Producing Closer, Safer, More Sustainable is a Strategic Imperative

For decades, the ideal of efficiency has guided value chain globalization: producing at lower cost, importing more, and eventually outsourcing risks. But this optimized model to the extreme has shown its flaws. The pandemic, geopolitical tensions, climate change, or political instability have revealed a brutal reality: our value chains are vulnerable.

From now on, producing faster or cheaper is no longer enough. We must produce closer, safer, more sustainable. This doesn't just represent an additional ESG imperative, but a strategic imperative emerging at the heart of economic competitiveness and sovereignty. The choice to relocate production and choose one's battles lucidly is crucial.

Identifying Critical Leverage Points

European companies can build resilient value chains that are ecologically responsible and politically and strategically aligned.

First battle: diversify and relocate critical supply chains. From Sanofi (with Euroapi) to TSMC (which is diversifying outside Taiwan), leaders are reinvesting in production to reduce their dependencies. Kimberly-Clark and Reckitt Benckiser have made similar announcements. Similarly, luxury industries are rethinking their supply chains to ensure traceability (whether social and ethical, as in the case of Egyptian jasmine).

Second battle: train their suppliers. Essential emissions indicators (Scope 3) often concentrate on the environmental impact, as in the large consumption or this part of the value chain concentrates over 95% of emissions. Companies are advancing not just by setting criteria: they invest to help their partners transform, by co-building with them durable solutions, efficient and recyclable supply, key to strengthening circularity, fertilizers, co-products, waste, packaging and even McCain actively support the transformation of their ecosystem. These reinforced coalitions are a key factor in shared resilience across the entire value chain in an ecosystem approach.

A Model for "Clean Industry"

Third battle: focus on impact zones. We must renounce wanting to cover everything to target where real influence and measurable effects exist. L'Oréal has thus chosen three key areas until 2030: packaging issues entirely from recycled materials, nearly 100% of environmentally friendly ingredients, and 100% renewable energy.

Fourth battle: accept extended time horizons. Resilience is not built in a quarter. Finally, it's a veritable strategic approach to the value chain that large European companies need. The ecological transition itself crosses dependency and sovereignty issues, and we must accept that restocking comes at cost and lower our short-term dependency on a long-term effect.

Europe has a historic card to play. While, according to Capgemini, 73% of large European companies and 56% of Americans judge "friendshoring" as priority and that 56% have already invested in "near-shoring," we have assets to become the global model of a clean, sovereign and competitive industry. On condition of massively investing in territorialized SMEs, experts on ecological and critical niches for the transition. In this new era, to see the value chain, it's building a power lever. This is no longer a mere reputation complement: it's a performance, robustness and influence lever. Success will be measured not only in margin points, but also in a question of robustness, sovereignty and, of course, sustainability throughout an ecosystem.

"Producing closer, safer, more sustainable is not just an ESG add-on—it's the new competitive advantage defining tomorrow's industrial leaders."