DALLAS — Approaching sustainability with intentionality brings many benefits, including unexpected ones, a baker and an allied supplier told a group at Nexus, an event jointly produced by BEMA and the American Bakers Association. 

The panel discussion — Sustainability in Baking — Pursuing Greener Practices — was conducted Sept. 26 at Nexus at the Omni hotel in Dallas.

Panelists were Justus Larson, senior director of operations, United States Bakery, Portland; Karen Reed, global director of marketing and communications, Kwik Lok Corp., Yakima, Wash.; and Charlotte Atchley, editor, Baking & Snack, Kansas City. The panel was moderated by Rasma Zvaners, vice president of regulatory and technical services, ABA.

Ms. Reed said sustainability efforts at Kwik Lok gave the company an appreciation of good work already being done.

“When we started really looking at the things we were doing, they were all things you would do for good business anyway,” she said. “But by pulling them out it became easier for us to see it and understand it, and to tease out more things that were not necessarily difficult but that we hadn’t been paying attention to. Then we’ve been adding more things.

“One of the best things about it was that by being more intentional and being more transparent, we are able to communicate about it more and better. It has been a really good draw in terms of trying to hire. We’ve had people who put in their applications because they wanted to work for a company that does these things for the community or is interested in working for a healthier planet. Those were not the intended impacts, they certainly were beneficial.”

Mr. Larson also said awareness helps US Bakery advance toward its goals.

“It was working with ingredient suppliers and saying if instead of bringing it in from other countries we can bring it in (domestically),” he said. “The sustainability aspect, if we can bring that all in and record that, it can become powerful. Then it’s about sharing it with our customers, whether it’s through social media or another way.”

For instance, the company reached its plastic use reduction goal a year earlier.

“It was awesome and important to make customers aware of that,” he said.

Sustainability solutions may be somewhat counterproductive if they necessitate changes that are not environmentally friendly, Ms. Reed said.

“We try to make sure that when we are creating a product to run through their machines, that it will actually run through the machines they’ve already invested in,” she said. “We understand that having a CapEx impact on top of a regulatory change is a lot. Finding materials that are fit for purpose but also run through machines people already have is really important.”

Accurately measuring progress toward broad sustainability goals around energy and water use is tougher than may be thought, Mr. Larson said. He was responding to a question about challenges bakers face in pursuing sustainability goals.

“One of our biggest challenges is how to measure currently from baseline to where we want to go considering our lines are changing all the time,” he said. “Each week is a different week, so we don’t have a nice standard baseline on energy use and water use because our product mix is changing. Fresh product is a majority of what we make, so if I measure this week and I measure next week, I have all the same equipment, but I may have different hours on the line or different items.

“So if you’re really trying to have data that end consumer can trust, if they can get a lot of data really quickly, it’s not hard to poke a lot of holes into it — what about this, what about this? How do you measure in a way you can track progress.”

Certain metrics are easier to track, he said, offering packaging changes as an example.

“If we are taking the inner wrapping of our bread out, or if we change the mill spec of the packaging, so it’s a little thinner, Eco-Lok or Kwik Lok, those are the easier wins,” Mr. Larson said. “It’s the bigger picture ones our customers really want to know what we’re doing, trying to make sure we’re able to track that.”

Recognizing the challenges bakers face, it is incumbent on suppliers to provide sustainability information with as much transparency as possible, Ms. Reed said.

“Sometimes regulations aren’t well informed based on science,” she said. “Many of our customers are science driven. They want to know what are my tradeoffs? If I move from your traditional closure, and I want to go to a different plastic or fiber that is at this level, what are the impacts on emissions? What are the impacts on water usage? How much less plastics will there be? We need to develop that data for the market and offer that to them. It’s funny, our product is really small. We are gathering that for our piece of the package. We know that our customers need to know that for everything they’re doing. The easier we can make it for them, the more we understand it ourselves, the more it helps us understand where we really need to focus.”

The panel discussion began with a high-level preview from Ms. Atchley of a survey conducted recently by Cypress Research for Baking & Snack magazine about sustainability and other initiatives by wholesale baking companies, ingredient suppliers and equipment manufacturers.

For all three, material recycling programs, waste reduction, energy use reduction and water use reduction were top priorities.

In the case of recycling, the percentage of companies with such initiatives underway ranged between 89% and 93%. For energy reduction, the figures were 74% for bakers, 92% for ingredient companies and 75% for equipment companies.

Lower percentages were recorded for areas such as humane farming usage in supply chain, supply chain transparency, heat recovery, uncycled ingredients, eco-friendly distribution/transportation and regenerative agriculture.

“Ingredient manufacturers are most likely to be interested in things having to do with the supply chain,” Ms. Atchley said. “Humane farming, supply chain transparency, regenerative agriculture, upcycled ingredients.