Speaker A
[MUSIC PLAYING] Our approach to social mission is to see how the business can use its resources—which is its people, its money, its energy, its innovation—and determine how we can make values-led business decisions that can create positive social, economic, or environmental good. In the beginning, it was just, well, let's just buy our dairy from family farms. But over time, we thought, we have to really build on that and really help family dairy farms reach a sustainable level economically, environmentally, and socially. And so we, over time, came up with a program that we call—now we call it Caring Dairy. And Caring Dairy has 11 elements to it, or 11 indicators—everything from soil health, water health, animal welfare, farm economics. Our goal is that this program will help the farmers to—on their own—create a more sustainable farm environmentally, economically, and, to a large degree, socially. We made a major decision in 2010 to make a significant conversion to fair trade certified ingredients. And so for fair trade ingredients, we source vanilla, cocoa, coffee, banana. But there's also berries, and nuts, and things such as that, and all the chunks and swirls that are finished goods. And we work throughout that entire ingredient portfolio, and we're trying to figure out ways to source those ingredients in ways that create benefits to those that are growing, and harvesting, and bringing those to market. We haven't gotten totally there. You've got to work your way all the way through. There are ingredients, such as sugar. So we're working with key stakeholders in the sugar industry, and with NGOs, and others that can give us good insights as to how we might make better values-led decisions in sourcing sugar. We wanted to make sure that the materials that we're using for the pint container are more sustainable. So we have FSC-certified paperboard. And that's the Forest Stewardship Council certified program. At the end of 2011, the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, signed a ruling that allowed us to take to the next level some freezers that we've been testing in the US. And they're hydrocarbon. These freezers are more climate-neutral, and actually much more energy-efficient. So this is the way we approach it. It's part of our business. It's part of our capitalism—all the way from the cow, to the freezer, to the container. And we look at all parts of our business. We never stop. Through a sense of linked prosperity, and being considerate of all the stakeholders, and making sure that everybody's making a reasonable profit along that value chain, that's just a model that can go into the distance and go into the future. [MUSIC PLAYING]
