Decades ago, being environmentally friendly and “going green” were buzzwords in most corporate boardrooms. Sure, some companies talked about their sustainability, but it wasn’t typically approached from the perspective of environmentalism.
Today, corporate and operations initiatives that seek to take better care of the planet and the natural resources it provides can be found in almost every corner of the food & beverage industry. In fact, the tables have turned to where companies not engaged in some sort of sustainability project are the outliers.
“The issue of sustainability is embedded into the fabric of our members’ business and their iconic brands,” says John Hewitt, senior vice president of packaging and sustainability for the Consumer Brands Assn. (CBA). “It’s been part of their DNA for many years.”
Revisiting recycling
The lower-hanging fruit for sustainability improvements typically has involved packaging — for many years, “reduce, reuse, recycle” has been the mantra of many. Hewitt says even today, the focus of many brands remains on packaging sustainability.
“Recognizing that single-use packaging is — as the name describes — single use, a majority of our companies have committed to making their single-use packaging 100% recyclable, compostable, biodegradable, reusable — something to make that packaging reusable in some way,” he says.
That’s well and good, but many question whether consumers actually recycle or reuse packaging — or if municipalities and infrastructure can handle the material — since those systems aren’t consistent and widespread. Hewitt says that the industry’s commitment to building out the infrastructure, educating the consumer and embracing technology to get recycling rolling has been one of the biggest changes over the last several years or more.
“Certainly, brands can design for recyclability in many respects, and they've been doing that for a long time, whether it's glass or paper, which have been going in blue bins for decades,” he explains. “Plastics has been an emerging and growing trend over the past decade, and one of the biggest commitments on the packaging side of the equation is our members’ commitment to helping build out that infrastructure that will collect and ultimately complete circularity for those packaging types.”
Another way to improve the success rate when it comes to plastics, of course, is to outright reduce their use for food & beverage products, which many companies are taking on. Hewitt points to an iconic cereal brand that reduced weight of the bags in the boxes by 17%, removing some 200,000 lbs. of plastic from the waste stream.
“If we remove those materials before they even get in the stream, we never have to worry about things like funding recycling systems, making sure that consumers recycle it properly, collecting it or finding an end market for it,” Hewitt says. “So source reduction remains paramount.”
In a recent webinar covering consumer-packaged goods disruption, Gina Roberts, solutions architect for market research firm Spins, sees brands demonstrating an evolution in their sustainability efforts through these types of changes – such as choosing glass over plastic to make packaging more sustainable.
“What’s kind of unique here is, brands are doing this across many different products and categories, but one that’s interesting to highlight is elevating recycling, which we’re seeing a lot in kid-positioned products,” Roberts says. She points out Globowl baby and toddler foods have married recycling with better health, by packaging their products in glass jars rather than plastic pouches, “so not only is the glass packaging promoting recycling, but it’s also negating micro-plastic ingestion.”
Celestial Tea, much like the cereal example above, attacked the plastic packaging issue by removing the outer plastic wrap on its product boxes, reducing its annual plastics use by about 165,000 lbs., Roberts notes.
Talking Rain Beverage Co., maker of Sparkling Ice, reduced the amount of plastics used in its bottles and removed the cardboard trays the bottles were packaged in, all in an effort to lightweight its product shipments.
“As of this year, we’ve been able to eliminate 1.6 million lbs. of plastic, and the impact on our carbon footprint has been tremendous,” COO Oscar Mayorquin explains, noting that the initiative is ongoing. “We’ve also recently qualified our fifth co-packing facility to run trayless, and by the end of the year, all our bottling facilities will have the capability to run trayless.”
In addition, Mayorquin says Talking Rain is ramping up a second phase of lightweighting the packaging, turning its focus to the bottles as well as the outer packaging on the products.
“We’re considering new and innovative ways to ensure the structure of the bottle remains firm, while reducing more of the plastic content,” he says. The company also would like to incorporate more recycled PET (rPET) content into its bottles, based on early returns on two projects. Talking Rain has had success using 25% rPET for products coming from its Preston, Wash., facility, and all its AQA brand alkaline water bottles are made with 100% rPET.
However, consumers often aren’t fully educated on where or how to recycle the packaging — or even if it can be recycled. Not to mention that different locales can have different rules or infrastructure. Hewitt says CBA members are trying to clear some of that confusion up through the association’s SmartLabel platform. The association continues to build out the program, which “digitally shares more information than could ever fit on the labels of tens of thousands of products that Americans use every day,” the web site says.
“Preparation instructions are something we're familiar with, as we've been using them ever since we had to fend for ourselves,” Hewitt adds. “But adding recycling instructions to the package has been a major commitment that many of our members have invested in as well.”
Beyond the product
Sustainability goes beyond packaging composition and plastics use, of course, into operational efficiency and use of natural resources. Carbon footprint was on Talking Rain’s mind when it lightweighted its products, and the company went the extra step to dig into its logistics partnerships and analyze the miles its trucks were driving to deliver product.
“One of our supply chain goals is to have our packing facilities located within 350 miles of customers,” Mayorquin says. “Our logistics network optimization strategies have reduced overall average miles per truck shipment by 12% and CO2 emissions per shipment by 8%.”
In May of this year, PepsiCo Beverages North America (PBNA) announced its Fresno, Calif., facility would begin to use 50 electric semi trucks for shipping and distribution, as well as 75 electric vans for its equipment services fleet across the state of California. The project was no small feat, as the 170,000-sq.-ft. facility needed to install eight 750-kilowatt Tesla chargers and two Tesla Megapack Battery Energy Storage Systems onsite to power the vehicles, the company’s release said.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Dept. of Energy awarded four of Unilever’s U.S. ice cream plants a $20.9 million award to reduce carbon emissions, and those facilities were expected to replace natural gas boilers with electric boilers and industrial heat pumps using waste heat recovery. The company said the proposed projects would cut 14,000 metric tons of carbon emissions per year.
Many of these larger companies have numerous divisions and plants all across the country (and the globe, in some cases), so how does a sustainability champion decide what projects make the most sense? In the case of Hormel Foods Corp. (whose McCook, Ill., Fontanini Foods plant won our 2023 Green Plant of the Year, by the way), the company fosters innovative ideas on sustainability initiatives at the plant level, then further encourages teams to think big through a structured recognition program.
“Our associates and manufacturing plants work hard every day to come up with efficiency, utility reduction and environmental improvement projects, and those get funneled up through our ‘Sustainability Best of the Best’ recognition program,” says Tom Raymond, director of environmental sustainability for Hormel. “Then we share those best practices with our other manufacturing plants and the industry through various means, because our team members are getting results.”
Sometimes, however, it takes some patience to see the results. Take Hormel’s most recent solar power project at its Jennie-O Turkey Store plant in Montevideo, Minn., for example. For perspective, the company has embarked on an ambitious goal to achieve 100% renewable energy worldwide by 2030.
“Like many organizations, we've taken on some big challenges with some aggressive targets over the course of a longer period of time,” Raymond explains. “It takes progress every year on a lot of projects to get to those targets.”
Raymond says Hormel continues to build its on-site renewable energy assets in order to take what the company considers a longer-term, more resilient approach to meeting the goal. From a financial aspect, he says, the Montevideo solar project allowed the company to get good, clean power affordably into the plant, which made it a priority project for that location. The eight-acre, two-megawatt Montevideo solar field came online in September of last year, just as the Minnesota winter season was closing in.
“Now that we’re in the first summer with that project active, we’re really starting to see the true benefits, with the solar project providing about 10% of the on-site clean energy to that facility,” Raymond says. “The sun comes up, and you’re seeing returns come across live.”
What makes the project unique, Raymond says, is that Hormel expanded it to help its employees in Montevideo and the surrounding community as well. Hormel uses one megawatt and feeds the other megawatt into the local grid, allowing employees to sign up to use that renewable energy in their homes and save money on their electric bills.
“What really sold us on the concept of essentially leasing that land for free to the community was the tie-in to our team members that work at that facility,” Raymond says. “That’s an easy sell to say we can add that extra megawatt capacity and bring our team members into the project for financial savings in their households.”
Of course, now that the solar project is up and running in Montevideo, Raymond says the plant has begun digging into how it can drive up the percentage of renewable energy it uses.
“We would love to find ways to increase that 10% to 20% on-site, and I think we’ve capped our solar capacity within the existing fence line, but we haven’t necessarily capped our energy efficiency or other renewable technologies,” he says.
Looking ahead
Hewitt says he is excited about what artificial intelligence might bring to the table in terms of improving efficiency or reducing carbon emissions. However, he gets really energized when looking ahead to molecular recycling.
“We believe with the appropriate transparency and accountability provisions, [molecular recycling] can really help complete the packaging circularity we are all committed to achieving,” he says. The process takes the polymers in the package waste, breaks them down into monomers, which can then be recombined to manufacture a plastic water bottle or shrinkwrap sleeve around a meat package, for example.
“In order to have a truly complete circular economy, there are packaging types that are difficult to recycle or have other considerations,” Hewitt explains. “Molecular recycling helps fill that void and bridge that last gap to circularity.”
The process isn’t too far down the path to fruition, Hewitt says. Work is under way on molecular recycling beyond the lab.
“It’s not theoretical; it’s not happening in some university lab today,” he says. “This is happening in actual bricks-and-mortar facilities in the U.S. that are creating jobs and fueling that circular economy.”
Regenerative agriculture is another area in which companies are dabbling — and learning for the future. Although agriculture is outside the manufacturing facility, Hormel is trying to connect the dots from farm to plate for consumers through its Ecosystem Services Market Consortium work with Target, Minnesota business leaders and The Nature Conservancy.
Raymond explains it as a multi-year pilot project in Minnesota designed to accelerate the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices — and that Hormel just extended it for a third year to continue to take measurements in the field. The company is trying to gain real data on science-backed benefits of regenerative agriculture for the entire food supply chain, even to the end consumers.
“A growing number of consumers understand the concept of lower-intensity food and food with a lower environmental impact, or what a better carbon footprint is for products, whether it’s clothes, cars or food,” he says. “But if you were to say something is from regenerative fields, it’s still very complex to understand.”
When it comes to sustainability initiatives, companies have certainly embraced them, but as the technologies and opportunities continue to grow, education and patience will be required.
“We continue to battle our way to reach our sustainability goals and targets, and you’re going to see us simply keep chipping away at that stone,” Raymond says. “And if it’s one small chip at a time, that’s OK — we’re going to keep chipping away with more projects.”
