees who work in sales, marketing, events and procurement in the Edrington Marketing Code. Employees renew their training every two years and the company has a training compliance target of 95% at any one time.

We believe we can achieve more in partnership, so Edrington works with and funds organisations that support responsible consumption and work to reduce the harms associated with alcohol misuse. Here is a selection of the work supported by Edrington in the past year.

Responsibility and Our People

Edrington’s Alcohol Responsibility Week is an annual week-long international campaign which reaches employees across more than 20 countries. It is designed to give every one of our people the information and support they need to make positive choices around alcohol, whether in their work or home life. In 2018/19 the company worked with Drinkaware, the UK’s leading source of alcohol responsibility information, to host their ‘Drinkaware at Work’ training.

Outside the UK, regional leaders led events to champion Alcohol Responsibility Week and give the campaign a local context. Other activities included a ‘low and no-alcohol’ cocktail masterclass where an Edrington mixologist showed employees how to make a range of mixed drinks that include either one unit of alcohol or none at all. Edrington’s occupational health team worked with the ‘Drink Wise, Age Well’ to run information sessions in its sites in Scotland.

Responsibility in Action

In Scotland, Edrington is a contributing partner to the Scotch Whisky Association’s Scotch Whisky Action Fund, a five-year commitment with the aim of supporting innovative projects that tackle alcohol-related harm. The fund is independently managed by Foundation Scotland. In the four years the fund has operated it has funded 37 projects.

Through its UK joint venture, Edrington-Beam Suntory UK, Edrington funds the Best Bar None programme, which raises standards in the hospitality industry.

Edrington is a member of the European Spirits Group and spiritsEUROPE, an organisation that represents spirits producers and co-ordinates a network of 31 national associations.

Through the Asia Pacific International Wine and Spirits Alliance (APIWSA), Edrington has contributed to tailored alcohol responsibility campaigns in China, Vietnam, Korea, Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan.

In the Americas, Edrington chairs the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility. Known as Responsibility.org, this independent, national, not-for-profit organisation leads the fight to eliminate drunk driving and underage drinking and promotes responsible decision-making regarding alcohol. FAAR programmes engage with law enforcement, public officials, educators, parents, and students.