Social Impact Assessment: Nestle’s, Olam/ofi’s and Balsu’s programs for hazelnut workers in Türkiye

Between 2015 and 2018, Nestlé and its hazelnut suppliers in Türkiye, Olam and Balsu, participated in an ambitious project, Piloting the United States Department of Agriculture Guidelines for Eliminating Child Labor and Forced Labor in Türkiye’s Hazelnut Sector. Türkiye is the world’s leading producer of hazelnut.

The pilot program – run by the FLA and supported by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (USDOL-ILAB) – provided insight into the workforce and working conditions in the hazelnut sector, which accounts for 20 percent of Türkiye’s agricultural exports. The project led to a comprehensive assessment of the companies’ internal management programs and a series of remediation interventions aimed at improving the working and living conditions of harvest workers and reducing the risk of child and forced labor in their hazelnut supply chain.

FLA conducted regular Independent External Monitoring (IEM) assessments of social compliance in the hazelnut supply chain of Nestlé, Olam, and Balsu in Turkey since 2013. As the FLA-USDOL project reached its completion in June 2018, we decided to delve deeper during the 2018 harvest, beyond traditional social compliance audits, and conduct a Social Impact Assessment study. The approach, adopted for the first time by FLA, reflects the growing need of companies and labor organizations to measure the real impact of interventions on workers’ living and working conditions. Regular inspections can reveal labor rights violations, but the limited scope of traditional social compliance evaluations often fails to demonstrate the full effect of remediation interventions on workers’ wellbeing.

In this assessment, we outline the findings of research to test interventions designed to protect workers in the supply chains of the three companies.

Please note that Nestlé ended its membership as an FLA Participating Company in April 2025 and ofi ended its membership as an FLA Participating Company in January 2026.