Linda Madigan, Stockholm Office, Bord Bia – Irish food Board
I attended this year’s SB’17 conference held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen on October 31 and November 01. The conference is a melting pot of influential brands its mission as stated on its web page, is to inspire and enable business and brand value creation through innovation for sustainability at scale.
A staggering sixty-one percent of people say that they hear more about the negative impacts of climate change than any positive stories according to Solitare Townsend of Futerra. She urged us to be Happy Hero’s, using a positive interpretation of a situation to influence a positive outcome. We get what we believe in, so we must believe there is a solution to climate change. IDEO’s Chris Grantham echoed this sentiment in his presentation on the circular economy an innovation mindset. “Being optimistic is incredibly important because change starts with the belief that we can create it”.
There were many great speakers, including David Katz who is globally renowned for the Plastic Banks solution to make plastic waste, a currency that transcends poverty, while stopping the flow of plastic into our oceans. His company has successfully monetised waste, to use plastic like cash. They are changing the way we view plastics.
Danish bioscience giant Chr Hansen which produces natural ingredients for food and beverage, dairy supplements an agriculture industry they shared their journey over the last year. They set out to map its entire product portfolio of more than 3,000 products against the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development. They are allegedly the first company ever to do it. The results showed they were 81% gross revenue contributes to the UN Global Goals promoting sustainable agriculture, improving global health and reducing food waste. Funnily they told us that the main question they are being asked about is not the positive 81/% but what is making up the 19% negative impacts? The agenda included speakers from H&M, who agreed that the fashion industry is putting stress on the world and they are facing the challenge of being part of the solution, becoming climate positive.
‘Together towards Zero’ which is Carlsberg’s sustainability mantra using science-based targets and highlighting how they will achieve targets through partnerships. They are using marketing muscle to help make better decisions at the consumer level, while marketing effort, starts a discussion and creates a conversation about sustainability ambitions. Another clothing company Italian apparel brand Napapijri’s ‘Make It Better’ mindset — which integrates sustainability and innovation to embody a new way of thinking, designing and creating products translating words into actions. For Napapijri, animal welfare was the key driver of change, beginning with taking fur of children’s range. In a number of Napapijri’s markets, removing fur was a hard sell and even risky, making innovation essential in order for the company to continue delivering desirable, high-quality products. Seeing the success of Napapijri’s purpose-driven strategy, parent company VF Corporation decided to integrate the animal welfare policy into the rest of its brands.
What happens if a business puts more back into society than it takes out? Sally Uren CEO Forum for the Future, introduced us to Net Positive, a coalition of seventeen leading businesses all working to define the next wave of corporate sustainability. Regenerative actions are a central notion of Net Positive actions, always leave the planet better than we found it. She urged us to be cognisant of our handprint versus our footprint and to be bold even when we don’t know exactly what we must do.
Finally, my highlight slide of the seminar was, from Loa Dalgaard Worm, FSC in Denmark in her presentation she spoke of the need to know your customers. Consumer demand for more socially and environmentally responsible products continues to rise, a trend that is increasingly putting pressure on companies to embrace new innovations in process and material. There is a hunger from the customer to identify with the brand, to know who it is and what are its’ values. The time is past for CSR to be buried in a report somewhere. The time is now to bring something new and good into place. She quoted Steven Althus of BMW ‘Marketing will no longer be the department that puts the lipstick on the Gorilla. It needs to be about a truth well told’.
