Having entered the fifth year of our CSR program, I am proud to announce that our engagement has only gotten stronger, and so has our commitment to the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact.

Today Sticks’n’Sushi consist 10 restaurants in the greater Copenhagen area, one in Wimbledon, London, and one more expected to open in the Fall of 2013 in Covent Garden, London.

Growth is therefore very much on the agenda. But with growth comes a greater responsibility. With the support from UN Global Compact and the resources the organization can provide us, we believe that we are well-equipped to take on this responsibility in a proactive manner, which also entails a commitment to sharing our results and challenges with our stakeholders and those who may benefit from it.

Yours sincerely,
Kim Rahbek Hansen,
CEO, Sticks’n’Sushi A/S

At Sticks’n’Sushi, we consider compliance to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights an absolute minimum of running a responsible business, and these principles ar therefore placed in the “zero-tolerance” section of our company Code of Conduct (hereafter CoC).

We are currently in a process of systematically ensuring that all suppliers to Sticks’n’Sushi have received and signed our CoC. This work is expected to be finished by the end of 2013.
However, we are well aware that a signature is not necessarily a guarantee of compliance. That is why we have created a “supplier matrix”, mapping out suppliers with a high, medium and low risk of non-compliance to our CoC, based on evaluations of country profile, product, and strategic importance. Based on this matrix, we have made a schedule of which suppliers need to be audited by a third party organ, who we ourselves can visit to ensure compliance, and who neither need an audit or visit.

Seeing that Sticks’n’Sushi is placed in Denmark and England, our main concerns regarding human rights has been with our suppliers. Accordingly this is where activity has therefore been greatest. That being said, we do have a “Welcome on board, employee handbook” that all new employees are handed and instructed in on employment. In this handbook is listed all our internal policies and employee rights, to ensure that all employees know their rights.

In accordance with our audit plan, our first supplier was audited in 2012 and the second is scheduled in the fall of 2013. Due to our current size, audits are limited to one or two a year. But this number is going to increase as we grow in size.

In 2013 we initiated our “Fish Tank”. The Fish Tank consist of a group of employees who are not management, and is a forum where they can represent their colleagues, and in an open and anonymous way speak their mind, without their management team by their side. The purpose of this is to give the employees a voice and direct line to our HR department, where they don’t have to go through their managers.

The result of our first audit sadly revealed non-compliance with the zero-tolerance standards of our CoC. After review with the third party auditor, we decided that the collaboration with the supplier had to end, since corrective actions were currently not an option. We are therefore currently in the process of locating a new supplier of the specific product.

Again, our main concern regarding labour rights, are with our suppliers. For info on policies and goals regarding our suppliers, see Human Rights, where we describe our supplier matrix, audit plan and on our conducted and scheduled audits, plus outcomes of audit.

All full time permanent employees have a contract that adhere to the Danish Employers’ and Salaried Employees’ Act.
Our contract for hourly paid employees does not follow the current settlement by the trade union. But we can fully stand behind this contract, which on most critical points such as salary and flexibility, fully live up to the settlement, and on others are above the conditions herein.

In September 2013, we will conduct a thorough employee satisfaction survey, the result of which we will publish in our 2014 COP.

All new employees at Sticks’n’Sushi are handed and instructed in our company handbook. In here they find extensive information about their rights and benefits at work.

At Sticks’n’Sushi we train a lot. We do intro classes, product classes, service classes, safety and health classes and much more. This gives our employees a very good base for doing good on their job, and for coming away, should they decide to leave one day, with a lot of skills and knowledge. For all these classes, our employees get salary.

As the following table shows, we have an employee retention rate that is 16% lower than industry benchmark.
In the timeframe from 01-07-2012 to 01-07-2013 Sticks’n’Sushi’s average retention rate was 24% against an industry average in 2011 (latest obtainable numbers) of 40,1%.

Our retention rates on the different positions look as follows:
Administration (22%), Assistant General Manager (20%), Floor Manager (63%), General Manager (11%), Kitchen (25%), Kitchen Manager (0%), Shift Leader (33%), Souschef (8%), Waiter (31%).

Another indicator that Sticks’n’Sushi is a healthy workplace with content employees is our sickness absence of between 2,5-3% against a Danish industry average of approximately 5%.

As a restaurant business with 11 units, our main “environmental footprint” does not come from our internal processes as much as the production of the products, we purchase around the world.

Of these products, fish is our absolute key product, and we were therefore early at formulating a “fish policy” containing 10 promises of sustainability that we had to live up to by 2013, both regarding wild caught and farmed fish.

On a more general product basis, we are currently in the process of developing a central purchase strategy, with ambitious goals for the purchase of organic, local and seasonal ingredients. This strategy is set to be finalized before the end of 2013.

The implementation of our fish policy has not been an easy process. It has led us to make difficult decisions, such as quitting the threatened eel from our menu. Even though we had a deadline at the end of 2012, we are not quite there yet. But we are close. We still need to find a solution to our tuna, which by many is considered as over-fished. We expect to find a solution to this by the end of 2013.

In 2013, on the menu side, we have introduced a new concept called “Seasonal Particularities”. This is our way of introducing more and more seasonal product into our menu, which is an effective way for a restaurant business to reduce its environmental footprint. With this we have also introduced several more vegetarian options to our menu, which is a trend we will continue in the coming years.

In early 2012 we replaced bottled water from Italy with our own water filtration systems in all our restaurants.

On the operational side we have made a “Climate Partnership” in addition to our contract with our Energy supplier Dong Energy, where we pay an extra fee of DKK 0,06 pr. kWh to buy RECS certificates from the Danish offshore wind park “Horns Rev II”.

Finally we sort our organic waste in all our restaurants, and get it delivered to a biogas facility.

The results of our water filtration system, is that 155.000 liters of water or 310.000 ½ L. bottles are no-longer transported from Italy to Denmark.

The extra fee we pay for our energy amounted in 2012 to the purchase of 1.165 MWh of wind power.

In 2012 we sent approximately 90 ton of organic waste to the biogas facility. According to standard calculations, this amounts to a saving of approximately 8000 kg. CO2 equivalents.

Point 9. in our Code of Conduct deals with our no-tolerance policy towards corruption and bribery. But being a medium-sized company, anti-corruption is a difficult issue to actively work with.

Besides including it in our supplier audits, we make a great effort to ensure 100% that Sticks’n’Sushi staff do not pay or receive bribery.

In our 2012 supplier audit, we detected that the supplier did not have an anti-corruption policy or had done any anti-corruption training with its staff. This was therefore strongly contributing to our decision to end the collaboration with the specific supplier.

Sticks’n’Sushi has never had any instances of employees paying or receiving bribery.