August 27, 2026
Our industry, producing food and beverage cartons that help protect food and make it available everywhere, both depends on and impacts nature.
In particular, the sourcing of raw materials – how and where they are produced – can be linked to environmental, social and supply chain risks. By increasing visibility across the multiple stages of a value chain, companies can better understand and manage these risks while also creating operational value through improved sourcing practices, greater resilience1 and a stronger ability to anticipate and respond to disruptions.
Driving business resilience through traceability
Traceability is a powerful tool for tracking the journey of materials across complex supply chains and is a key focus of Tetra Pak’s Approach to Nature, our value chain-wide framework for making a positive contribution to halting and preventing nature loss.
To better understand and manage potential risks and impacts across the value chain, we pay specific attention to materials with a significant land footprint such as paper-based materials, polymers and aluminium foil.
Elisa Bauer, Nature Manager at Tetra Pak, explains:
“It’s about knowing where our materials originate. With the right provenance information, we can find out what our impacts are all the way down to a regional and local level – both from a nature and social perspective."
Elisa Bauer, Nature Manager at Tetra Pak
Regulations such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) are also increasing expectations around traceability. EUDR is designed to help ensure that certain commodities and products placed on, or exported from, the EU market are not linked to deforestation or forest degradation. Meeting these expectations depends on access to reliable information about the origin of materials and how risks are assessed and managed.
Tracking a product from the source – including material sourcing areas, producers and any intermediate or sub-suppliers – enables us to link product volumes to specific attributes of suppliers and/or production sites, so we know how materials have been produced as well as where they come from, helping further to identify, prevent and mitigate environmental and human rights impacts.
By building out traceability capabilities, businesses can better assess their exposure to challenges such as drought, biodiversity loss, deforestation and conversion (the loss of natural ecosystems to other land uses), geopolitical disruption or human rights-related issues. This can support faster, more targeted responses when disruptions occur, help protect supply continuity, and enable more informed decision-making.
Increased and contextualised knowledge is also foundational to strengthening relationships with suppliers, improving operational efficiency and contributing to more resilient systems. These improvements can create value across the supply chain, enabling greater transparency and collaboration upstream while supporting Tetra Pak customers with their sourcing and sustainability ambitions.
Collaboration to join the dots
While traceability provides valuable visibility into supply chains, achieving it requires collaboration across multiple actors and systems. Certification, supplier engagement and access to reliable origin information help build the transparency needed to better understand sourcing practices and manage risks across the value chain.
Certification plays a key role in verifying material attributes and supporting responsible sourcing2. A cornerstone of our Approach to Nature is our continued commitment to working closely with suppliers and building on our long-standing partnerships with recognised industry bodies such as the Forest Stewardship Council™ (FSC™)3 for paper-based materials, Bonsucro4 for plant-based polymers and the Aluminum Stewardship Initiative (ASI) for aluminium5.
Today’s growingly complex sustainability landscape, however, calls for businesses to complement these initiatives with greater due diligence and verification of their own. “Certification is a core element of the due diligence approach in our upstream value chain” says Elisa. “Traceability helps us go one step further and make checks of our own.”
Through Tetra Pak’s Join Us in Protecting the Planet (JUIPP) initiative, we work with participating suppliers to gather increasingly detailed origin information for sourced materials. “Every year we survey in-scope suppliers to share sourcing locations with us, and we score them accordingly. The more detailed the data, the higher the score.”
We’re steadily getting greater granularity6 and have a target to achieve traceability to the production unit of origin or sourcing areas for paper-based materials, plant-based polymers and aluminium foil that we source from high-priority locations by 2027.
This information will support more targeted assessments and verification in higher-risk areas, with a focus on deforestation-free sources.
“We don’t fully own all the data, so we depend on others across the value chain to provide it,” continues Elisa.
“This is an industry-wide challenge, which requires a collective effort. Our role is to ensure this priority is firmly on the map and encourage close collaboration every step of the way."
1. For a definition of ‘resilience’: What is resilience? - Stockholm Resilience Centre
2. Our commitments are implemented across the value chain through our Code of Business Conduct for Suppliers and Responsible Sourcing Procedure, which establish baseline requirements for all materials.
3. By 2025, 100% of the paper-based materials used in our products originated from FSC-certified and other controlled sources. Tetra Pak’s FSC licence code is FSCTM C014047. Please read more at www.fsc.org
4. By 2025, 100% of plant-based polymers used in our products were Bonsucro-certified. Please read more at www.bonsucro.com
5. We work continually with existing and new suppliers to target obtaining 100% of our aluminium from ASI-certified sourced. Read more about Aluminum Stewardship Initiative (ASI).
6. Tetra Pak FY25 Sustainability Report, p. 73 Tetra-Pak-Sustainability-Report-FY25.pdf