Rainforest Alliance Certification and Beyond: Useful Tools for Company Due Diligence

Sourcing Rainforest Alliance Certified ingredients demonstrates a company’s commitment to sustainability in their supply chains. Our standard includes requirements on child labor, forced labor, working conditions, living wages, deforestation, hazardous pesticides, water pollution, and other issues that are not only critical to improving agricultural operations but also are key focus areas for government regulators. These requirements align with—and often exceed—international standards and emerging legislation.

But it is how these requirements are implemented at the farm and farm group level that matters. This is why our Farm Requirements include assess-and-address systems that build the capacity of farm and farm group managers to assess, mitigate, monitor, and remediate human rights risks and impacts. Farms and groups must also have internal inspection systems and grievance mechanisms in place to monitor all the requirements of the Rainforest Alliance standard.

One of the key components of effective due diligence is the ability to adequately prioritize risks. Our Risk Assessment Tool, which is mandatory for all certificate holders, helps identify possible adverse impacts for a wide variety of environmental and social issues covered in the standard. We also have custom risk maps for key issues, including our child labor and forced labor risk maps and deforestation risk maps which help target audits and ensure deforestation-free supply chains. In addition, our Salary Matrix Tool assesses the gap between current worker wages and the applicable living wage benchmark. We encourage companies to use these risk maps and tools in their own risk assessment processes while also requiring all farms and farm groups to assess their own risks.

Grievance mechanisms are another important way certification supports farmers in identifying risks and impacts. The Rainforest Alliance Certification Program requires all farms and supply chain actors to have a grievance mechanism in place, with third-party auditors evaluating their effectiveness. In the instances when farmers or farm workers feel that their grievances have not been appropriately resolved, they can escalate them to the relevant certification body’s grievance mechanism and then to the Rainforest Alliance’s own grievance procedure if necessary. Certification bodies are the third-party auditing firms that check if farms and farm groups meet the requirements of certification.

The results of a farm or farm group’s assessment directly leads to mitigation measures for each of the identified risks. For example, if a Rainforest Alliance Certified farm or group is operating in a country and sector that scores high or medium risk on our child labor or forced labor risk maps, we require the farm or farm group to take stronger mitigation steps. All mitigation steps—either recommended by the Rainforest Alliance or chosen by certificate holders—must be included in the farm’s management plan, with implementation verified by auditors.

Training and capacity building are also key elements of our approach. Farmers and farm groups who achieve certification go through tailored training and capacity-building programs so that they have the knowledge and skills needed to implement our standard.

For any human rights or environmental violation identified through self-monitoring or third-party auditing, certified farmers must follow our Remediation Protocol. The protocol details mandatory steps as well as good practices. Examples of remediation can include ensuring a child returns to school, repayment of unpaid wages, or the dismissal (and/or disciplining) of a perpetrator of workplace harassment. For environmental risks, remediation efforts can include taking steps to increase the number and diversity of native shade trees.

Certificate holders must carry out various forms of self-assessment to track their progress and results. This includes monitoring for cases of child labor, forced labor, discrimination, and workplace violence and harassment as part of our assess-and-address approach. In the case of group certification, each group must also have an internal inspection system in place. This means that all farms belonging to the group are inspected yearly and non-compliance is reported to group management for correction.

In addition to the self-assessments, Rainforest Alliance-authorized certification bodies audit farms and require corrective actions if they find any non-compliance with our standard requirements. They then follow up to confirm that corrective actions are implemented before issuing certifications. The Rainforest Alliance’s rules for certification bodies maintain and ensure integrity, consistency, and transparency on the part of our authorized certification bodies.

Our certification program generates key data relevant to due diligence that companies can use to communicate to customers, consumers, and regulators. For example, companies sourcing Rainforest Alliance Certified products can track data in our certification platform about remediated non-compliances found through audits in their supply chains. Companies will also be able to access indicator data directly gathered and reported by certified farmers and groups to the platform, such as the number of child labor cases found through internal monitoring and the number remediated. For more information, please refer to our full listing of these indicators and our estimated timelines for data reporting.