L’Oréal: Milestone 1 Evaluation

L’Oréal joined the Fair Labor Association (FLA)’s Agriculture Program in December 2024, after collaborating with FLA on Harvesting the Future projects and Human Rights Impact Assessments since 2021. This membership enables the company to pursue Fair Labor Accreditation for its coconut supply chains in the Philippines.

L’Oréal has begun embedding FLA’s Workplace Code of Conduct in its supply chain, building off its existing policies and practices, and participates in Independent External Assessments across its coconut oil and derivative supply chain (coconut supply chain). This report details FLA’s evaluation of L’Oréal governance at the headquarters level (Milestone 1).

L’Oréal’s highlights for Milestone 1 – Governance and Alignment include:

• Strong senior management commitment: L’Oréal is a global beauty company that sells seven billion products each year. It manages complex supply chains across numerous sectors and geographies, sourcing more than 7,000 ingredients for its products globally. For a company with this level of complexity to commit to achieving FLA Agriculture Accreditation for any commodity demonstrates a strong commitment to responsible sourcing within the beauty industry. Since joining the FLA Agriculture Program, the company has worked diligently with supply chain partners and peers. Within its coconut supply chain in the Philippines, L’Oréal has mapped current actors, labor conditions, and volumes of coconut oil and derivatives, and has planned to progressively convert its procurement to be more sustainable over time.
• Responsible procurement practices: L’Oréal has embedded human rights protection into its sourcing strategies and practices through its Responsible and Sustainable Sourcing Policy and its Human Rights Policy, which define supplier and partner expectations. To ensure implementation, L’Oréal internally aligns staff and collaborates across departments, regions, and supply chains. While its corporate sustainability team and sustainable sourcing team lead efforts to make procurement more socially responsible and sustainable, the sourcing department also plays an active role in sustainable sourcing by participating in various activities, including engaging suppliers, monitoring their performance, participating in coalitions, and mainstreaming sustainable practices into procurement. FLA has observed cross-departmental collaboration in its field activities, in which L’Oréal sourcing department staff, rather than sustainability staff, participated in a labor standards session for partners.
• Capacity-building for suppliers: L’Oréal’s approach to responsible sourcing is to directly work with coconut suppliers by building the capacity of local mills and farmers (the most upstream part of the coconut oil and derivatives supply chain). L’Oréal has partnered with local entities to understand current capacities and provide training to relevant stakeholders, such as mills and cooperatives, who, in turn, support farmers.
• Collaborative remediation: L’Oréal has also demonstrated its ability to lead and collaborate effectively across its supply chains with suppliers, peers, and third parties. For example, L’Oréal actively participates in Harvesting the Future projects to promote child protection and decent working conditions in the jasmine sector in Egypt and to improve human rights and labor conditions in Türkiye’s rose sector. L’Oréal is also a founding member of Action for Sustainable Derivatives (ASD) and the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI)