Balancing Packaging Trade Off's: Sustainability vs Brand

The challenge: How does a global snacking giant like Mondelēz balance its iconic brand image with bold sustainability packaging goals?

Meet the expert: Patrick Shewell Mondelēz's Director of Global Packaging Sustainability shares his insights on navigating trade-offs.

Managing an empire of decision-makers:

Mondelēz has 150+ markets, operations in 50 of them, and 17 independent business units. That's a lot of decision-making power spread around the globe.

In this decentralised world, Patrick acts as an "influencer without authority." Aligning a huge network of decision-makers behind a global strategy requires crystal-clear communication and effective collaboration.

Global Packaging Strategy: The main challenges

Sustainable packaging choices often involve significant upfront costs without immediate returns. This makes achieving buy-in challenging (to say the least).

Patrick’s advice:

Don’t wait for "purest solutions." Instead, Patrick prioritises a “spectrum approach” that considers both cost and environmental impact (similar to a marginal abatement cost curve). This involves prioritising:

1. The low-hanging fruit: Interventions that are easy to implement, have minimal impact on consumer experience, and build internal buy-in for future initiatives. Example: removing avoidable plastics.

And then

2. The high-cost/high-impact projects: With the easy wins out of the way, it’s time to tackle the bigger fish. These tend to have greater environmental benefits but require a stronger business case as they are more challenging to achieve e.g., incorporating recycled content into packaging has a high material cost and low supply. It is also hard to valorise downstream as it’s abstract to consumers, making the business case difficult.

By starting with achievable wins and strategically prioritising projects, Patrick builds expertise, momentum and a strong foundation for tackling more ambitious sustainability goals in the future.

Beyond cost and impact: Project selection goes beyond just price tag and environmental impact. Mondelēz also considers these strategic factors:

• Location: Solutions are tailored to the specific needs and recycling infrastructure of different regions.
• Brand alignment: Sustainability efforts reflect brand values and what matters to consumers in each market. Think of high-value products like chocolate, where consumers might be more willing to pay a premium for sustainable packaging.
• Future-proofing: Regulations like EPR are factored in to ensure packaging solutions are compliant with upcoming changes.

EPR: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is all about holding product manufacturers to account for the impact of their waste and resource use. EPR regulations pin the cost of end-of-life treatment on manufacturers and incentivise better product design for a circular economy.
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For example: Take a Cadbury dairy milk bar, it’s wrapped in a flexible film. Once consumed, Mondelēz is responsible for paying a fee. That fee is ring-fenced and used to build systems to collect that packaging material and sort it into the right waste stream to improve recyclability rates.

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A word to Mondelēz’s suppliers:

“What I look for in suppliers is to build sustainability into the core of their business and think about everything through a sustainability lens” - Patrick

We’ve heard the B2B concerns that they don’t always see commercial payback from their packaging sustainability investments. Some advice:

• Build a sophisticated business case: Don’t just pitch new packaging solutions. The team you’re pitching to will be fighting for budget. Make it easier for them and demonstrate the tangible ROI. Identify brands in the portfolio where the packaging swap makes most sense, or which market will best suit based on EPR and tax.
• Find the right decision maker: Procurement teams may be struggling to reconcile hard goals (dollars saved) with sustainability value. You need to win over someone for whom this is a problem e.g., they have KPIs linked to sustainability - find yourself a Patrick Shewell.
• Get going now: In most cases quality and cost still trumps sustainability. But hold tight, with tax breaks and policies like EPR catching up, putting the groundwork in now will help further down the line.
• If all else fails, find another initiative: Sometimes, the hard truth is that while your initiative may impact sustainability, it’s just not one of the highest priority initiatives for the customer (vs other opportunities). Either pitch something else or be prepared to play the long game.

Getting it right can help to develop a sticky relationship with your customers. A great example is Amcor, one of Mondelēz’s direct packaging suppliers.

Following the collapse of Australia's largest in-store flexible plastic collection scheme, Amcor partnered with Mondelēz to invest in a first-of-its-kind advanced recycling facility in the country. This initiative intends to establish an end market for collected flexible plastic waste and help create greater incentives for these materials to be collected and recycled. It also allows Amcor and Mondelez to source and use more recycled content and reduce virgin plastic consumption. Amcor's collaboration strengthened its position as a strategic partner for Mondelēz.

Brands take note: strategic supplier collaboration is key. Work with large suppliers to access innovative ideas and expertise in sustainable packaging solutions. 

Interested in listening to this interview? Listen to our latest podcast episode: Sustainable Packaging Trade-offs with Mondelēz.

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