The World's Leading Services for Sustainable Supply Chain

The partnership was established in 2018, with a shared vision – to understand and improve Unilever’s supply chain dynamics. With a dedicated joint team, we embarked on a journey together, focusing on traceability, supplier profiling, risk-analysis, and deforestation monitoring. This quickly evolved into a transformative partnership.

Over the years, our joint efforts expanded and deepened, reflecting a commitment towards meaningful change. This partnership took on increasing prominence, including traceability of supplies of commodities to the plantation level, addressing smallholder inclusion priorities through farm legalization initiatives, as well as contributing to Unilever’s nature restoration goals with an innovative grower recovery program which utilized social forestry as a powerful tool for change.

A critical role of Earthqualizer has been the contribution of palm oil grower concession maps to Unilever, empowering our partner with the tools needed for internal capacity building (by enabling them to conduct their own geospatial analysis)—a crucial step toward ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the supply chain. Unilever’s continuous and consistent commitment to ‘on-the-ground’ impacts, particularly through smallholder and recovery programs, has put Unilever as an industry leader in sustainability.

Earthqualizer Group and Bumitama Gunajaya Agro have been working together in Ketapang Regency for a decade to build a vision and mission for sustainable landscape management, maintaining biodiversity in the landscape around Bumitama Gunajaya Agro’s operations, and also fostering collaboration with village communities and stakeholders at the local level.

Through the social forestry scheme, Earthqualizer Group and Bumitama Gunajaya Agro combine the needs and sustainability commitments of BGA through the Production, Protection, and Inclusion approach. Currently, over 11,000 hectares of social forestry areas in three villages in Ketapang Regency have gained legal access to social forestry under the village forest scheme, where communities have received long-term support and collaboration.

This collaboration is also beginning to provide ecological, economic, and social benefits to the surrounding communities. This collaboration program provides an opportunity for Bumitama Gunajaya Agro to contribute to cross-sector collaboration for long-term landscape management and to continue being the Conservation Lead in the sustainability commitments of the palm oil industry in Indonesia.

KPN Plantation and the Earthqualizer Foundation (EQ) have collaborated with a shared commitment to implement the No Deforestation, No Peat, and No Exploitation (NDPE) Policy, aiming to execute a successful Recovery Plan. The objective is to demonstrate to the market that the industry’s transformation to sustainability is indeed a reality.

In 2021, the partnership between KPN Plantation and EQ entered a new phase, intensifying efforts to implement and consolidate KPN Plantation’s NDPE policy and Recovery Plan. This expansion coincides with the group’s ventures into trading and refining, amid increasing expectations from the international market.

Our partnership with KPN Plantation focuses on key areas such as supply chain traceability, supplier compliance monitoring, recovery support, and strategic advice. The collaboration is ongoing and is anticipated to establish a robust foundation for the sustainable palm oil industry.