Articles

Jola Brooking, Interim HR Director Suntory Beverage & Food GB&I

At Suntory Beverage & Food GB&I (SBF GB&I), we have been working hard to ensure our people continue to thrive. The year reflected in this report was about promoting health and wellbeing; inspiring, educating and enabling our people to be their best and meet their own health and wellbeing goals.

We not only recognise the power we have to help create a healthier nation, but we are also actively inspired by it ourselves. We have prioritised our employee’s wellbeing by eradicating the stigma around mental health and enhancing our flexible benefits to enable a better work life balance for our employees.

Our fourth gender pay gap reports a mean pay for women that is 11.3% higher than men and a median gender pay gap of 21.3% in favour of women, an increase of almost ten percent on last year. The results reflect Suntory Beverage & Food GB&I’s employee split between our head office in Uxbridge and manufacturing site in Coleford. The favouring towards women is explained by the higher proportion of women in head office who have more opportunities to progress and access higher salaries compared to the operational and engineering roles largely occupied by men in Coleford.

Addressing the gender balance at Coleford continues to be a key focus for the business as we work to address the historic stereotype of men traditionally occupying manufacturing roles. Gender balance and providing equal opportunities for all, regardless of gender, is a hugely important part of SBF GB&I’s Growing for Good vision and is instrumental in ensuring the business’s success. Our culture is centred on principles that focus on responsibility and guide the business towards creating harmony with people and nature.

We are acutely aware that in an industry where manufacturing roles are still overwhelmingly male, achieving a stronger gender balance in this area is of paramount importance if we are to attract and retain the very best talent which we know is integral to the future of our business.​

Inspired by our founders' attributes, our mission is to create a company where everyone is welcome, treated fairly, made part of our community and supported to thrive. We recognise, like many organisations, that there remains work to do to realise the vision of achieving a genuinely diverse and inclusive society.​

We are committed to addressing imbalances across our workforce, sounding out and rooting out unfair practices and unconscious bias, but most importantly, listening to our employees.​We have a strong culture, with principles centred on responsibility and these guide our business towards creating harmony with people and nature.​

We believe in diversity, fairness and respect, regardless of gender or background. We are committed to keeping this at the heart of our culture both now and in the future.

View our 2020 gender pay gap report here which has been published in line with the government’s Gender Pay Gap regulations introduced in April 2017.