How to Have Hard Conversations About Sustainability When People Would Rather Talk About Anything Else
In her new book, ‘You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime,’ Maisie Ganzler advocates for grappling with sustainability questions even when it’s uncomfortable. Maisie is the Chief Strategy & Brand Officer at Bon Appétit Management Company.
Bon Appétit Management Company is a Palo Alto, California-based on-site restaurant company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges, and universities. The company is a subsidiary of the British multinational corporation Compass Group since 2002, and operates over 1,000 cafes in 33 states. In May 2018, Bon Appétit became the first food service provider and major restaurant company to ban plastic straws in all of its locations, with an exception for people with disabilities.
Maisie is an expert strategist with deep experience in scaling organizations, branding, cross-disciplinary management, forging supply chains, and sustainability. Below is an excerpt from her book.
“You spray the sh!t in the air! People can’t breathe!” Fedele Bauccio, CEO of Bon Appétit Management Company—and my boss—is fired up. He’s talking to the chief sustainability officer of America’s largest pork producer, who has flown to our Palo Alto offices to ask why Fedele keeps publicly badmouthing them, especially since as a foodservice company that serves over 250 million meals per year at corporate headquarters and private colleges, we buy a lot of pork from his company. Well, Fedele is telling him.
Fedele’s main bone to pick is the poor air quality in the communities surrounding the company’s farms. An industrial swine operation can generate as much waste as a medium-sized city. Thousands of pigs are kept in barns with slatted floors, so when they do their thing, the waste falls through the openings. The pig poop is collected in large pits called manure lagoons, piped out, and sprayed onto nearby fields. Imagine liquid that smells like rotten eggs raining down from the sky—that’s how these industrial pork farms deal with waste.
Fedele is on a roll. He’s incredibly passionate about these manure lagoons. Before this face-off between two forces in the food industry, he spent two years on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. It brought him to North Carolina to see, and smell, this issue firsthand, and it left an indelible mark on him (literally, he threw away the clothes he wore because he couldn’t get rid of the odor). He’d looked out on a lake of manure and watched as its contents were shot into the air. He’d sat in the living rooms of the families whose homes were near the farms—communities with sky-high rates of asthma and cancer—who couldn’t let their children play outside because the stench was giving them respiratory problems.
Those experiences changed him. So, whenever asked, and sometimes even before he’s asked, Fedele rails against factory farming in general, and the pork operations he saw specifically. He even names names, including that of our very own contracted supplier. As you can imagine, they aren’t too happy about that. Thus, here we are, in a pristine conference room thousands of miles away from the farms in question, as he yells about raining manure.
I wholeheartedly share Fedele’s outrage, and it’s my job to leverage this moment to make change for those families and those pigs—and to get my company credit for doing so. As Fedele continues to harp on fecal matter, however, all I can think about is how hard this will be because of how incredibly unappetizing the topic is. There’s just no way to talk to your customers about taking action on pits of poop while they’re enjoying their lunch, or even after they’ve eaten. Can you imagine sitting down to dine underneath a poster about manure?
What’s the headline? “The shit created by your pork sandwich was safely handled”? That’s not going to sell more BLTs.
That’s, of course, where the unusual title of my book comes from—it’s become something of a mantra for me, and represents, figuratively, the greater struggle all companies face with sustainability. The truth is, consumers, and other stakeholders, truly don’t want to think about this stuff at all, and when I say “this stuff,” I might as well be talking about sustainability in general. I don’t mean they don’t care—many, many do. But when I get into the details, the complexities, the hard choices, the poop, even the most ardent supporter can lose the will to make the necessary change. The trick for a for-profit business trying to build a more sustainable system, then, is to gain a market advantage by doing good, environmentally or socially, and then get credit for doing so with an audience with a short attention span. You can’t market manure at lunchtime, no, but you can’t let that stop you from figuring out how to move forward more sustainably.
This effort must start with defining sustainability, a term I’ve already used six times but for which, as you might imagine, there are many interpretations. Once, while at a Sustainable Food Lab event, I was chatting with a large-scale soybean farmer. He mused, “I’ve taken as much of the labor out of my business as possible. I just don’t see how I can make it any more sustainable.” Hmm, I thought, no mention of the chemicals he’s using, no worry about genetically modified seeds. We’re not talking about the same thing when we say “sustainable.”
Sustainability has become a buzzword in marketing everything from food to clothing, from tourism to buildings. When it entered the common business lexicon, I heard two definitions applied more than others (though I heard many). The first was “Meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” a definition based on Our Common Future, a 1987 UN World Commission on Environment and Development report. The second was “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations,” from the founding document of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Both of those are beautiful sentiments but neither is adequate if you’re trying to write a purchasing policy for chicken.
At my company, Bon Appétit, we were guilty for years of being just as poetic and vague. We used the tagline “Food service for a sustainable future” without being clear on exactly what our vision for that future was. When giving talks, I would fall back on one of the two broad definitions above and then make a joke about sustainable business being like pornography; you know it when you see it. That flippancy didn’t belie the depth of our commitment or the authenticity of our claims. Not having a solid definition of sustainability both hampered me in differentiating Bon Appétit from its competitors who were also making loose claims, and it opened us up to accusations of greenwashing because of the breadth of the promise.
I called on our employees across the country to help us define “sustainable food service.” We crowdsourced a description that captured the values of our team and the issues most relevant to our business:
Flavorful food that’s healthy and economically viable for all, produced through practices that respect farmers, workers, and animals; nourish the community; and replenish our shared natural resources for future generations.
Now we had something I could test purchasing policies against, and we could communicate to the world in one, not-so-short sentence what we cared about.
You should craft a similar definition for your business. The more specific, the better. In some cases, industry groups have done this work for their sector. When talking about sustainable tourism, the World Tourism Organization refers “to the environmental, economic, and socio-cultural aspects of tourism development, and a suitable balance must be established between these three dimensions to guarantee its long-term sustainability.” Not bad, but maybe, if you’re running an eco-resort in Costa Rica, you want to get even more specific and call out rainforest preservation and the economic security of the Kèköldi people.
Consumers and critics often think that sustainability is a switch somewhere that corporate executives can flip and simply pay the farmer more for regenerative agricultural practices, the factory owner a bonus to use only ethical recruiters of migrant workers, or a premium to the mining company to ensure you get conflict-free minerals. That a company could be more sustainable if it would just spend more for its inputs.
I’ve learned from experience that the complexities of national and even global supply chains, competing priorities, and the challenge of messaging make authentically greening a company much harder than simply writing a bigger check. Through my successes and failures leading an almost $2 billion corporation toward a more sustainable future, I’ve come to understand that there are, instead, dozens of small switches you need to flip daily.
As chief strategy and brand officer of Bon Appétit Management Company, I’m the architect of the company’s approach to responsible purchasing. I have traveled to what seemed like the end of the earth to build a brand based on sustainability. On my quest to understand the complex certification schemes of the aquaculture industry, I followed shrimp from ponds in the Mekong Delta to a factory with hundreds of Vietnamese women leaning over conveyor belts to remove the crustaceans’ heads, shells, and digestive tracts by hand. I’ve walked across the border from Yuma, Arizona, to Mexicali, Mexico, to interview farm leadership teams formed to create a more equitable food system. I slept on a church floor after marching through South Florida protesting the treatment of farmworkers in the tomato fields. I’ve spent countless hours in meetings in windowless conference rooms in airport hotels.
The hardest part of all this? Boiling these experiences down into actionable purchasing policies and pithy marketing campaigns.
I did eventually stick the seemingly impossible landing on the manure thing: I improved our pork supply chain and, by doing so, built brand recognition for Bon Appétit as an industry leader in the sustainable food industry. It took over a decade of work, a series of small wins and big setbacks, and—spoiler alert—our marketing materials never mentioned manure lagoons.
Adapted from You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime, by Maisie Ganzler, published by HBR Press.