Personal Injury Law

Take-Aways from October 20 Webinar: Defining Sustainability and Getting Started

By Kenneth Odza

This week kicked off the three-part webinar series on bringing sustainable food products to market. Thanks to our presenters and attendees. The recorded webcast was archived and is accessible at this link or by clicking the image at the bottom of this blog entry. Click here if you just want to view or download slides.

Take-aways from the first webinar include:

• Darigold's definition of sustainability: Prosperity + Stewardship + Community = Sustainable Value

• Customers, regulatory pressures, industry leadership and vocal stakeholders drive sustainability.

• Engage sustainability by 'connecting the dots' in the food chain.

• Sustainability is not an event; it's a process and you need to select something that's core to your business.

• Build SMART (specific-measurable-attainable-realistic-timely) objectives around your sustainability goals.

• Keep your sustainability efforts tangible by going after low-hanging fruit (e.g., packaging).

• Use the same metrics (e.g., ROI and NPV) to evaluate sustainability projects as you use to evaluate other projects.

• Funding sources for sustainability food products: equity from investors, debt from lenders and government programs.

• Look at GRI standard as a guideline in developing sustainability key performance measures.

I hope you can join me, my colleague at Stoel Rives, Jere Webb, Alison Dennis from Burgerville, Roberta Anderson from Food Alliance and Ricardo Carvajal from Hyman Phelps and McNamara on November 3, at 9 am PST, noon EST, (live Twitter feed at #sustainlaw) for the next webinar as we discuss the following:

• Regulatory Traps – Current Regulatory Environment For Making Sustainable Claims and Standard-Setting Efforts Currently Underway,
• Avoiding 'Green Washing',
• Pros and Cons of Third-Party Certification, and
• A Restaurant Chain's Perspectives on Sustainability.

Live Twitter feed of the next webinar is also available at #sustainlaw.

Full post as published by Food Liability Law Blog on October 21, 2009 (boomark / email).