Inside Danone’s best practices for water stewardship

Food and beverage company Danone doubled the number of its production sites that have decreased their freshwater withdrawals through reduction, recycling, reuse and reclamation from 2020 and 2025: Almost 100 percent of them now manage those metrics on a monthly basis.

The company is also on track to meet its other major water goal: the introduction of a watershed preservation or restoration plan in each of its facilities in high water-stress regions by 2030. In the U.S., for example, Danone currently supports watershed projects in California, Texas and Utah.

Close to 72 percent of Danone’s sites now have a strategy in place, compared with 20 percent in 2020, according to the company’s sustainability data published in early March. Metrics are managed on a monthly basis by its local engineering teams.

That progress has made Danone the highest-ranked company in nonprofit Ceres’ October 2025 benchmark report that rated corporate water stewardship across the apparel, beverage, food and high-tech sectors, said Kirsten James, senior program director for the water program at Ceres. 

The nonprofit assessed 71 companies on practices related to water quantity, quality, ecosystem protection, access to water and sanitation, board oversight and public policy. Danone is the only one in the “leading the way” category because of the breadth and depth of its strategy.

“Their practice of looking at risks and opportunities through the lens of long-term resilience is something that really stood out to me,” James said.

Attention at the highest levels

Danone’s water governance is overseen by a global impact steering committee, which comprises the deputy CEO, the executive committee and leaders in operations, human resources, research and innovation, quality and food safety, finance, technology and data; and a global engagement committee, which consists of representatives from the impact committee and the company’s general secretary. These teams shape recommendations and establish practices that are customized to local needs, said John Lee, senior director of nature on Danone’s mission and sustainability team. 

“It supports our long-term growth and future-proofs our business in a way that is very relevant in the very quickly changing world of food and beverage, and the food system generally,” he said.

Danone withdrew 59.8 million cubic meters of water from sources near its sites in 2025, a 0.2 percent decrease from the previous year. Approximately 45 percent of that went into its bottled water portfolio, the rest into industrial processes.

To further reductions, the company is evaluating technologies that detect leaks during production and redesigning ways to conserve and manage water while production lines are idle. 

Danone’s largest water-related liability, however, is in its supply chain. Close to 90 percent of the company’s water usage comes from agriculture, Lee said. To address that footprint, Danone has pledged to develop stricter water resource management plans that will half its ingredients by 2030, compared with about 37 percent currently.

Danone is encouraging farmers that grow feed crops for its dairy supply chain, for example, to invest in soil probes that reduce unnecessary irrigation; sites where this strategy was implemented saw a 6 percent reduction. The company is also addressing how dairy farmers use water to cool storage systems and manage manure. 

“All of this work around soil health also has benefits such as nitrogen and phosphorous reduction, so that’s improving water quality locally and also reducing any runoff that may have occurred in the past,” Lee said.

Useful tools

Danone uses resources both developed internally and by environmental nonprofits to hone and manage its water strategy, including:

• Water Footprint Assessment: Developed by the Water Footprint Network to measure groundwater, freshwater and rainwater at company locations.  
• Water Risk Assessment: Annual evaluation, based on WWF’s Water Risk Filter methodology, of water risks such as scarcity, flooding and water quality for factories, watersheds and agricultural supply chains.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis: Ceres’ framework that estimates potential cost of water-related risks, societal impacts and potential solutions.
• Sustainable Protection and Resource Mapping: Proprietary tool, co-created 20 years ago by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, that was open-sourced by Danone to create site-specific strategies and track progress. 

What’s next: Water reclamation

Most of Danone’s reductions so far have come from the introduction of more efficient measures, but the company is stepping up its use of recycling systems that use “rejected” water and reclamation technologies that redirect filtered wastewater back into the production system. So far, 11 reclamation systems have been installed across Danone’s 150-plus production facilities. 

A two-step filtration system used at a pair of sites in Belgium cleans wastewater before reintroducing it into processes. The closed-loop strategy has helped cut Danone’s total water consumption at those sites in half since 2018. Danone also reclaims water at its sites in Mexico.

Two more installations are being considered in France, which the company expects to be operational in the next five years.