Company Sustainability Assessment

Company: Tim Horton’s

*Include visuals in the report, such as graphs, etc..*

For this assignment, you are expected to evaluate a companys sustainability performance and to identify its sustainability strategy. This assignment is meant to ensure that you are aware of the social, ecological, and economic issues deemed material to the industry your assigned company is in, the existing sustainability performance of a company in the industry in response to those issues and the sustainability strategy employed by the company. Imagine that you are an analyst, tasked with conducting an assessment of the company’s sustainability performance. The audience reading the report would include consumers, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

Resources: To complete this assignment, you must conduct your own research drawing on a range of resources including, but not limited to, the company’s website, company CSR/sustainability reports (if available) and other legitimate publicly available information situated outside the company website. Make sure not to parrot reports, but rather synthesize this research into your own analysis.

Logistics: The assignment should be single-spaced, no longer than 1400 words (not including references or visuals). You are welcome to use tables to summarize their analysis and use the text to highlight key points or takeaways in the tables. The grading rubric for this assignment can be found below.

• All content that is not originally your own must be cited and referenced properly (including any information gathered from AI)
• The quality of your sources matter in assessing good analysis (ChatGPT versus a peer reviewed or legitimate news article)

Criteria

Material Issues: You must identify three material sustainability issues associated with the industry in which the assigned company is situated. You must provide your own materiality matrix. Provide evidence of and explain why these are particularly relevant and important in light of the tension between societal and business interests for this industry (e.g. how does efforts to reduce costs/increase revenue/WTP increase negative externalities, etc.?) Avoid highlighting conflicts that apply to all industries (e.g. the conflict between a businesss financial goals and the expectation that sustainable investment may carry costs).

Performance: Utilizing the four criteria framework (purpose, metrics, targets, legitimacy), assess the performance of the assigned company in response to your three identified material issues. Demonstrate critical thinking by going beyond what the company is reporting/discussing and reiterating company initiatives by emphasizing what they think of their company’s efforts. To this end, you must also identify what is missing from the company’s reporting and what they should see, using examples, for an embedded sustainability strategy.

Sustainability Strategy: You must identify the companys sustainability strategy based on the analysis of the company’s response to these issues. They must apply the three components of strategy (positioning, competencies, and culture) to provide further support of the chosen strategy. The identified sustainability strategy should be consistent with the analysis conducted in the previous section.

Report Presentation: You must demonstrate a strong ability to communicate effectively and professionally in writing (e.g. use of proper grammar, sentence structure) through a well structured report. You must use citations properly and include a list of references (note that any accepted citation format is permitted – APA, Chicago, etc.). The report should be presented in single space and must be within the word count.