11 years as sector leader of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes
Headquartered in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and London (United Kingdom), Unilever is a leading manufacturer of foods, home care and personal hygiene products. The foundation of Unilever was laid in the 1890s, when William Hesketh Lever, founder of Lever Bros, devised the idea for Sunlight Soap – a new product that helped popularize cleanliness and hygiene in Victorian England.
Today, Unilever’s brands are present in 170 countries and chosen 160 million times each day. In 2005, Unilever had a global turnover of 39.7 bn. More than half of the company’s sales are generated by its Foods brands, which include Knorr, Flora/Becel, Hellmann's, Lipton, Iglo/Birds Eye/Findus, Rama/BlueBand, Slim•Fast, Bertolli and the ice cream 'heart' brand. Unilever employs 206,000 people throughout 100 countries.
Unilever Netherlands spends 16 million annually on air travel and counts roughly 3,000 travellers.
