2Sustain

This month’s issue of Packaging World Magazine includes an excellent interview with Glenn Ventrell, director of packaging innovation and development for the Sara Lee Corporation.

Sara Lee, a global manufacturer and marketer of food, beverage, household, and body care products, generates more than $13 billion in annual net sales across 200 countries. The company has a longstanding commitment to sustainability, a dedication which according to Sara Lee’s website includes:

• offering a spectrum of products while keeping in mind the well-being of our consumers and delighting them with great products.
• supporting sustainable, economic, environmental and social improvements in the global communities where we do business.
• considering the interests of future generations when making today’s business decisions.

See Sara Lee’s 2008 Sustainability Report here .

In the article, Ventrell, who is responsible for overseeing the development of food packaging for all of the Sara Lee’s North American business, provides intriguing insights about the company’s goals and packaging processes related to sustainability.

For instance, he predicts that biopolymers are likely to become more important in sustainability efforts (remember Coca-Cola’s new bottle made from sugar cane and molasses?), and he also gives a comprehensive overview of Sara Lee’s Standard Unit Load program, which essentially called for the redesign of more than 1,200 items in order to optimize warehouse space and trucking.

“The logic in the past would have been, ‘The more I can get on one pallet to put on the truck, the more money I will save,’” Ventrell says. “The reality is that how much you can cube-out a truck is much more important from a cost and sustainability standpoint.”

Ventrell also weighs in on Wal-Mart’s Packaging scorecard.

“I think it’s actually had a positive effect. It gets you to focus more when one of your largest customers in North America starts working on sustainability, and then it doesn’t become a push from us,” he concludes in the interview. “We are both on the same team trying to get to the same end results, which isn’t always the case between companies, customers, and consumers. In the case of Walmart, they’ve got a program that isn’t all that dissimilar to ours. We keep other information in addition to the scorecard for a couple of reasons. One is for our own understanding of what we are doing. The other is in case other companies come along and ask for scorecards or ask for information, they probably won’t be looking for the same data. So while the scorecard is quite time-consuming on the one hand, it has had a positive impact on the other.”

P.S. Nice sidebar story here about a Sara Lee plant in Sioux Falls that recently won a company award as the top plant in the nation with regard to safety, quality, delivery, cost, and environmental sustainability. “You have to take the time to sit down with the people that actually do the work and actually add the value, to figure out what’s important in the business,” Ben Borkowski, plant manager, says in the article.