Episode 10: Becoming a Carbon Neutral Company with Tim Faveri from Maple Leaf Foods
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Achieving carbon neutrality is an essential goal for every company. In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with Tim Faveri, Vice President, Sustainability & Shared Value at Maple Leaf Foods, to discuss Maple Leaf’s vision of becoming the most sustainable protein company on Earth, how Maple Leaf became a carbon neutral company, their focus on food insecurity, how they have been able to push their social and environmental initiatives down to their suppliers, why they chose to pursue a GreenCircle Certified Sustainability Facts label, and what the future looks like for food.
Maple Leaf is a carbon neutral company, what initiatives did you have to put in place to achieve this?
“Part of our purpose at Maple Leaf Foods, as well as a strategy for us is to be a leader in sustainability. We want to lead in all aspects of our sustainability program. What's interesting is when we were about to launch our purpose in 2017, we reached out to our employees and asked them, ‘how can you operationalize yourself in your day to day work and raise the good in food? What's that going to look like for you?’ We interviewed and held workshops. We called them ideation sessions from shop floor employees right up to our CFO, and what was quite fascinating was that at that time in 2017, we had the boldest environmental goals of any meat company. Our goal was to achieve 50% environmental footprint reduction by 2025. Some of the most common feedback that we got from our employees was, ‘if we want to be the most sustainable protein company on earth, why are our environmental footprint goals only set at 50%?’
That's actually what cascaded an almost two year carbon management strategy that I had to lead and develop with my team. This led to setting science based targets achieving carbon neutrality. We set a very aggressive timeline to achieve carbon neutrality because of the fundamental fact that we believe that we're in a climate crisis right now and companies with scale like Maple Leaf need to do everything they can to minimize their impact. We achieved this by adopting a pretty general framework, nothing proprietary at all.
We took the inverted waste reduction pyramid and said, ‘at the top of the inverted pyramid we have to avoid greenhouse gas emissions at all costs.’ We have to integrate greenhouse gas avoidance into our strategies and decision making. The best example I can provide of that is, when we decided to build our new London poultry processing facility in the heart of where all the broiler birds are grown in Southwestern Ontario. Right now, our processing facilities are over 200 kilometers away from that region. And by just locating that site in the heart of where the chickens are grown and raised, we are avoiding millions of road kilometers from birds being on trucks to get into downtown Toronto. It is also higher animal welfare there as well.
We also have to reduce. Greatly reducing the natural gas you consume at your operations, the electricity, the water, the solid waste to landfill, all those aspects of environmental footprint and efficiency of your production needs to improve greatly. That improved efficiency helps reduce greenhouse gases and it helps save a lot of money for companies. Those savings can be put back into more greenhouse gas reduction initiatives as well.
We're also focused on replacing. We look at power purchase agreements for renewable electricity. We also have a comprehensive strategy in flight right now around the circular economy, and embracing anaerobic digestion and biogas to turn most of our organic waste into renewable fuel that we can consume back in our plants again.
For most companies, there are still greenhouse gas emissions that companies can't avoid right now. We have a corporate fleet of cars and a few trucks. There's not enough electric vehicle charging stations out there right now from an in infrastructure perspective for us to embrace and utilize. There's not enough renewable natural gas in the pipe for us to even buy under a power purchase agreement. So with the emissions that we can’t avoid, we purchase the highest credible offsets that we can find in the North American voluntary marketplace, and we neutralize our emissions to zero. That is something that we're very proud of. Actually, we've hit our two year anniversary of being carbon neutral. What we're seeing in sustainability circles now is that more and more companies are interested in this as a meaningful step to take in the short term on their journeys to being truly net zero. We're talking a lot about this in the food system, across Canada and North America, and globally through the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. We're a carbon neutral company from here on out, it’s baked into our overall purpose.”
How are you pushing all of your environmental and social initiatives down to your suppliers?
“This is something very important to most companies in the food system, because our supply chains are so big. Just from an emissions perspective, 80% of our overall greenhouse gas emissions are from scope three or supply chain related emissions. So you better believe we need to have a focus on what's happening there. So our work with our suppliers is really tied to the existing partnerships and relationships we have. We have an updated supplier code of conduct, where we now have the ability to track and monitor performance on environmental impact like greenhouse gas emissions. Big companies like Walmart do this to us, and other global supply chain companies. Ramping up our efforts on tracking of greenhouse gas emissions is super important for us, and for all food companies moving forward.
On the social side, it's also super important not only to get data, but, as I mentioned earlier, our suppliers are our partners. There's a reason that they're our suppliers because they share our values and they work well with us. Most of our suppliers are very supportive of our efforts in food security and in supporting us in those regards. It really is an enhancement of the overall supplier and customer relationship when you can come together and collaborate on a sustainability issue. That's actually part of my job description to collaborate with our customers and our suppliers on sustainability. The world right now is so focused on climate, data gathering, and greenhouse gas emissions. Looking at how we can collectively reduce our impact as a value chain. There are a lot of precompetitive collaborations out there that we belong to. What I'm really excited about, moving forward, are those actual value chain partnerships that can be leveraged where a customer, a manufacturer, and a producer can all get together and have a meaningful impact. I don't think that that's far away.”
What were the drivers behind your decision to pursue GreenCircle’s Certified Sustainability Facts multi-attribute label?
“I came across your multi-attribute label when it was called Certified Environmental Facts when I was working for Canada's largest restaurant company. It was something that I always kind of kept it the back of my mind, with respect to introducing that to Maple Leaf Foods. Our Greenfield Natural Meat company is kind of our leader in what we call sustainable meat brands. Their products are all about sustainable attributes such as no antibiotics, high animal welfare, gestation crate free, vegetable grain fed, made by a carbon neutral company, GreenCircle Certified, and the list goes on and on. We use the Greenfield brand as that kind of lead horse on sustainability attributes. We come together every year and look at how we're going to progress those claims to keep us in that leadership position.
When I presented the label informally to the former Marketing Vice President, we looked at it and to be perfectly honest, he was just blown away. He was saying, ‘this is so innovative and it's eye catching, and it's aligned with a nutrition label, why wouldn't we do this?’ Then we socialized that with our strategy team, marketing team, sustainability teams, operational teams, and the agri-farms team. We were all in agreement that if we elevated the Certified Environmental Facts label to a Certified Sustainability Facts (CSF) label, it would help maintain the leader position for the brand and for our company to advance on our claims as well. The CSF label does a good job of showcasing transparency, and that is something that the food system in general, around the world, has not done a very good job of.
There are all these ingredients that people can't even pronounce in our food. So, when we move towards greater transparency of what's in our food, how our food is raised, how it's processed, etc., we personally believe that overall transparency helps build and heighten consumer trust in what they're consuming and trust in the food system. So pursuing this label was not a hard sell. We remain excited about the certification and I still think we're the only Canadian company with the Certified Sustainability Facts label. Our marketing and sales folks love that label when they're presenting to customers.
We thank you for your support on this label. It's very interesting because the GreenCircle audit team went through from farm to disposal, the whole life cycle. As a vertically integrated company from farm to fork, there are very few people even within our organization, that have gone through what your auditors went through. From feed mills, to the barns where the animals are grown, through the the primary processing, secondary manufacturing, further processing, packaging, and then to where our waste goes, that shows the complexity of just one company’s supply chain.”
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ABOUT tim faveri
Tim Faveri is Vice President, Sustainability & Shared Value at Maple Leaf Foods. In this capacity, Tim leads the development and execution of the strategy and initiatives that deeply embed sustainability and shared value into Maple Leaf’s culture and business. Sustainability and shared value provide the framework for Maple Leaf’s purpose - Raise the Good in Food.
Tim is a seasoned business and sustainability professional and his specialties include sustainability strategy development and implementation; carbon management; corporate reporting / disclosure; stakeholder engagement; and supply chain and environmental risk assessment and verification. Prior to joining Maple Leaf, Tim was Director, Sustainability and Responsibility at Tim Hortons Inc., one of North America's largest publicly-traded restaurant chains and iconic Canadian companies.
Tim sits on the Board of Directors of Circular Materials Ontario. He holds a Bachelor’s degree (Biology) from Queen’s University and a Master’s of Health Science degree from University of Toronto.
