Sustainability reports are tools for disseminating information to stakeholders and the public, serving the organizations in the dual purpose of communicating CSR and being accountable. The production of these reports has recently become more prevalent in the food industry, despite the fact this practice has received heavy criticism on two fronts: The quality of the tool for communication, and the extent of accountability. In addition to these criticisms, organizations must overcome the additional challenge of publishing sustainability reports that successfully meet the demands of a multi-stakeholder audience. In light of the importance of this practice, this paper presents a method to assess the communication and accountability characteristics of Spanish food companies' sustainability reports. This method is based on the method Analytic Network Process (ANP) and adopts a multi-stakeholder approach. This research, therefore, provides a reference model for improving sustainability reports, with the aim of successfully meeting their communication objectives and the demands of all stakeholders.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be measured by a number of different criteria, some of which are similar to each other, while others can be manifestly contrary to the general tendency. This means that some companies can obtain a good valuation in some criteria but a bad valuation in others, which makes it difficult to assess the company's overall CSR valuation. It is not easy to find a single measure that covers all aspects of corporate social performance. This paper aims to estimate multicriteria CSR performance through different models of goal programming and by taking into account all the dimensions that make up CSR. An illustrative example shows the result of applying these models to a database composed of 212 European companies, which enabled us to identify the most socially responsible group, regardless of the approach considered in the construction of the multicriteria performance. The results show that environmental and corporate governance dimensions are the most important elements in measuring this performance.

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CSR reports are intended to communicate the organization's CSR performance to stakeholders. Currently, CSR reports mainly follow well designed guidelines like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). However, various authors claim CSR reports are becoming more a publicity tool than a communication tool. To help assessing the communication performance of CSR reports, an assessment procedure is proposed based on ANP. ANP allows designing a communication index to rank CSR reports, taken as the alternatives, according to a set of communication indicators, taken as the criteria. In the proposed network, communication criteria were, among others: Relevance, Communication technique, Accuracy, Easiness to find particular data, Layout, etc. Criteria were arranged in four clusters namely: Quality, Reliability, Comprehension and Presentation. In order to test the procedure a set of comparable CSR reports were selected. The assessment model based on ANP and the assessment judgments were carried out by a panel of experts including an expert on communication theory, an expert on environmental NGOs' demands and an expert on consumers' demands. The case studies showed significant differences among the alternatives (the reports), allowing to establish four levels of communication performance: Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor. Logically, the assessment procedure not only allowed ranking the reports but also determining weaknesses and opportunities to improve the communication performance of each CSR report.