Kraft Heinz’s Secret Sauce to an Effective Sustainability Strategy: Data

A section where we interview leading sustainability professionals, to share their advice on planning and executing initiatives. This week we were lucky enough to sit down with one of our customers, Kraft Heinz! David Shaw,Global Net Zero Transition Lead and Cristina Kenz, Chief Growth and Sustainability Office share how they are using data to redesign their strategy.

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The challenge: unusable data.

Kraft Heinz has over 17,000 suppliers and millions (if not billions) of lines of data. The critical challenge they faced was unusable data. Data was siloed, fragmented, and lacked actionable insights.
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On top of this, a bugbear for the KH team was that the GHG Protocol framework offers little actionable insight on how to meaningfully decarbonise. Instead, it clumps ~97% of your emissions into one Scope 3 category with even more obscure subcategories.
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The workaround… enter Altruistiq (shameless plug alert). By slicing and dicing data through the lens of business activities, products, and services on the Altruistiq platform… Kraft Heinz can “reformulate the problem” in a way that makes sense to them. Having data visibility at the product-level enables KH to make procurement-informed decisions e.g., ingredient optimisations, supplier swaps etc.

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The drive for data visibility (down to every single tomato)

As the world's largest tomato seed manufacturer, Kraft Heinz recognised the need for sustainable tomato sourcing. With 65 million bottles of ketchup produced annually, every tomato matters. Their commitment to 100% sustainable Ketchup tomatoes by 2025 hinges on reliable data, generic emission factors and assumptions were not good enough.  Kraft Heinz has prioritised data visibility, to pinpoint emission hotspots and track the progress of reduction initiatives e.g., emission reductions from factory switches to triple zero manufacturing sites (zero emissions, zero waste, zero water) and model different sourcing scenarios.
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Learnings ripe for the picking:

• Prioritise commercials: Embed sustainability within the commercial team. The closer you align them, the easier it is to get buy-in and budget.
• Make data-driven decisions: Your strategy will be more effective if you understand the full picture. Go deep and granular with your data insight to make your strategic decisions easier.
• Get creative. Know your customer profile and market the sustainability initiatives that will resonate the most. Most of KH’s customers won’t care about cover cropping (incidentally 100% of KH’s farms in Spain implement cover crops). However, KH launched two ingenious campaigns (credit where credit’s due Cristina) to push the soil health narrative to their consumers:-‘Marz Edition Ketchup’: made with tomatoes grown in extreme, Mars-like soil conditions. This was a two year long experimentation which finally resulted in a future-proof tomato variation. To celebrate, a bottle of ‘Mars Edition’ ketchup was launched into space.-‘S.O.S Tomatoes’: KH highjacked the game Fortnite. Players were able to grow tomatoes, however, they were challenged to run faster than the speed of soil degradation to reflect the rapid rate at which soil is degrading.

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Both campaigns engaged ~3bn consumers, spiking interest in the brand’s sustainability agenda. With such high levels of consumer engagement, Cristina was able to demonstrate value in their sustainability initiatives… (a great tool for internal buy-in).
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Feel free to get in touch with David and Cristina - they’re full to the brim with learnings!

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