How to have difficult conversations about sustainability when people would rather talk about anything else

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“You’re spraying shit in the air! People can’t breathe!” Fidel Bauccio, CEO of Bon Appétit Management Company and my manager, is very excited. He’s speaking to the chief sustainability officer at America’s largest pork producer, who traveled to our offices in Palo Alto to ask why Fedele continues to publicly vilify them, especially since the food service company serves more than 250 million meals a year at corporate campuses and private colleges. Lots of pork from his company. Well, Fidel tells him.

The main reason Fedele should be chosen is the poor air quality in the communities surrounding the company’s farms. An industrial hog 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 work, waste falls through the holes. Pig waste is collected in large pits called manure lagoons, piped and sprayed onto nearby fields. Imagine a liquid that smells like rotten eggs pouring from the sky. This is how industrial pig farms deal with waste.

Fedele is in full swing. He’s incredibly passionate about these compost lakes. Before this showdown between two food industry powers, he spent two years on the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production. She brought him to North Carolina to see and smell this problem firsthand, and it left an indelible mark on him (literally, he threw away the clothes he was wearing because he couldn’t get rid of the smell). He looked into a lake of dung and watched its contents shoot up into the air. He sat in the living rooms of families whose homes were near farms—communities with high rates of asthma and cancer—and who couldn’t let their children play outside because the stench was causing them respiratory problems.

Those experiences changed him. So, when asked, and sometimes even before he’s asked, Fidel attacks factory farming in general, and the pork operations he’s seen specifically. It even names names, including those of our contract suppliers. As you can imagine, they’re not very happy about it. And so, here we are, in a clean conference room thousands of miles from the farms in question, while he screams about manure falling.

I wholeheartedly share Fidel’s outrage, and it is my duty to use this moment to make a difference for those families and those pigs – and take credit for my company for doing so. As Fedele continues to harp on the poo, all I can think about is how difficult this is going to be because of how incredibly unappetizing the subject matter is. There’s no way to talk to your customers about taking action on poop digs while they’re enjoying their lunch, or even after eating. Can you imagine sitting down to dinner under a poster about compost?

What is the address? “Was the shit from a ham sandwich handled safely?” This won’t sell any more BLTs.

Hence, of course, the unusual title of my book – it has become something of a mantra for me, representing, metaphorically, the larger struggle all businesses face with sustainability. The reality is that consumers and other stakeholders don’t really want to think about these things at all, and when I say “these things,” I’m probably also talking about sustainability in general. I don’t mean they don’t care, a lot of them do. But when I get into the details, the complexities, the difficult choices, and the excrement, even the most ardent proponents can lose the will to make the necessary change. So the trick for profit-seeking companies trying to build a more sustainable system is to gain a market advantage by doing something good, environmentally or socially, and then take credit for doing so with an audience with a short attention span. You can’t market compost at lunchtime, no, but you can’t let that stop you from figuring out how to move forward more sustainably.

This effort must begin by defining sustainability, a term I have already used half a dozen times but, as you might imagine, there are many interpretations. Once, while at a Sustainable Food Lab event, I was talking with a large-scale soybean farmer. “I’ve taken as much work out of my business as I can,” he mused. “I don’t see how I can make it more sustainable. Well, I thought, he didn’t mention the chemicals he uses, and I don’t have to worry about GMO seeds. We’re not talking about the same The thing is when we say “sustainable”.

Sustainability has become a buzzword in the marketing of everything, from food to clothing, from tourism to buildings. When I entered the common business dictionary, I heard two definitions that applied more than others (although I heard a lot). The first was “Meeting[ing] “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” a definition based on the “Our Common Future” report, issued by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. The second was “In all our deliberations, we must take into account the impact Our Resolutions for the Next Seven Generations,” from the founding document of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Both are nice sentiments but neither is sufficient if you’re trying to write a purchasing policy for chickens.

At my company, Bon Appétit, we’ve been guilty for years of being equally poetic and mysterious. We have used the slogan “Foodservice for a Sustainable Future” without being clear about exactly what we see for that future. When lecturing, 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. This impudence did not belie the depth of our commitment or the validity of our claims. The lack of a consistent definition of sustainability hindered me in distinguishing between Bon Appétit and its competitors who were also making broad claims, and also opened us up to accusations of greenwashing due to the breadth of the promise.

I’ve invited our employees across the country to help us define “sustainable food service.” We’ve crowdsourced a description that captures our team’s values ​​and the issues most relevant to our business:

Delicious, healthy and economically viable food for everyone, produced through practices that respect farmers, workers and animals; Nourish the community. And replenish our shared natural resources for future generations.

Now we have something I can test procurement policies on, and we can communicate to the world in one not-so-short sentence what we care about.

You should formulate 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, social and cultural aspects of tourism development, and an appropriate balance must be found between these three dimensions to ensure its long-term sustainability.” Not bad, but maybe, if you run an eco-resort in Costa Rica, you want to be more specific and talk about rainforest preservation and the economic security of the Kikuldi people.

Consumers and critics often think of sustainability as a shift somewhere that corporate executives can flip and simply pay farmers more for regenerative agricultural practices, or a bonus for a factory owner to use only ethical hiring companies for migrant workers, or a bonus for a mining company to ensure it gets mineral-free. From conflict. That a company could be more sustainable if it spent more on its inputs.

I’ve learned from my experience that the complexities of national and even global supply chains, competing priorities, and the challenge of messaging make making a company authentically green much more difficult than simply writing a larger check. Through my successes and failures in leading a nearly $2 billion company toward a more sustainable future, I’ve come to realize that there are, instead, dozens of little switches that need to be flipped every day.

As Chief Strategy and Brand Officer for Bon Appétit Management Company, I am the architect of the company’s approach to responsible purchasing. I’ve traveled to what seemed like the ends of the earth to build a brand based on sustainability. In my quest to understand the aquaculture industry’s complex certification schemes, I tracked shrimp from ponds in the Mekong Delta to a factory where hundreds of Vietnamese women lean on conveyor belts to remove the crustaceans’ heads, shells, and digestive tracts by hand. I walked across the border from Yuma, Arizona, to Mexicali, Mexico, to interview farm leadership teams formed to create a more equitable food system. It grew on the floor of a church after a march through South Florida to protest the treatment of farmworkers in tomato fields. I’ve spent countless hours in meetings in windowless conference rooms in airport hotels.

The hardest part of all this? Transform these experiences into actionable purchasing policies and powerful marketing campaigns.

I was finally able to commit to a landing that seemed impossible on compost: I improved our pork supply chain and, in doing so, built a recognized brand for Bon Appétit as a leader in the sustainable food industry. It took more than a decade of work, a series of small wins and big setbacks, and — spoiler alert — our marketing materials never mentioned compost lagoons.

Adapted from You can’t market compost at lunchtimeWritten by Maisie Ganzler, published by Harvard Business Review.

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