"Monster Beverage from laggard to leader on slavery in supply chain", 4 June 2019

Thanks to an As You Sow shareholder resolution, Monster has changed its attitude on the issue of supply chain slavery and appears to have transformed its policies and practices in under a year...The shareholder resolution was filed after Monster scored a zero...in the 2016 KnowTheChain slavery in supply chain scorecard.

At the 2018 AGM, Monster’s CEO explained that the company was resisting the requirement to devote company resources to comprehensively gathering data and publishing a slavery and human trafficking report on its sugarcane supply chain. Shareholders thought otherwise and delivered a decisive vote. Company leadership took action, and...things began to change...Finally...the parties came to an agreement [on] who would be directly accountable at the company, specific dates for incorporating the company’s Supplier Code of Conduct into supplier contracts...as well as targets for training suppliers through 2025.

We are hoping to see other companies that scored poorly on the most recent KnowTheChain report — like Prada (5), Amphenol (9), Hormel Foods (10), Tyson Foods (12), Conagra (18), Hershey (22), Kraft Heinz (23), and Costco (23) — to follow Monster's lead.