The Business Case for Sustainability: Lessons from 20 Years at Mars

Mars is a company that has stayed committed to sustainability even as others have pulled back from the conversation. They have a $250 million sustainability fund, a goal to cut emissions across their entire value chain in half by 2030, a net zero target for 2050, and they’ve tied executive compensation to hitting those targets. A big part of what makes their approach distinctive is that Mars is family-owned, which gives them the ability to think over longer timescales and treat sustainability the same way they treat R&D or talent: as a long-term investment in the business, not a line item to cut when times get tough.

In this conversation, Kevin gets into the supply chain pressures that made sustainability a strategic necessity, what Mars has learned from mapping their value chains, and why consumer demand alone isn’t enough to move the needle. He explains why you can’t sell someone both the problem and the solution, and how reframing these challenges in familiar terms can help mobilize people. And for founders, he shares what a company like Mars is actually looking for when new technologies come knocking. In a field that’s weathered plenty of enthusiasm and skepticism, Kevin brings two decades of grounded perspective on what works and where things are headed. So here’s the conversation.

Sanjeev Krishnan: Kevin, welcome to the S2G podcast.

Kevin Rabinovich: Thanks Sanjeev. Very, very happy to be here.

Sanjeev: Tell me more about you, your role, and who you’re with. I’m gonna keep it mysterious and let you do the reveal.

Kevin: Name’s Kevin Rabinovich, the Global VP of Sustainability here at Mars. I lead a team that we call Performance Acceleration. Which is basically about how do we make it easier, faster, less expensive, or maybe even more fun for Mars to make faster progress on all the sustainability goals and targets that we have.

Sanjeev: And how did you get to be where you are today?

Kevin: Yeah. Maybe somewhat uncharacteristically in this day and age I’m a one-company guy. So I’ve only ever worked at Mars. I started here after my first year at university. Went back and forth to school and work a little bit and then joined full-time. So I’ve been working for Mars for 32 years now.

The first 13 years of that I was in research and development. So I’m an engineer by background, designing and building manufacturing lines to make new products. And then, 19 years ago was asked to help figure out what this sustainability thing should be for Mars back in 2007, and have had the opportunity and the privilege and the pleasure, I guess, to watch it really expand from a question back in 2007 to a whole program today that goes under the sustainability banner.

Sanjeev: I think everyone probably knows who Mars is, but just what is Mars? What is the company just to root people in?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. So Mars is a very large consumer products company, is probably from a sector point of view, how you’d describe us. We have a very large snacking business, so chocolate confectionery, chewing gum. And then, as of very late last year, we’ve just completed the acquisition of Kelanova.

So we now have more of a savory snack business as well as part of that, along with a number of other brands. We then also have a very large pet care business, which is both pet food, so we have a whole range of brands, sold through lots of different channels, as well as the reason we call it pet care and not just pet food, we have a significant veterinary service business and some labs and diagnostic equipment that kind of goes along with that. So really the sort of whole ecosystem of owning and caring for a pet. We also have what we call a food nutrition business, which has main meal human food, so rice, soups, sauces.

Ben’s originals, Kevin’s Natural Foods would be some of the names that consumers might recognize. And Mars is all over the world. So we’re truly global. So we have something like 140 factories. Actually that number’s gone up by now, but I don’t have the new number with Kellanova in my head yet. But maybe 160 or something factories, spread all over the world.

Sanjeev: And privately held.

Kevin: Yeah. So we are privately held. So the Mars family are the owners of the business.

Sanjeev: And as we sit here today, the last couple of years, the word sustainability, the word climate, some of the buzzwords that are used have been fairly polarizing, I think, at least in America. What is your view of what is the business case of what you do?

Kevin: Yeah, if I can give a slightly roundabout answer that’ll work its way back to that. Going back to the why was Mars asking itself that question back in 2007, that I got the opportunity to start leading the answer to of what should the sustainability thing be? So the reason that question was coming up was rhetoric aside, it’s pretty clear from the science and the numbers and the math, that there are real challenges and constraints and pressures that business is putting on the environment and social systems. And similarly, we are exposed to many of those pressures in our supply chains because one of the ways we talk about Mars, at least the food product parts of it, is we are fundamentally an agricultural business.

We aren’t running farms, but we’re taking things from farms. Converting them, adding value to them and marketing them to consumers. And so without those farms, we don’t have a business. And so we are absolutely exposed to the external environment. So that really led to this insight of this is material to our business, particularly if you think about your business, not just in quarters, years, or five-year cycles, but as in the case of Mars, quite literally generationally, right? So we have owners who are thinking about the business they inherited from their parents and the business that they are gonna pass on to their children. So they are, totally aside from anything to do with sustainability, they are thinking about the business and generational timescales.

Which, ownership aside, I think every business probably, at some level, wants to think of itself that way, right? No business is thinking I’m gonna like kill it for five years, then we’re gonna shut this whole thing down. The vision is that it’s gonna keep going. And so I think that brings some of these longer time horizon consequences into the decision-making process.

And then ultimately in the case of Mars, what it led to was what we call the Mars Compass, which is something that you can find if you go to our website. And the compass basically is the owner’s articulation of what they want the business to deliver. 

And the compass has four quadrants. So one is strong financial performance, which is basically recent backward-looking financials. So same sort of stuff that any company would care about, total shareholder return, that kind of stuff. The next quadrant is what we call quality growth, which is a measure of how much of your revenue is coming from markets where growth is easy for lack of a better word. Markets that are growing fast, segments that are growing fast, products that are growing fast, and geographies that are growing fast. As opposed to markets where you are really having to fight and claw even just to hold ground on the business that you’ve got.

And the idea behind that is that more of our revenues are coming from quality growth. It’s a great leading indicator for next year’s strong financial performance. So that’s become a forward-looking financial metric. Then we get to the bottom of the compass, where we have two non-financial areas.

One is trusted partner, which is essentially a corporate reputation score gathered by surveying large numbers of different groups of people. And the thesis behind that is a little bit like the quality growth kind of headwind, tailwind thing. Are you a company that people tolerate?

Or are you a company that people are glad is part of their economy, community, country, lifestyle, consumer behaviors, whatever. And the thesis there is, the more people are glad you exist and do what you do. That will help you deliver better performance because people will be more excited about buying your products.

They won’t be looking for a competitor to supplant you. A regulator won’t be looking to make your products unappealing or whatever. And then the final quadrant is what we call positive societal impact, which is where we literally have the sustainability metrics such as reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

So the actual greenhouse gas score is the metric there. And so that’s what owners are asking management to deliver. And the thesis is that the best performance for Mars will come from working on all four of those because ultimately, at a strategic level, they are reinforcing. If you’re a trusted business, it’ll be easier to recruit talent.

Which obviously drives everything that you care about, is having the best people. In the very short term, you can articulate a situation where the money that you spend on sustainability this year decreases your strong financial performance this year. ​‘Cause clearly if you didn’t spend it on sustainability, it would drop to the bottom line.

You’d have bigger earnings, better cash. Sure. But there are a multitude of things that businesses spend money on, that if they didn’t spend money on it in that year, you’d have better performance. So you could cut all of your R&D spending, you’d make more money that year, but you’re not set up for the future.

And so that was really the idea behind this, that the money that we’re spending on sustainability is an investment in things that are gonna pay back. In the same way that investing in R&D or talent or training or any number of things that, if you were purely trying to maximize revenues and performance in this year, you would sell off all of your assets.

There’s all kinds of crazy stuff you would do that people would go, of course you shouldn’t do that. And so I think the insight for us really was that there are a lot of things in sustainability that intellectually should fall into that same category of, yes, it’s an expense on the P&L, but in a strategic sense it is an investment that sets you up for better performance in the future.

Sanjeev: Are you seeing data and science that’s making you, without being doomsday about it or apocalyptic about it, that says, this is gonna impact supply chains? The process will need to change?

Are you seeing anything today that makes this urgent, that you all have had a lived experience of supply chain disruptions?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. There’s very clear evidence that volatility in weather patterns impacting crops is a real issue. One example is we source rice for part of our food nutrition business in Europe from Spain.

So, the South of Spain is a big rice-growing region. But it’s also an area that’s prone to drought on multi-year cycles. And interestingly, in that particular basin, they’ve got quite a robust management program run by the government of like, how much water’s available, how many acres can people plant?

And a few years ago, after a couple years of drought, the water regulators said, yeah. We’re only gonna let half the acres…Actually, what they said was there’s only so much water available. Farmers then essentially planted half or maybe less than half the acres than they normally would, which meant there wasn’t enough to supply us.

And so we had to move sourcing somewhere else. 

Sanjeev: You’re seeing that in many different crops?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Not necessarily all as dramatic as that, but yeah,  it’s definitely a pressure. And anyone who works in agriculture is seeing, at the very least, increased volatility, if not persistent trends of more water, less water, and hotter.

Sanjeev: You’re trying to future-proof your core business and your expanding business. In what you’ve done since 2007, what is the future that you are contemplating in terms of agriculture or other supply chains?

Kevin: Yeah. Maybe the one thing I should have said about the compass that I didn’t was, so those are the four quadrants of the compass. In the middle of the compass is, in a way, what I think is the best part of it, which is The Mars Purpose, which is the world we want tomorrow, starts with how we do business today.

And the reason I like that, beyond it being like a kind of a fun slogan, is that there’s an agency implied by that, right? It’s not like the world tomorrow is coming. You need to prepare for it and figure out what you’re gonna do about it. It’s no, the decisions you make today actually shape the world of tomorrow.

And so in the context of future proofing, I think, there’s maybe a couple of answers to this. So one is we have a net-zero goal. We have goals on water and land, human rights, and circular impacts. And the way we have set those goals is on the principle of if everyone else who had a share of those impacts set the same goals and delivered them, and you added up all that delivery, it would solve the problem.

And so that’s like the mantra that we adopted quite early on for how to set goals. But the interesting consequence of that is, so if we deliver our net zero roadmap and GHG reductions, we’ll hit our goals. Mars alone is not really gonna move the needle. Mars GHG performance is not really gonna move the needle on the climate situation from a future-proofing and a risk management point of view. So that’s why we take on the challenge of also working with others and sharing our ideas and encouraging others and explaining our thinking to people and listening to other people’s ideas as well.

Because at the end of the day, most of the problems we’re trying to solve in sustainability, you don’t solve by getting 10% of the market to do the thing differently. We need 98% of the market to do the thing differently. And so that’s part of the theory of change to try and avoid the worst of some of what we can see coming.

On the flip side, one of the interesting things that happens when we get into the work we wanna do on sustainability is we have, I would say, progressively drifted away, at least intellectually, from the idea of, we buy commodities and whoever can sell us something in a bucket that meets the specification of whatever needs to be in the bucket, it’s all fine.

Because most of what matters in sustainability, you can’t measure it in the bucket. It’s something about the process that produces the thing, right? And so once you start learning more about that, you have to get more into your supply chains, and you have to understand more and relate more.

And in the sense of increased climate volatility or otherwise, knowing more about your supply chains and your value chains can be a strategic advantage now. That knowledge doesn’t come for free. You’ve gotta invest some time and energy in knowing that. So there’s a trade off there but I think we’re seeing some value in that.

And then, the other one, just to be completely transparent about it, ​’cause why not, is, because we do a lot of this work because we’re willing to talk about it, we get invited to talk about it on stage at Green Biz last week on a podcast here with you today. And somewhere there will be someone that hears this and goes, wow, that’s amazing. I wanna go work there. And at the end of the day, talent is the most important thing. ​‘Cause all the decisions get made by the people, and whoever has the best people in the long run wins.

Sanjeev: I think two buzzwords I like to use sometimes to describe this are beta and alpha, right? And beta, the way I think about is like that, this is how the market performs. And alpha is like outperformance, whatever strategy. You’ve been doing this since 2007.

Have you seen pockets where a unit cost perspective or surety supply perspective, where you guys have outperformed because you’ve had this lens, this part of this compass? Either because you’ve had surety of supply when others didn’t, or you were able to effectively gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace? Or is it still early?

Kevin: It’s still early. Thank you for the out at the end of the question. Yeah, I think, yes, it is still early. I think it’s also the case where at the level of, are we paying less per ton of cocoa or sugar or chicken or whatever, versus our competitors, I don’t know. And I don’t know if we would ever know. That’s the sort of information that would be very hard to, people aren’t publishing that and talking about it. But I think we are convinced of the long-term value of this.

And it’s interesting. I feel like I’ve already brought it up more times than I was expecting to, the talent attraction and retention value of this. And I think the other thing is, and this is maybe an unanticipated side effect. One of the experiences we’ve had, which I think for sure is true, must be true for other businesses as well, is if you want to ask questions, Mars is a big sprawling business all over the world.

Lots of business units, very complex. If you wanna ask questions that require rolling up financial data, we’re pretty good. If you wanna ask questions about the global business that rolls up something that isn’t financial. How many kilowatt hours of electricity did you use in all of your factories?

How many tons of rice did you buy across all of your businesses? Harder, right? Because prior to thinking about sustainability, there wasn’t necessarily a clear business case. For being able to roll up all of that data in a cross-business, cross-country, cross-sector sort of way. But for sustainability, we needed to do a better understanding of our footprint.

And one of the side values that comes out of that is recognizing where you might have synergies inside of your own business that you wouldn’t otherwise see just by having spend data.

Sanjeev: The other thing that I think about particularly with the consumer-facing business, people talk about like the power of capital markets to shift the world. And clearly, we’re seeing this with AI spend on one hand, creating a lot of vacuum of capital. On the other hand, it’s destroying wealth like we’re seeing currently in the market around software companies, which have been a darling of capital markets. But to me, I have a thesis that, particularly in the US, but globally in a consumer-driven GDP, you know, 70% of GDP is consumption globally, it’s at a high number.

Consumers are more powerful than capital markets ​’cause they are the engine of capitalism. I’m curious whether you think consumers are starting to pay attention to not just the product, but the process.

Kevin: Yeah. So our experience and data on this would suggest, and I should say this is for the categories where we operate, consumers care about this. It’s very clear. The survey data is unambiguous, and it’s a bit noisy, but in general, the degree to which they care drifts upward over time, right?

Great, strong signal. When you look at actual consumer behavior, purchase decisions, so on and so forth, very little signal. And there are a couple of possible explanations for that. So one is that consumers are lying about what they believe. Don’t think that’s true. 

More reasonable seems that they care about whatever it is that they’ve said they care about. But there are other things they care about more that are breaking the decision tree before you get to the point where recycled or not recycled is the deciding factor, or low carbon versus not low carbon is the deciding factor. And so that’s our hypothesis at the moment. And our understanding at the moment is that it’s price, it’s brand, it’s familiarity, it’s flavor.

There are all these other things that kind of break the tie before you get to that. It’s one of the areas that we’re still trying to crack is, how do we generate demand side value from the supply side work that we’re doing in sustainability. The other interesting thought there is in the short term, if you could figure out a way to differentiate yourself in the market because of sustainability, and capture share or whatever, great.

But in the long run, this can’t be a market differentiator. Because again, we’re not trying to change the behavior of 10% of the snacking and pet care companies and auto companies and every other company in the world. We’re trying to change 98 or 99%. And so if there’s a competitive advantage with the consumer strategy, we should all hope it is a transient one.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing, and transient could still be 10 years, and it could be a great thing to do, but structurally, that isn’t the answer we should be hoping for.

Sanjeev: I do think the opportunity for our audience, our community hopefully listening is how do you improve processes that at the same time can hit the price signal that the decision tree hits, or enhances the trust value or the brand value.

I think that’s really the opportunity of the next 10 years. And what I see, and I’m curious about your thoughts, is the advancements I see in biology, in physics, in chemistry, material science, obviously enabled by computation, is this sometimes false equivalency of hey, just ​’cause the process is good, means that the price signal needs to be higher.

And I get it, there’s a scale effect to the incumbent model, but how are you seeing the pace of innovation, and how do you predict what the pace of innovation’s gonna be? Whether it’s in packaging, whether it’s in ag inputs, whether there’s some things happening, in my opinion, secularly in biology, secularly in physics and chemistry, and material science that hit the process where it needs to be without sacrificing the price signal that consumers really care about in addition to the process being what they want.

Kevin: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s interesting about sustainability is that although there are some of us who have been kicking around this space for a few decades at a collective level the number of person years that have gone into working on decarbonization or water efficiency or circularity or whatever are still quite small compared to a lot of other stuff that we have worked on as a civilization, right?

The example I usually give is that humans have been building bridges for, I don’t know millions of years. Some Neanderthals knocked down a tree so that they could get across a river without getting their feet wet. And we’ve been building on that ever since then.

And there’s a lot of very mature thinking where the reasonable expectation of like, how much could you change the game gets pretty small. But in sustainability and decarbonization, there are still lots of big ideas happening all the time, with like step changes in performance, and I think that’s exciting and interesting.

And I think one of the other things that’s interesting is, in a way, you can imagine, and maybe I’ll stick with carbon for a second. You can imagine a carbon footprint as a sort of inefficiency in that to take carbon outta the ground in the form of a fossil fuel or as an input from a material point of view.

It’s hard to get stuff outta the ground. You’ve gotta process a bunch of it, and then you end up throwing a bunch of stuff up into the air, right? And if you can design a process that skips all of that, global GHG emissions last year were on the order of 50 billion tons. That’s 50 billion tons of stuff that got moved from somewhere and thrown up in the atmosphere.

That’s time, that’s energy, that’s resources, that’s money, if there’s ways to eliminate that. So I think it’s interesting to think about how solving some sustainability challenges, which in a way you could say is adding a constraint to the problem, because yes, it is, but because it forces you to look at another performance criteria, it can prompt and inspire different innovation pathways.

So super interested in that. Now, predicting the pace of it, if I was really good at that, maybe I’d be a venture capitalist. 

Sanjeev: What are the top three frictions? Like I often find in biology, the journey from R&D to like field or implementation is a long time. Is there anything you’ve learned that says, Hey, if you do it this way, you may save a year, you may save two years, you may like either in the positioning of it, like, Hey, don’t pretend everything is a silver bullet.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a great question. So maybe a couple of thoughts. The first one that comes to mind is that one of the things I’ve definitely learned over the years is it is very hard to be the one selling the problem, and the answer. Even harder if you’re trying to do it in one conversation. So if you want to come into a room and explain to someone they have a problem they didn’t know they had, but good news, I’ve also got the solution you didn’t know you needed to the problem you didn’t have, that’s a struggle, right? And so one of the things that we’ve definitely learned is finding ways to separate getting people bought into the problem and then having a conversation about what’s a solution to the problem. 

And sometimes that means you have different people or different origins communicating the problem and the answer. Sometimes it’s just time, right? You just say Hey, I think we’ve got a problem. And you just soak in the problem for a while, and everyone goes, yeah, okay, yeah, that is a problem. Then you go, oh, by the way, we have an answer.

So that, that’s definitely one is, don’t assume that because there’s a problem you care about enough to have invented a solution that the person you’re talking to necessarily cares about the problem as much as you have and is as invested as you are. That’s one. I think, in a related vein, the other one is that people have all sorts of problems they’re already trying to solve, which may or may not have anything to do with sustainability.

To the extent you can articulate the benefits of what you are doing to solve the problem that they already have, that’s another winner. The other thing, and in a way this loops back to the consumer thing, and this is more of an internal thing to the company that you might work at.

And this is coming more from you’re at a company that’s been around for a long time doing whatever they’re doing, and they’re trying to pivot to sustainability. One of the things that I increasingly spend more and more of my time on is figuring out how to make the problem we’re trying to solve in sustainability look like a problem that the person I’m talking to knows how to solve.

And so my example of this is I started working very closely with our finance team, particularly our controllership team, five or six years ago. And I had a conversation with our controller and said, Hey I want you to help us build a stronger, more robust carbon accounting system.

To which she said, cool, but I don’t know anything about carbon accounting systems, and so I’m not sure how I can help. And to which I said, oh, fair point. And we kept talking, and eventually where I got to is a different articulation, which is, I’ve got an accounting system that happens to be in a unit of currency you’ve never heard of.

There’s euros, there’s dollars, there’s yen, and there’s tons of CO2 equivalent. It’s just a funky unit you’ve never heard of. Forget about the fact that it’s a carbon accounting system. I’ve got a system that’s pulling data from all over the business, bringing it into a central place, doing a bunch of conversions on it, which are not entirely different than currency conversions, and trying to aggregate. And I went, think of me as like a low-fidelity, low-quality financial accounting system from some business that we just bought. And you need to get us to like an audit grade. And she’s ​‘oh, that problem I know how to solve.’ 

And so, figuring out how to take the things that we’re working on and twist them, five degrees left or right, where people go, oh, that looks like whatever the thing is that they’re already good at. Because what we’ve seen is in the same way that consumers care about this, and, you know, so do people that work for businesses, like the same person that says, yes, I care about this doesn’t stop caring about it when they get to their job. And so if you can give people a way to leverage the skills and the knowledge they’ve already got in service of sustainability, they love it.

They’re excited about it, they’re enthusiastic, but it needs that translation.

Sanjeev: So the currency of thermodynamics effectively was carbon in your case, 

Kevin: Yeah. Carbons not the only thing we wrote. I’ve given that example of, think of it as a funky currency you’ve never heard of a number of times.  No one’s ever made the it’s the currency of thermodynamics argument.  I’ll have to think a little bit more about that, but my spidey sense says there’s something there. Yeah. That’s interesting.

Sanjeev: And does your controller or CFO see that as, okay, because it’s almost like a tax expense that we could save money. People try to save money on taxes all the time. And so have they made the linkage of I love what you were talking about, which is, hey, some of this stuff is inefficient. 

Kevin: Yeah. There is some inefficiency. But I think it’s also important to be honest with ourselves in the sense of, most of what’s going on for sure in climate is externalities that a perfect or even a better market would actually price it. Because we are accruing debts and expenses versus the status quo that will become payable in the future. And the market doesn’t force you to reckon with that today. I think in the end, it will not be economically neutral to tackle climate change versus today.

I do believe it will be economically beneficial to prevent climate change versus the scenario where you let it happen. So versus the business-as-usual spending to solve these problems it is the right thing to do. But versus today, unfortunately, in many cases, it’s still voluntary.

Sanjeev: One final question on this topic, and I wanna get us toward the end here. Like we fundamentally believe that electrons, calories, energy density molecules are ruled by large incumbents, and they’re the tanker ships of our sectors. And we try to work with speedboats and increasingly medium-sized ships, and the pace of the transitions are really the incumbents.

These tanker ships move our industries. The thing that we talk a lot about is the speed of trust. We try to invest in relationships so S2G can bring that speed of trust. What things accelerate the speed of trust for a speedboat or a medium-sized ship with someone like you all, and what things decline the speed of trust?

Just maybe advice for our community, Kevin, around like, trust is one of your key pillars, but what things accelerate trust, what things lower the speed limit of trust? As as some of our community come with solutions to incumbents like Mars. Hey, here’s something I’ve worked on the bench, and it’s been tested for three or four years. Like, just advice.

Kevin: I think one of the key things is really understanding the problem or maybe the opportunity that you think your customer or your buyer of your technology or service, your product, whatever, like what does the problem look like to them as opposed to what you think the problem is or what the opportunity is?

And often there are layers to the problem that aren’t immediately apparent to you. So one example I can give of this is there are lots of people working on E‑boilers, replacing natural gas boilers with electric boilers. Cool. In practice, what we often find is that one of the problems that we have is not always, but often, E‑boilers are in a vertical configuration, whereas gas boilers tend to be horizontal.

If my boiler house has a five-meter ceiling. I’m gonna spend almost as much raising the roof as I would on the E‑boiler. And if all you’re saying is that you’re just looking at the boiler. Then, you’ll miss that, right? And so I think, recognizing what it takes to integrate whatever your thing is into the system that you wanna put it into, and thinking through that is a big one.

And that’s just one example, but that’s an example of showing that sort of recognition of what the needs of your customer are to integrate. I think the other one is not over-hyping or overselling. And obviously there’s a tension there ​’cause, presumably, you’re competing against someone else from a vendor point of view.

We all know that there is hype and inflation in some of the sales cycle. And I think the degree to which people can be more transparent and honest about it, sooner is better. ​‘Cause it’ll all come out in the end in the engineering. It’ll come out in the numbers.

Sanjeev: I think that’s very sound advice and something we’ve learned with lived experience working with a lot of incumbents and folks that dominate the industry. I had that experience 10 years ago, ​’cause I think you guys have been leaders in the forefront of this, and we worked on the algae side for a while with Mars, and I think that’s very good advice in concluding this.

So I wanna take you back to 2007. You get this role, what would you tell that Kevin in 2007 do more of or less of? What is your reflection of this journey, and then, let’s fast forward to 2035 Kevin, and just how you would think about where we come from and where we’re going?

Kevin: So, 2007 Kevin. I would say definitely early on, we started with a program that’s very structured around science, data, numbers, and performance. As opposed to in the early days, a lot of companies started with narrative and reputation and case studies, which has a role and it’s super important.

But I think fundamentally being focused on numbers, performance, and data has served us well. It’s also given us a lot of stability in our policy goals and targets point of view because, certainly, the science improves over time and you get sharper resolution, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.

And so that’s been super powerful. The thing I would’ve done more of sooner was really think about how to integrate this into the business. And we got to a good place with the compass that I described earlier, but we didn’t really start working on that until 2018.

And so I think that would be good. And I think right now we’re in a phase of realizing how we can better use all of the data we’ve gathered to help the business to drive faster progress. And so I think there is value that we could have seen and spotted sooner. But really, I think that integration and making this, not a skunk work, special teams kind of thing, but how do we make this 3% of all 150,000 people at Mars, not a hundred percent of a hundred people.

And certainly we’re doing that, but I think we could have leaned on and thought about that harder, faster, and sooner. But speaking on behalf of Mars, I think we’ve come a long way in the 19 years that we’ve been at sustainability now.

Super proud of our program. All the people that work on it, we’ve got ideas that we’re pushing out into the world because we’re doing it, and we think other people could do the same. And we’re also excited to learn from others. And that’s maybe something else I would say that I would definitely do again, is sustainability is an area where the degree of cross-company collaboration is probably higher than any other topic. There’s a hugely powerful and effective network of peers, even direct competitors, that work with each other. And I think that’s been hugely important. And I think the value of that network, which maybe is relevant to

Sanjeev: it seems like a culture builder

Kevin: and I think that could be relevant to your listeners, and the sort of companies that S2G invests in is the power of the network and being able to learn from each other.

Sanjeev: Well, Kevin, thank you so much for your leadership and for everything you do.

Kevin: Yeah. No, thanks for the invite. This was great.

Tonya: Thank you for tuning into the S2G podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, or share it with a friend. For more information or to connect with us, check out s2gin​vest​ments​.com.