Green, ethical and healthy innovation

I've been at the Green, ethical and healthy innovation conference today. Here are a few highlights:

Alistair Menzies from Fair Trade confectioner, Divine Chocolate told the story of how they built a company which is 45% owned by the thousands of farmers in Ghana who produce their cocoa. Divine are growing at 20% per year; have increased the incomes of the farmers by a third and they're profitable, which means the farmers receive dividend payments. I think this is a fantastic example of using a for-profit model to improve the lives of the poor. And they brought along samples for us all so they're well and truly in my good books :)

Sarah McCartney from Lush harnessed The Wisdom of the Crowds by creating a presentation made up entirely of comments from the Lush forum where she asked Lush employees what they think about ethical and green issues. A novel format which worked well. The main take-home point for me was that ethical issues like fair trade, organic and the environment are really all part of the same thing. It's superficial and meaningless to tackle one and not all of them.

The nice people from Eat Natural wore pajamas and served us all breakfast from their new product range. And very tasty it was too although I can't remember anything of note from their presentation. Good luck with the launch though guys!

Emma Gotch from Tesco talked about their efforts to reduce packaging. They're well on track to meet their self-set target of reducing their own-brand packaging by 25% by the end of 2010. One example was sending coat hangers back to China. They recycled 11,000 coat hangers in a week from just one store which is quite staggering. The scale of Tesco makes you realise just how much waste packaging causes. I'm more worried about the other 75% of packaging that's still going into landfills. There was no mention of a long-term sustainability initiative to deal with the that pesky little inconvenient truth that we are consuming more resources than the planet can offer. Still, at least we won't run out of coat hangers any time soon. Phew.

Julia Clarke from Tate & Lyle talked about their switch to Fair Trade - the biggest switch undertaken by any British company which is impressive by anyone's standards. Despite the increased cost of Fair Trade, the retail price has stayed the same, and they are selling more volume so it's clearly popular with consumers. A question from the audience revealed that their their trade sales however are not Fair Trade unless a customer specifies that they want this (and none have) which slightly changed my view on what they have done. Can it really be an ethical decision to only go partly Fair Trade? Still, it's a big move in the right direction and they deserve credit for that.

Lisa Ohlin from Cadbury played the famous drumming gorilla video which I had somehow managed to avoid watching until today. Damn.

Comments

[Suki Fuller]

Thanks for being informative while being succinct. Look forward to hyperlinks (if you get to them) especially concerning Tesco.

[Tom Nixon]

Hyperlinks now added!

[Suki Fuller]

WooHoo!!

Cheers.

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