McCormick joins social responsibility movement

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Spice manufacturer McCormick & Co. Inc. has joined the ranks of other companies with nationwide reach that are seeking to brand themselves as socially responsible.

Earlier this month, McCormick released its first corporate social responsibility report, which outlines goals for the company to support itself, the environment and the community¬ — without government involvement or incentive.

“We are now increasingly focused on the alignment of our CSR efforts with our business objectives and strategy, recognizing that these efforts are integrally tied to our business success,” CEO Alan Wilson wrote in the report.

For example, McCormick’s report announced that the company will increase funding to its suppliers’ farming communities by 50 percent by 2018. As part of this plan, McCormick, based in Sparks, donates rice to its vanilla farmers in Madagascar if their children meet school attendance benchmarks.

Michael Runnels, chairman of the Department of Law and Social Responsibility at Loyola University Maryland, said that such “strategic philanthropy” tends to benefit businesses more than giving for the sake of image-boosting. In the case of the farming communities, in addition to improving the quality of life, these donations will strengthen the economic relationship between the corporation and the farmers, he said.

“The best corporate actor is the corporation who sees a relationship between the corporate bottom line and the public interest,” Runnels said.

Other initiatives outlined in McCormick’s report include reducing solid waste by 50 percent and spending 20 percent more on marketing “the role of flavor in healthy eating.”

So far in 2013, major corporations like Dell, Wal-Mart and General Mills have released CSR reports, according to csrwire.com, a website that tracks corporate sustainability news. All of them advertise environmentally and socially oriented initiatives and goals.

Elizabeth Kennedy, a Loyola law and social responsibility professor, said these reports are neither required nor incentivized by law.

However, Runnels said, they are encouraged by consumers, who value corporations that “show more than lip service” toward philanthropic and sustainable causes. He said the Great Recession and the previous corporate scandals of companies like Enron and WorldCom made shareholders and consumers wary of what happened behind closed doors, and CSR reports allow businesses to be more transparent.

Furthermore, indirect incentives (such as federal investments in solar energy) and media pressures such as those BP faced for initial reluctance in compensating the victims of the Gulf spill encourage corporations to practice social responsibility.

The appearance of benevolence, however, is not enough. Runnels said corporations often tout membership in nonprofit organizations, such as Business for Social Responsibility (of which McCormick is a member), to verify the sincerity of their efforts, even though these organizations sometimes require nothing of members but fees — BSR charges member organizations as much as $33,000 per year.

BSR is not alone. A growing number of nonprofits have arisen, all with the goal of helping other businesses achieve and quantify sufficient levels of CSR — for a price. McCormick, for example, built its environmental policy around the framework established by the International Organization for Standardization, and its report met guidelines designed by the Global Reporting Initiative.

“Corporate sustainability … has developed into an industry in and of itself,” Runnels said.

He also said CSR is often viewed as “an elaborate public relations charade,” though he added that McCormick has made “substantial and impactful investments in sustainability.”

But even those good deeds do not make McCormick above reproach, according to Kennedy. She noted that while McCormick touted its environmentally friendly initiatives, it did not mention labor rights.

In response to that point, Jim Lynn, McCormick’s corporate communications director, said the company’s history of employee empowerment made a union unnecessary in its operations.

Kennedy said the failure to even discuss labor rights is a prime example of “greenwashing,” in which a business draws attention to a positive initiative to divert attention from other practices.

“The worst-case scenario is where a report like this makes the consumer less likely to ask … questions,” she said. “The best-case scenario is … [where] a report can make decision makers feel like they have to be more accountable.”