Stonyfield Farm: Sustainable Supply Chain Helps Cut Waste, Avoid Costs
Sustainability wasn’t an afterthought for organic dairy Stonyfield Farm. Founded 30 years ago in New Hampshire, Stonyfield evolved from an organic-farming school supported by yogurt sales into a full-fledged yogurt business built on the idea that a company could be profitable while having a limited effect on the environment and supporting family farmers.
“It’s always been part of how we’ve done our work and how we’ve built our presence in the marketplace,” says Wood Turner, Stonyfield’s vice president of sustainability innovation. As the business has grown, he says, sustainability has become a productivity tool, helping the Londonderry, N.H., company avoid costs and waste in operations, and notably in its supply chain.
These days, sustainability efforts at Stonyfield include shipping large amounts of perishable products cross-country by rail as a way to be more fuel efficient, using plant-based plastic in packaging, helping Costa Rican banana growers work toward increasing profits by eventually becoming puree processors, and exploring a way to lower methane emissions from “cow burps.”
Most of Stonyfield’s effects on the environment occur in the supply chain, not in the plant, according to Turner. “Being engaged in the supply chain is really where the action needs to be,” he says.
Turner oversees Stonyfield’s “mission action” program, a multi-team effort to reduce the business’s environmental impact across the supply chain. The program has helped the company avoid $30 million in costs since its implementation in 2006.
“That’s real money,” Turner says, adding, “It’s also a driver for innovations” in areas such as fuel, packaging and energy use. At a time of scarce resources and volatile raw material costs, sustainability is an important part of Stonyfield’s strategy, he says.
Stonyfield had been trying to measure its carbon footprint for years before implementing its mission action program, Turner notes. In doing so, the yogurt and ice cream maker, which Fast Company this year named one of the top 10 most innovative companies in food, learned which aspects of the business were having the most environmental effect.
“The biggest impact in our supply chain is milk production,” Turner says. To be specific, the milk supply chain accounts for 52 percent of the company’s carbon footprint, he says. Consumer package recycling, in contrast, represents only 2 percent.
Learning the role of milk, transportation and packaging helped the company organize teams for the mission action program, which initially addressed those areas, facility greenhouse gases, non-milk ingredients, and employee impact at home and during the commute, among other areas.
No, the program has been integrated into the company and is no longer a “siloed” part of the business, Turner says.
Stonyfield has reduced its transportation-related carbon footprint by 36 percent since 2007, in part because of its use of rail shipping, according to Turner. “Rail is 11 times more fuel-efficient than trucks,” he says.
The dairy also works with its packaging suppliers to reduce its carbon footprint. The company was the first to replace yogurt six-pack plastic lids with foil, and also replaced fossil fuel-based plastic with plant-based plastic in its six packs, Turner says.
Turning to plant-based plastic in multipacks has helped Stonyfield cut its packaging carbon footprint by 48 percent, according to Turner.
The company also is working toward sustainability in one of the most complex parts of its business, milk production. Stonyfield, which buys from a cooperative comprising 1,000 family farms, aims to reduce enteric methane emissions, or cow burps. Methane is 22 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, Turner says.
Through its Greener Cow pilot project, started in 2009, Stonyfield found it could reduce greenhouse emissions while boosting the nutritional value of milk by changing the feed given to cows in the winter, when they’re not on the pasture. While the project is promising, Stonyfield has struggled to move it beyond the pilot phase because of cost implications “that aren’t necessarily savings,” Turner says.
The company is working on a way to expand the idea, he says, and also is looking into manure management. The company also has given small grants to farmers to help them reduce their own carbon footprints.
Stonyfield also is working to help Costa Rican banana growers become puree processors, so Stonyfield can shorten the supply chain to growers, removing the need for a third-party contract processor. While Stonyfield believes the move will help it manage and stabilize costs, the purpose is really a philanthropic act of corporate social responsibility, Turner says. It’s also part of a story the company can tell consumers, and Stonyfield hopes to expand its “small grower engagement” to other fruits, he says.
“We fundamentally believe in transparency in the supply chain,” Turner says. “We see ourselves as a leader in sustainability and we take that seriously and our customers take it seriously.”
While a very small team is focused on the company’s sustainability “hot spots,” some 50 to 60 employees are actively involved in Stonyfield’s environmental mission, he says. Consumers, however, generally aren’t as interested in sustainability as the company would like them to be, as shoppers focus on price, convenience and variety.
“Organic ingredients do cost more,” Turner says. “I personally would like to see more companies in the category engaging with consumers on sustainability.”
More broadly, however, Turner sees corporate interest in supply chain sustainability as “huge,” and cited Walmart’s work in the area. He hopes smaller companies will pick up on that mentality.
“I think it’s a big deal and you’re seeing more and more companies starting to think about supply chain,” Turner says.
