In Conversation With Bea Perez, VP and Chief Sustainability Officer, The Coca-Cola Company

Speakers

• Beatriz Perez, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, The Coca-Cola Company
• Kai Robertson, Director, Food, Beverage & Agriculture Practice, Advisory Services, BSR (Moderator)

Highlights

• Cross-sector and stakeholder dialogue is essential to identifying and resolving issues, and building and integrating a successful sustainability strategy.
• When pursuing ambitious sustainability goals, there will be times when strategies fall short of anticipated outcomes. In these instances, it is imperative to have tenacity, identify the problems, and try again.

Memorable Quotes

“It’s about storytelling, but not making up stories. It’s about getting the consumers that consume those 1.7 billion servings a day to drive sustainability to scale to make a difference.” —Bea Perez, The Coca-Cola Company

“We want to work with others to continue to scale and advance, and to make a difference, and we can’t do it alone.” —Bea Perez, The Coca-Cola Company

Overview

Every day, 1.7 billion servings of Coca-Cola products are consumed. A company with such reach can make a tremendous impact. To start, Bea shared some of her priorities, goals, and challenges as Coca-Cola’s new Chief Sustainability Officer.

Perez joins the sustainability team at Coca-Cola after years of experience as the Chief Marketing Officer for Coca-Cola North America. In addition to having a personal passion for sustainability, Perez views the role as an opportunity to use the marketing skills that she has honed to further integrate sustainability into the business model at Coca-Cola. Specifically, Perez looks forward to leveraging her strategy-building skills to expand the sustainability strategy throughout the company. Additionally, Perez has a wealth of experience in getting traction internally around big thinking and big ideas. The same skills will be necessary within the sustainability space, as Perez and her colleagues seek to motivate employees and consumers around ambitious sustainability goals and ideas. Perez emphasized that although she has the title, CEO Muhtar Kent remains the Chief Sustainability Officer at Coca-Cola. Such support from the C-suite is what adds credibility to the sustainability strategy.

Coca-Cola is comprised of 500 brands and 3,500 products. Each brand has a different personality and awareness level of sustainability. Some brands, such as Honest Tea and Odwalla, have already deeply incorporated sustainability into the lifecycles of their products, from raw materials to packaging. Coca-Cola works closely with its numerous bottlers who are integrated into its business to develop various sustainability programs such as energy-saving systems.

The challenge facing Coca-Cola is to create dialogue across the business to determine what the company is doing well, what should be scaled, and what needs to change. This requires that internal stakeholders such as government affairs participate in the dialogue. Another way to further integrate sustainability across Coca-Cola brands will be by focusing on four pillars of sustainability: water, packaging, climate, and community well-being. These pillars were identified through conversations with stakeholders on two questions:

1. What issues are integral to our business?
2. What do we want Coca-Cola to stand for?

Water: Water is not only a core ingredient to the Cola-Cola business, it is the lifeblood of the communities in which Coca-Cola operates.

Packaging: If 1.7 billion Coca-Cola products are consumed each day, there are 1.7 billion packages a day also being discarded. Recognizing the negative impacts of this waste, Coca-Cola is working toward lightweight packaging and improving recyclability.

Climate: Coca-Cola currently has 10 million refrigerators globally. If the company doubles business by 2020, it must be mindful of the impacts of its equipment on the climate. As such, Coca-Cola will focus its efforts on reducing its CO2 emissions. One way the company does this is by investing in innovative technology.

Community well-being: Coca-Cola’s community well-being pillar is focused on malnutrition and overnutrition. Perez will examine the roles that the brand portfolio can play in fighting these health risks.

As Coca-Cola works toward a set of ambitious sustainability goals, Perez emphasized the importance of learning from challenges and even failures. When planning for the long term, Coca-Cola considers the return on investment of its various programs. That said, business must take risks to achieve sustainability targets. There will be times when initiatives are not successful. In these instances, Perez urged businesses to identify the problems, resolve them, and try again. Along this line, Perez encouraged the audience to stay in communication with Coca-Cola around what is and is not working.