Friday 5: CBI, Oatly, Plastics, Isles, Ravenous

28 Apr

Written By Adrienne Lawler

Giles Gibbons

Good Business - Sustainability | Strategy | Impact

April 28, 2023

All change

The CBI (Confederation of British Industry) is on life support.

This week its president, Brian McBride, published an open letter to its 190,000 members after weeks of revelations about its culture and the behaviour of senior staff.

The focus has, rightly, been on the corporate culture of the organisation and the role that has paid in creating a toxic workplace – something that is far away from what it would expect from any of its members.

Can the CBI survive? That is very much an open question. However, what seems to be overlooked in all the discussion is whether the CBI in its current form is even close to what business needs today.

The CBI (Confederation of British Industry) was created in 1965. A time when the world of business was very different. Business needed a voice that spoke directly to government and one that had its interests at heart. And since at least the 1970s and the publication of Milton Friedman’s ‘shareholder primacy’ doctrine, those interests centered around the idea of shareholder capitalism.

But the world has moved on. The view of the shareholder as the only stakeholder a business needs to consider is being replaced. Stakeholder capitalism is becoming the driving force for long-term commercial success (even in the US with organisations like Business Roundtable).

Sure, it still makes sense to have an organisation that can represent the collective voice of business and help the private sector move forward. However, what that means in practice is totally different when the dialogue needs to be with multiple stakeholders (including businesses speaking to each other) and moving forward comes from delivering value in a more holistic way – a way that delivers profit and drives the economy, but also helps create a more equitable society and planet where we can all thrive.

Unless the CBI is ambitious in rethinking its role and how it operates, this will be an organisation that doesn’t make it out of hospital.

T-oat-ally oatrageous

If you’ve ever wondered about the negative publicity that an oat-based drink company can receive, then you should check out F*ckOatly.com, Oatly’s new and charmingly named website, entirely dedicated to guiding you through their most momentous failures and fiascos since conception.

It’s sarcastic, littered with profanities (we hope this makes it through your spam filter…), and doesn’t shy away from the hiccups and scandals that Oatly has confronted in its journey to produce oat milk. Their timeline begins with Glebe Gate – the drama that ensued when Oatly sued Glebe Farm’s Oaty brand for copyright infringement, and passes through the time they were accused of ‘ageism, insensitivity to alcoholism and being anti-farmer’ following a 40 second advertisement encouraging dads to switch out cow’s milk for oat milk. It ends with the current spread of misinformation around their products through TikTok, and a space for an impending ‘New Scandal Coming Soon’.

F*ckOatly is an entertaining read, and an eye-opening insight into the inevitable mass hysteria that forms in response to business decisions that won’t please everyone, even when the mission of promoting more sustainable, plant-based diets remains central to the way the business operates. Perhaps the progressive nature of the mission invites harsher criticism when consumers feel let down.

Oatly’s philosophy – that it’s sometimes better to face up to the hate to disarm it – is cleverly and humanely executed here. But if you disagree, and hate Oatly, and F*ckOatly, then you’re kindly directed you to F*ckF*ckOatly.com, a website which invites you to click a button to cathartically express your discontent. So far there have been 255,511 angry people, an impressive increase of 1000 while this article was being written.

Reporting on plastic, it's fantastic

We’ve been talking a lot about reporting recently. Two weeks ago, we published our first Friday 5 special exploring the current reporting landscape, how it’s changing and what to do about it. And this week we want to highlight CDP’s new disclosure module for plastics, incorporated into its water security questionnaire.

Why? Well, as the adage goes, if you don’t count it, you can’t manage it. You can’t find ways to reduce impact, manage risk and avoid the reputational damage associated with getting it wrong. And despite the growing awareness of the environmental impact of plastics, progress remains slow – according to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, of the 78 million tonnes of plastic produced each year, 32% is lost to land and sea, and 40% sent to landfill. Recycling rates remain low, and with 98% of plastics made from virgin feedstock, the environmental impact of the plastics lifecycle is significant: if growth in single use plastic continues at current rates, it will account for between 5-10% of carbon emissions by 2050. So integrating questions about plastic use into disclosures in a way that is consistent, transparent and comparable makes a lot of sense. For many companies, reporting on plastic use remains a challenge, with limited guidance on what to report and how.

Reporting has an important role to play within sustainability, driving the focus on what really matters: action to improve sustainability impacts. This new functionality provides the 18,000 organisations that already disclose other metrics through CDP with an easy reporting mechanism to disclose data on plastics. Right now, it is not mandatory, but we wouldn’t rule that out in the future.

This move from CDP brings plastics into the mainstream, following the path it established for carbon emissions, water use and forest management, and highlighting to management teams the fact that plastic reliance is increasingly recognised by investors as a risk. Where disclosure starts, accountability and ultimately innovation and improvement follows, so this is a welcome change.

Save our Wild Isles

If you’re a nature lover, you’ve probably already binge-watched the latest flagship BBC documentary series Wild Isles, showcasing the UK’s awe-inspiring natural habitats and wildlife. But what you may not know is that the series was produced in collaboration with WWF-UK and the RSPB as part of their Save Our Wild Isles campaign.

Our countryside has undergone drastic changes in the last 50 years, with intensive farming and infrastructure projects pushing nature and wildlife close to breaking point. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, and in the bottom 10% of countries globally for protecting the nature we have left. An SOS for nature, the Save Our Wild Isles campaign is a call to action on behalf of nature.

The campaign calls for action from everyone – holding governments to account for acting (or not) on the promises they made at COP15 and the policies they have put in place to protect and restore nature, calling on farmers to put nature at the forefront of their practices, and encouraging the public to speak up for nature. For businesses, this means putting nature at the heart of every boardroom decision, and publishing plans to become ‘nature positive’. Supported by big names, including entrepreneur and TV Dragon Deborah Meaden, NatWest CEO Alison Rose DBE, and our friends at Aviva, the campaign uses trusted influences to shine a light on why the nature crisis is bad for business and how businesses can help turn the tide for nature.

While ‘nature positive’ is a relatively new concept, and it is not yet clear what this means in practice, this campaign is a step in the right direction, putting the challenges of responding to the nature crisis in the spotlight. We hope this will be the spark that sets in motion the action needed to better define ‘nature positive’, allowing businesses to put nature at the forefront of their decision-making and help to preserve our Wild Isles for future generations.

Food for thought

Good Business Book Club: Ravenous, by Henry Dimbleby

The food we eat is killing us, and the planet. What should be a source of joy and sustenance is making us fat, burdening healthcare systems and harming the environment. Not a surprise: we know that ultra-processed food is bad for us, we know that there is an obesity pandemic, we know that modern farming practices contribute to carbon emissions and damage nature. But we don’t often stop and think about the connections between these issues, or consider that solving one of these challenges may mean addressing all of them.

In 2019, Henry Dimbleby was asked by the government to produce a national food strategy that responded to the question of how we can feed ourselves affordably without destroying our own health and the health of the planet. The National Food Strategy, published in 2021, was widely considered to be a thoughtful and creative response to this question, and yet, in Dimbleby’s words, the government response in 2022 was not a strategy but a “handful of disparate policy ideas” chosen for the fact they are relatively uncontroversial. His new book, Ravenous, feels like a pointed response to this failure of imagination, going deep into the challenges and highlighting the connections between them, and setting out a way forward.

That way forward isn’t simple. Changing systems is hard; changing a system as complex and essential as the food system, when there are so many players who have so much at stake, seems almost impossible. It needs regulation, so that companies who have already made significant voluntary changes aren’t penalised compared to their laggard competitors when consumers, conditioned by biology to seek high calorie food, exercise their right to choose. It needs innovation, and investment in education and support for people on low incomes, and creative policy responses and changes in land use.

Ravenous is both broad and deep – topics range from overfishing, food poverty, crash diets, the impact of exercise and food waste to marketing and behaviour change, geopolitics and fake meat, and while it’s all meticulously referenced, it’s also covered lightly and with anecdotes and examples that make it a compelling read. And while you may have encountered a lot of what is covered elsewhere, you are unlikely to have read anything that joins the dots so clearly and effectively, or which will give you quite so much food for thought.

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