Adam Note: Thank you TraceGains for writing this week’s article. This week’s article is about sustainability!
Many in the industry see sustainability as the new organic — the new loca. There’s one glaring difference, though. Sustainability, when it finally arrives, will be here to stay. It represents nothing less than a seismic shift in the food and beverage business.
After all, the world’s population will probably exceed 9 billion by 2050, effectively doubling the demand for food, according to data from the WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund).
To make matters worse, “about 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted each year—four times the amount needed to feed the more than 800 million people who are malnourished.” With a growing population, those numbers aren’t going to get better.
Finally, estimates suggest that food production accounts for at least a quarter of global greenhouse emissions.
In October, CPG giant Unilever announced a two-pronged approach to reducing the amount of plastic it uses. To start, the company plans to cut its virgin plastic production in half by 2025, while collecting and processing more plastic than it sells.
They’re the latest in a string of heavyweights to announce such an ambitious drive toward sustainability:
- In April, Proctor & Gamble Co. declared 100 percent of its packaging would be recycled or reusable by 2030.
- Nestlé not only plans to phase out all non-recyclable plastic packaging by 2025 but wants to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
On the protein side of the business, the board of the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) announced in a press release earlier this year that it unanimously agreed to make the environmental impact of meat and poultry production a non-competitive issue among members. NAMI, which represents 95 percent of red meat processors and 70 percent of turkey products, is encouraging companies to actually share sustainability best practices. The group said it will develop a list of advisers who can help producers with problems, and it has an awards program acknowledging plants with strong environmental programs.
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Supplier Management
TraceGains’ suite of software solutions can help pave the way for both suppliers and manufacturers working to make the long term move toward real sustainability.
Supplier Management allows food and beverage manufacturers to manage supplier documentation with unique access to custom dashboards for critical documents including allergens, organic, nutrition, supplier/item risk analysis, and more. Supplier Management directly taps into TraceGains Network, allowing customers to request documentation from all of its suppliers with a single action. Conversely, suppliers can submit required documentation to all suppliers using TraceGains’ PostOnce™ technology.
TraceGains also recently unveiled a new sustainability form online that allows customers to evaluate suppliers to make sure the sourced product matches not only safety and quality specifications, but ethical and sustainable standards as well.
So maybe sustainability isn’t the new organic, after all. Maybe it’s simply the future of doing business.