McDonald’s

Why I’m (still) an optimist

January 1, 2012

Happy New Year! And good riddance to 2011, a year during which we made little or no progress on some of the issues that I care most about: climate change, the long-term federal debt, social mobility (aka the American dream), and our dysfunctional Congress. Yet I remain an optimist.

Texas drought 2011

I could write many words about our woes. Instead, I’ll try to be succinct. On the climate issue, global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, we learned recently, and 2011 surely brought further increases.  Concentrations of CO2 are 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming, the Guardian reports. Neither the US nor the UN moved closer to regulating CO2. In a discouraging development, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich backed away from their once-sensible support of greenhouse gas regulation, in what can only be seen as shameless pandering to the know-nothing wing of the Republican Party. Discouraging, too, was the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which will slow down the growth of carbon-free nuclear power. So will the failure of Solyndra. Meanwhile, the U.S. suffered massive flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, a terrible drought in Texas, record wildfires and at least 2,941 monthly weather records that were broken by extreme events, according to the NRDC.. Coincidence? Uh, no.

Like the atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the federal budget deficit has been growing.That’s no coincidence either. We’re living beyond our means, whether by burning fossil fuels or taxpayer dollars, and sticking future generations with the cleanup bill. Just last week, the White House asked for a $1.2 trillion increase in the federal debt limit, raising it to about $16.4 trillion. According to Marketplace Radio, that amounts to about $52,000 for every American. For a typical  family of four, that’s bigger than the mortgage. [click to continue…]

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Smithfield Foods: Sustainable pork?

April 27, 2011

Unless you avoid pork for religious reasons, you’ve probably eaten pork products from Smithfield Foods: the bacon or sausage in a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, Armour-Eckrich bologna or ham, pork from Bob Evans or Jimmy Dean’s, an Esskay hot dog at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, and quite likely your Easter ham.

Smithfield is a pork giant. It has 49 factories, 500 or so hog farms, 48,000 employees and about $11 billion in revenues in FY2010. It slaughtered about 27 million animals last year in the U.S. “We’re the largest pork producer in the world, by a long shot,” says Dennis Treacy, the company’s chief sustainability officer.

Yes, Smithfield has a chief sustainability officer–and that may surprise you if you remember reading horror stories about Smithfield’s confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s), its problems managing pig manure, its labor conflicts or animal welfare  issues in places like The New York Times and Rolling Stone. The company was featured–not in a flattering way–in the movie Food Inc. and sued by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Dennis Treacy

Treacy had problems with Smithfield, too, before joining the company. In fact, Treacy, who was the director of the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for the state of Virginia from 1998 to 2002 under Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore, once sued Smithfield for polluting the state’s waters.  (You could look it up.) In 1997, Smithfield was fined $12 million, one of the largest fines at the time, for violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

Now, though, Treacy says Smithfield has cleaned up not just the water but its own act. He’s been with the company for nine years, and says he was hired to make the company more sustainable and improve its reputation. “We have slowly but surely built a sustainability program,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and everybody wants to work for a company that is respected.”

I met Dennis earlier this week in Washington. He seems like a good guy, and he’s spent his career on environmental issues–he studied fisheries and wildlife at Virginia Tech, got a law degree from Lewis and Clark in Oregon, which is a top environmental law school, and he lives on a small farm near Richmond where he and his wife raise chickens and rabbits. [click to continue…]

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Dennis Salazar: the complete package

April 3, 2011

Dennis and Lenora Salazar

Back in 2007, Dennis Salazar and his wife, Lenora, took a leap.

With about a half a century of combined experience in the packaging industry, they decided to start their own company.

And to make it as “green” as possible.

Then Dennis did something smart. He wrote about his plans. He didn’t write a white paper. “They’re long, they’re boring, they take a lot of time and nobody reads them,” he says. Instead he started a blog, which is no easy feat for someone who’s technical skills aren’t top-of-the-class. “I’m not a young techie,” he told me, unnecessarily, as we struggled to connect via Skype.

He called his first blogpost “Am I retrainable for sustainable?” and wrote:

OK, I admit it. I am confused and perhaps even a tad nervous.

After more than 30 years as a packaging professional focused on flexible—dare I say—plastic packaging, this new movement people are calling ” sustainable” packaging has me seriously concerned.

He obviously didn’t have all the answers, but he promised to try to figure out what’s best for his customers and for the environment.  He listed Seven R’s — renew, reuse, recycle, remove, reduce, revenue and read, promising to education himself, his customers and ordinary consumers as he learned more. “That’s the beauty of this market,” he says. “While we teach on a daily basis, we learn on a daily basis.”

Today, Salazar Packaging is doing well. Based in Plainfield, IL, the firm has customers from all around the U.S. including well-known national brands like Stonyfield Farms and Method and smaller firms like Coyuchi, which makes bath, bedding and baby products from organic cotton, and Volcano Island Honey Co, which makes Hawaiian white organic honey.

I ordinarily don’t write about small b-to-b companies–my focus is the FORTUNE 500, and consumer brands–but Dennis, who is now 56, has a story is worth telling, for several reasons. [click to continue…]

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What a long, strange trip it’s been for McDonald’s Bob Langert

February 10, 2011

Bob Langert worked in logistics for McDonald’s in the late 1980s when he was asked to take on a “temporary” six-month assignment to get chlorofluorocarbons out of the company’s clamshell packages.

Twenty years later, Bob has worked with WWF and Conservation International on marine stewardship and sustainable beef, spent a decade with Temple Grandin dealing with animal welfare issues, visited chicken farms and slaughterhouses, picked tomatoes with migrant workers in Florida, lectured on sustainability in China and taken a nine-day raft trip down the Amazon River with his pals at Greenpeace.

“I never, ever imagined this,” Bob said. “To have the good fortune to do this work, and make a difference in the world is beyond my expectations.”

I interviewed Bob, who is vice president for corporate social responsibility, at McDonald’s, today at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago. We talked about what he’d learned about working with NGOs, his accomplishments, frustrations and whether selling hamburgers can be “green.”

Here are a few highlights:

A pioneering partnership: Langert’s work with packaging led to a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, which ruffled feathers in the corporate world and the environmental community.

“Fred Krupp [EDF’s chief] was a visionary back then,” Bob said. “It was not politically correct to work with big companies.”

EDF’s crew did a shift working in a McDonald’s, and proceeded to help with dozens of initiatives—from trimming the size of straws to using recycled paper in napkins.

Recalled Bob: “We didn’t spend one penny more. We saved millions and millions of pounds of packaging and costs.”

The future of fish: McDonald’s joined with the WWF to develop guidelines for the companies that supply its fish. What’s the business case, I asked, for investing corporate time and money in sustainable fisheries?

“Assured supply,” Langert replied. “The guy in charge of buying fish for McDonald’s, he was really concerned with being able to buy fish 10 or 20 years from now….The No. 1 job of everyone in supply chain at McDonald’s is to make sure we have stuff on the menu tomorrow.”

This kind of long-term thinking—so rare in big public companies—is a key to sustainability.

Picking tomatoes: When McDonald’s was urged to support efforts by migrant workers in Florida to win better wages, Langert worked side by side with the pickers. “ I couldn’t keep up with people half my size,” he remembered. “Females doing the work all day long in the sun and you see the living conditions which are not good at all.” Just last month,  the workers hashed out an agreement that should bring them higher pay.

Bears and the Amazon: When Greenpeace protesters dressed as chickens picketed a McDonald’s in London, accusing the company of destroying the Amazon, Langert’s first job was to calm down his colleagues.

He recalled saying: “Let’s not get all in a tizzy about their tactics. Greenpeace doesn’t have an advertising budget, so they had to use McDonald’s to get the word out. Let’s look at the issue.” The allegation was that tropical forest was being cut down to grow soy to feed chickens in Europe that became McNuggets.

When he asked trusted partners at Conservation International and WWF about the charge, he decided Greenpeace had a point. He approached the group and, before long, McDonald’s, Greenpeace and big suppliers like Cargill had agreed to stop buying soy from deforested land.

The raft trip came later. “We spent nine days—four of us from McDonald’s, four of us from Greenpeace, to get the lay of the land. I gave up a Chicago Bears Superbowl game to go so that tells you where my passion is. Anyone who knows me knows that besides my family and my faith, it’s the Chicago Bears.”

Langert’s to-do list: He’d like to find new ways to engage consumers in McDonald’s sustainability work. The company serves about 64 million people a day.

He also wants to do more to reduce the environmental impact of the company’s 33,000 stores, most of which are  owned and operated by others. “Energy’s a big issue for us,” he said. New initiatives are on the way, he hinted.

The problem with burgers: Because beef has such a big environmental footprint, I asked Bob how he could reconcile the company’s desire to grow—and sell more beef—with its environmental ethic. I told him that my rabbi, Fred Dobb, has said that one of the easiest things people can do to help the planet is to eat less beef, and asked if McDonald’s would try to wean its customers away from Big Macs.

“I’d like to talk with your rabbi,” Bob replied. He acknowledged the beef production has a big footprint, but said that “at the end of the day, we’re going to give people what they want. We’re going to do it in a good, responsible, clean, safe way. We’ve tried veggie burgers. They hardly sell at all. The day we can sell 500 a week in a restaurant, they’ll be on our menu forever and ever. I don’t have angst. You’ve got to face the realities of the world. And the reality of the world is that people eat protein from livestock and meat. Nothing wrong with that from my moral compass. I respect others that have a different moral compass. It’s our job as a company to make things better, though. We’re starting on that path–working with WWF on sustainable beef. That’s the  next step.”

Certainly McDonald’s offers choices to those who would prefer to avoid beef. Hey, the company even gave out pedometers and yoga CDs a few years ago to encourage people to be more active. But…given the climate crisis and the obesity crisis, maybe the next step ought to be to encourage those 64 million customers to make choices that are healthier for themselves and for the planet.

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How to “green” a hamburger

January 4, 2011

Plastic bags, SUVs and hamburgers: No right-thinking tree-hugger would endorse them, at least not in public. But here’s the thing: While we can replace plastic bags with reusable ones, and we can electrify our SUVs, the world’s consumers will almost surely demand more, not less, beef in the years ahead.

Which is why the World Wildlife Fund has begun a conversation about, of all things, sustainable beef.

The WWF, led by Jason Clay, its iconoclastic senior vice president for “market transformation,” last fall convened a Global Conference on Sustainable Beef, bringing together environmentalists, academics and industry giants including McDonald’s, Walmart, Cargill and JBS, a Brazilian company that calls itself “the largest animal protein processing company in the world” and owns U.S. brands Swift and Pilgrim’s Pride.

The goal? To improve sustainability within the beef industry. [click to continue…]

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Quiznos: Green enough?

February 23, 2010

People sometimes say we need to save the planet for our kids. I sometimes think our kids are going to save us.

If you doubt it, ask Rick Schaden. Schaden is CEO of Quiznos, the fast-food chain best known for its toasted subs, and the father of five children, aged three to 19. Today, Quiznos is rolling out new packaging (“Eat Toasty, Be Green”) made from renewable or recycled content that will reduce the chain’s environmental footprint. When we spoke by phone yesterday, I asked what led him to make the changes.

“Believe it or not, I was home watching a movie called Wall-E with my kids,” Schaden said. “You think about LEED-certified buildings and hybrid electric cars and all these really high-tech things, and then you watch Wall-E and the world is buried in trash.” The Disney-Pixar animated movie is the story of a robot named Wall-E, who is designed to clean up a Earth that has been overwhelmed by garbage.

Quiznos green packaging

Quiznos green packaging

His kids had always pushed Schaden to be more green at home. “My kids make sure everything is sorted and separated. If anyone in my house would dare to put a plastic bottle in the trash, my 14-year-old would give him a smack,” he said. “It’s the culture of the new generation. It tells you that’s where consumers are heading.”

So, he figured, why not see what could be done at Quiznos, where he is a large shareholder, and where he returned as CEO, after some time away, just about a year ago. [click to continue…]

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Adam Werbach: Take small steps to go “blue”

November 15, 2009

person_14272ab1_mediumTo attack big environmental problems, start with small steps.

So says Adam Werbach—activist, author, advertising man and one of the more interesting people working in the sustainability movement today.

Werbach is the former president of the Sierra Club, the author of Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto and the chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi S, a sustainability consulting firm that’s part of the global communications giant Publicis. He’s worked for Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Frito Lay, among others.

He’s behind a Saatchi project called DOT – do one thing – that is inspired by the PSPs – personal sustainability projects – that he helped bring to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart encouraged its 1.3 million employees to integrate sustainable practices into their lives by making small changes to their everyday habits. Many thousands have stopped smoking, lost weight, recycled more, or biked or walked to work.

Is this the way to curb climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, save tropical forests and the like? Or do people screw in a CFL bulb and then figure they’ve done their part?

Werbach argues that small steps lead to big things. “Change begets change,” he says. “Recycling and energy conservation—once you start remembering to do that, you’re remember to do other things.”

Werbach spoke the other day at the Net Impact conference at Cornell University, and he drew a big crowd. Net Impact is a  group of business students and young professionals who want to use the power of business to make the world better. [Disclosure: I’m a new member of the Net Impact board.] The conference attracted more than 2,400 people to Ithaca, N.Y., in November in the midst of a recession–no small accomplishment.

The crowd may have showed up because Werbach is a controversial. His green friends went after him when he joined forces with Wal-Mart. He appeared on the cover of Fast Company in 2007 beside the headline “He Sold His Soul to Wal-Mart.” (Fortunately, the story was kinder.) But even now, he begins his talk by explaining why he gave a speech in 2004 called “Is Environmentalism Dead? [PDF], left the Sierra Club and opted to work in the corporate world.

“My quitting environmentalism was about embracing something different,” he says. “We were not moving far enough, fast enough.” [click to continue…]

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Food Inc: tasty but unsatisfying

June 22, 2009

“You can change the world with every bite.” So says the new movie Food Inc., now in theaters. I’m not so sure.

I’m sitting in my neighborhood Cosi. Just ordered a “gigante” Artic Latte and a fruit cup. Did I change the world? For better? For worse? Who knows? I ought to know because I pay more attention than most people can to the social, environmental and health impacts of the food business. I’m paid to do so. And I don’t have a clue—where the coffee in the Latte came from, where the fruit came from, or what the embedded energy or carbon footprints.

By all means, go see Food Inc. The movie serves up a provocative indictment of industrial food. It shows how our eating habits affect climate change, waste and energy. (The food processing and packaging business is one of the top five industrial users of energy in the U.S.) The film is entertaining and clever, as you’ll see if you watch this trailer And the visuals are eye-opening, even for those of us who have read Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, two stars of the movie. The trouble is, the politics, economics and science of Food Inc. are all a bit fuzzy.

Consider the argument that we can change the world by redirecting our consumer dollars. Gary Hirshberg, the founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, puts it this way:

The irony is that the average consumer does not feel very powerful. They think that they are the recipients of whatever industry has put there for them to consume. Trust me, it’s the exact opposite. Those businesses spend billions of dollars to tally our votes. When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we’re voting.

[click to continue…]

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