How car producers are driving toward sustainable supplier development

Abstract Sustainable supplier development helps to improve mutually the supplier’s as well as the buying company sustainability performance. The producer could choose guidance, compliance or capacity building activities to develop its supplier or implement them all. This paper aims to present how the car producers practice sustainable supplier development taking into account different types of approaches and implementation tools. The authors applied content analysis to investigate approaches of six car producers from EU member states. The data was collected from the sustainability reports and complemented with the available information of the supplier sustainability requirements and the code of conduct of each car producer. The findings revealed that analysed car producers use similar approaches to develop their suppliers in the context of sustainability. All of them use mix of activities from all identified categories and collaborate within industry initiatives devoted to spread sustainability in supply chain.