Responsible drinking

Our response

SABMiller has six core principles that underpin our approach to combating alcohol abuse.

• Our beer adds to the enjoyment of life for the overwhelming majority of our consumers.
• We care about the effects of irresponsible alcohol consumption.
• We engage stakeholders and work collectively with them to address irresponsible consumption.
• Alcohol consumption is for adults and is a matter of individual judgement and accountability.
• Information provided to consumers about alcohol consumption should be accurate and balanced.
• We expect our employees to aspire to high levels of conduct in relation to alcohol consumption.

Strong commercial governance

Alcohol advertising is one of the most regulated forms of advertising in the world. In addition to local laws, all our operations around the world must comply with our own sales and marketing standards. These are contained in our Policy on Commercial Communication, updated this year, which governs where and how we market our brands and covers both traditional and digital communications. We regularly assess compliance with our policies: in one recent example, an independent compliance report found that 98% of our advertisements across Europe contained the responsible drinking messages set out in our responsible messaging guidelines.

This year we also issued our Product Portfolio Policy, which sets out group-wide requirements for new and acquired products to ensure that all our brands support our alcohol principles. Under this global policy, for example, we will not seek to acquire or develop any alcohol products containing stimulants such as caffeine.

Our strong governance processes seek to ensure that we market and sell our products responsibly. Each of our businesses is required to have an internal compliance committee that oversees adherence to all the necessary standards, training and reporting processes. These committees also engage with beer industry and with national self-regulation systems, some of which include representation from civil society.

As a member of the International Center for Alcohol Policies and the World Federation of Advertisers, we work with communities, organisations and governments to establish and improve selfregulatory systems for responsible marketing. Through the Self-Regulation Initiative of Global Actions on Harmful Drinking, we work with regulators, advertising industries and the media with the objective that alcohol marketing codes are high -quality and fully implemented.

We also provide regular education on alcohol responsibility for our employees, all of whom are required to adhere to our Alcohol Code of Conduct. All around the world more than 50,000 employees participated in training about alcohol responsibility and our policies. This year we introduced an online refresher course, part of which asks participants to make a personal pledge on alcohol responsibility. In Hungary we received 370 pledges from 400 e-learning participants in just one month, including pledges about being a role model at work and at home, and pledges to stop people from driving home if they've been drinking.

Progress against 2012 targets

2012 Target	Progress
Work towards our goal that 100% of global brand labels carry a responsibility message that conforms to the SABMiller-approved standards	All our global brands (including franchise network) now carry a responsibility message.  Where they are produced via a local franchise brewery and there is no local legislation that applies, the new messaging has been shared.
Enhance local efforts to audit the Policy on Corporate Communication media placement requirements	Independent audit of media placement requirements completed in 13 markets. While the results showed high levels of compliance, action plans are now in place where issues were identified.
Make progress in the number and quality of partnerships to reduce alcohol abuse	We have established a number of new alcohol responsibility partnerships over the last year. For example in Romania, URSUS Breweries has established a bartender training programme in conjunction with the traffic police and the National Institute of Legal Medicine. MillerCoors established a new partnership which gives grants to universities to help stop underage drinking on-campus. In South Africa, SAB launched a new programme “You Decide” with the Department of Transport, National Development Agency and the provincial departments of education.

2013 targets

• Work with brewers and other alcohol producers to strengthen commercial governance through the development and publishing of industry commitments
• Enhance consumer information about our products in terms of ingredients and nutrients
• Implement an internal audit of compliance with our Policy on Commercial Communications and report year 1 findings