A Sweet Year of Apples and Honey

Photo: jewishpub.org

This Sunday evening (16th September), Jewish New Year celebrations will be held around the world and in the best of tradition, everyone will consume quite a lot of apples and honey, the symbolic expression of a wish for a Sweet Year ahead. As global consumption of apples and honey will probably triple during the two days of the New Year festivities, I thought I would take a look at the sustainability of these two special foods.

Apples

Carl Sagan said: "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." which is a very sustainability-ish type of comment. Of course, don't confuse apples with Apple, whose sustainability commitment is not so clear, as Fabian Pattberg, our sustainability conscience, explains, following the flamboyant iPhone5 launch. But in this post I want to refer to real apples - the kind that grow on supermarket shelves that you eat after scrubbing them with disinfectant to remove all the pesticides.

Sustainable apples may be TRU EARTH certified, such as those at the family-owned Ecker's Apple Farm, and others are the product of scientific agri-innovation such as that practiced by Bayer Crop Science. Actually, the science of apple growing is called pomology. There are 7,500 varieties of apple grown through the world, which makes for a lot of pomologists. Apples are fat, sodium and cholesterol free, which makes them ideal for a healthy (but not so much fun) diet, in fact, they say that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, which is a good thing, unless the doctor happens to be your wife, husband or best friend. You can find loads of amazing facts about apples here. I even found on the web what looks like a very interesting Spiced Apple Ice Cream recipe, which seems to be the perfect way to start the Jewish New Year.

Apples, of course, being a popular food, are often stars of Sustainability Reports. Using the PDF search facility at CorporateRegister.com, I can find almost 2,000 Sustainability Reports that refer to apples (although some of them are the Apple kind of apple, some are components of pineapples, and one or two show up because they are mentioned in the word grapple (you'd be surprised how many times the word "grapple" comes up in Sustainability Reports. Wonder why that is?). However, this leaves the vast majority of reports with real apples, and while I won't mention the bad ones (bad apples, get it?), I will highlight just a few ways in which apples flavor Sustainability Reporting.

 

The Yummy Fruit Company in New Zealand supports the AppleQuest program by donating free apples to remote schools such as those in the Chatham and Pitt Islands - noted in the Giumarra Companies 2012 CSR Report.

The 2011 Annual Report of Club Mediteranee mentions a sustainable development partnership in Morocco which supports the professional development of fruit growers and the Village at Marrakech and made seasonal purchases of different varieties of apples and quinces.

  

Worcester College at Oxford University incorporated wildlife habitat into its garden design. They have an allotment and apple orchard (the apples are used to make apple juice that is sold at Waterperry Garden Centre in Oxfordshire). This is in the University of Oxford Environmental Sustainability Report for 2010/2011. So if you are ever incredibly thirsty and passing through Waterperry Gardens....

We even have a little blip about apples. Arla Foods 2011 Social Responsibility Report mentions that Rynkeby Foods added new details to the labelling on a blackcurrant fruit drink so that it states that the drink also contains apples. This change was made after a Danish newspaper drew public attention to the labelling error. The Power of the Press strikes again.

 

And General Mills Global Responsibility 2012 report recalls a little disappointment relating to apples: "In 2006, we launched Nature Valley Fruit Crisps. But the dried and baked slices of apple, with just 50 calories per pouch, didn’t meet consumers’ demanding taste requirements and were discontinued." Too bad. But maybe consumer taste has changed since 2006.

Enough about apples. Let's turn to honey.

Honey

Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers. Aha, but did you know that honey bees transform nectar into honey by a process of regurgitation, and store it as a primary food source in wax honeycombs inside the beehive. But don't let that put you off. The value of honey was recognized in ancient times when honey was known as a wonder-drug for curing almost everything and even embalming corpses. But don't let that put you off. Honey tastes great and there are several hundred unique honey varieties from all over the world. The good thing about honey is that,  in the honeybee world, females do all the work. That way, you know it's gotta be good.

 

Honey-bee raising can be a great activity to encourage Green Employees and help them become aware of their natural surroundings. This is the case with Novus International (disclosure: my client), who started a Honey Bee Project which remains very popular, as reported in their last Sustainability Report.  Another Sustainability Report (2011), this time from Greif Inc., talks about Greif’s Pollinator Habitat Improvement project. "Timberland offers the potential to provide clean forage for the bees that are vital to agricultural productivity and economic viability, while bees offer improved landscape health on timber holdings. Greif is working with Pollinator Partnership to learn how pollinators impact wildlife food availability on timber landscapes. We are also studying the added values of hosting honey bees and beekeepers on the landscape and the best management practice for ecosystem services on forest landscapes."

 

Burt's Bees, however, published a Sustainability Update in 2009 in which someone stole the bees, or at least that how it seemed, as they reported about everything but bees. Bees are one of the species affected by changing patterns of human behavior and consumption and climate change, linked to early pollination. Colony Collapse Disorder has become responsible for massive bee attrition, brought on by use of pesticides and other factors. The UK website HelpSaveBees makes an impassioned plea to do more to save the gradual extinction of our natural honeymakers. But the real reason we should all save bees is ... yes, you guessed it .... more icecream !!!!!!!! See what Haagen Dasz are doing to save bees. That Buy a Carton-Save a Bee campaign is totally compelling. Wonder how many bees I can manage to save in one day ? Enough said.

 

All that remains is for me to wish all the CSR Reporting Blog followers, all Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media friends, all current and future (!) clients of Beyond Business, and just about everyone that is celebrating the Jewish New Year (number 5773) :

 

A HEALTHY, HAPPY, PROSPEROUS, SUSTAINABLE and SWEET YEAR !

 

 

 

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, winning (CRRA'12) Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen   on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz  (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

21 ways to make your Sustainability Report stand out from the crowd

Inspired by this post on Geenbiz.com entitled  "I published my CSR Report. Where's my media coverage?", in which  Elin Nosewski offers some tips about how to get noticed by reporters and bloggers - mainly focusing on the report content, I thought I would offer some tips of my own on how to make your Sustainability Report stand out from the crowd. Here they are:

1. Call it iReport 4s. Everyone will queue for one.
2. Write it in Latin or Ancient Greek. You will easily capture all the very very very old people who read Sustainability Reports.
3. Include pornographic pictures. Porno is the most viewed content on the internet. Every second, 28,528 internet users are viewing pornography.
4. Have your CEO present it to Financial Analysts and Investors over breakfast in a London Hotel. They won't understand but they will enjoy the croissants.
5. Have your VP for Human Resources write the introduction. Now, that's original. That's how Lloyd's Bank did it in 2009.
6. Have the CSR Reporting Blog mention it in The Top Ten Reports of the year. (No-one one has been able to afford this, yet, but you could be the first.)
7. Print your report on virgin paper, destroying 347 Amazon Forest trees, and send it using the postal service to thousands of stakeholders. Greenpeace will make such a campaign about this that no-one will fail to notice your report.
8. Win a CSR Reporting award. That's how Vodafone does it.
9. Gamify it. That's how BT does it.
10. Write it in Braille. 39 million blind people will love you.
11. Turn it into multiple-choice test. It will be used in school syllabuses all around the world.
12. Offer an iPad to those who provide feedback. That's how OneSteel does it.
13. Offer a luxury weekend in Hawaii to all those who are prepared to use the weekend to read your report. Don't worry, only 4 people will respond. Your mom, your dad and your 2 kids.
14. Send out a Presss Release saying you have published a Sustainability Report. (OK, this is not a serious entry.)
15. Add disposal instructions on the back cover. Something like: Please dispose of this report in an environmentally responsible manner before you read it.
16. Fit it all into one webpage. This is how AHA! does it.
17. Use a sexy waitress to deliver it to male executives. See how Heinz does it with Ketchup.
18. Publish it on the web, then Digg it, Stumble Upon it, Slideshare it, Facebook it, Google+ it and Tweet it. Again. Once more. And again.
19. Employ a blogger relations specialist and create a bloggers corner blog. This is how SAP does it.
20. Make it all in videos. This is how Burt's Bees does it.
21. Accidentally on-purpose, call it your Annual Report. The entire financial world will love it! And financial journalists will rush to scrutinize it.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (Beyond Business, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Who stole the bees from Burt's Bees?

Burts Bees. Aspiring to be the Greenest Company on Earth. They have made a good start, apparently. The 2009 Corporate Responsibility Update of  their "very first" 2008 report, attests to year on year increasing revenues since 2004 , growth from 400 to 480 employees , increased post consumer recycled product in packaging, lighter weight packaging, and reduced use of PVC, total electricity reduction by 21%, total water reduction of 20% , and a "net normalized reduction" of GHG's (normalized means factoring in sales growth ) of 33.5% versus base year which is 2006 (though actual total emissions versus 2006 were 5.7% higher in 2008) .   Burt's Bees give preference to socially and environmentally conscious suppliers, spend 28% of purchasing costs in their home state of North Carolina, and 1.39% to minority or women's businesses. Burt's Bees employees contributed 6,006 hours of volunteer time in 2008 and 2009, and the Company donated cash of $295,500 to charitable purposes , and $600,000 of product . Burts Bees team members love their work (those who responded to the employee survey rated their job 4 on a 1-5 scale) and 30% of the Company's executives and senior managers are women. Burt's Bees employees have a great safety record and practice yoga as part of the Company's well being program. The Company is engaged with partners such as Habitat for Humanity and Teach America and a wide range of intiiatives for the benefit of the community.And relations with parent Company Clorox are quite hunky-dory. OK. So far so good. Many good initiatives from this sustainability spirited Company and clearly strong efforts to manage their impacts. Their decision to issue an update  demonstrates a commitment to continued progress and a degree of transparency.

The question I kept asking myself as I read this report-update however was, where on earth are the bees? There is almost nothing about bees in this report. I expected to be totally blown away with bees. I thought I would read loads of hive-tales, pollen-stories, honeycomb legends, nectar anecdotes and, of couse, tributes to the Queen Bees. I hoped to learn about endangered bee species, colony collapse disorder (mentioned in  the 2008 report),and hive restoration expeditions. I thought this report would be quite buzzing with bees. I thought we would be inspired with sustainability learnings from drones and colonies of honey bees. Burt's Bees  has come  a long way since its beginnings as a Company in 1989. I took a look at  the products on their website. My eye caught the Mama Bee Belly Butter which is targeted at pregnant women with big bellies (though I suspect Chunkey Monkey regulars could benefit too, mentioning no names) but to my dismay, it is made from cocao butter though cera alba is listed in the ingredients list. Cerra alba ? Yes, you guessed it, Beeswax. I thought I might order some  Baby Bee Bubble Bath containing vanilla exract (no chocolate chunks) but no cire d'abeille (Beeswax in the language of the tricolor). So I went to the Naturally Ageless Intensive Repairing Serum to smooth out all those wrinkles (especially now that I am appearing on 3BL TV), but again, bees extract gives way to pomegranate extract. So, I think Burt has some explaining to do. Is this a Company about bees or what ? Who stole the bees?

Anyway, bees or bust, this update is a nice chatty summary, even though there are many aspects which I found confusing. The time period covered is not clear - Fiscal Year or 2008 or 2009 or half'n'half? DIfferent dates and time periods are referenced and it is not always clear to me what relates to what. The data presented is not detailed and left me wondering in most cases about the basis for calculation.  Whilst the trademarked Greater Good Burt's Bees Sustainability framework loooks graphically impressive, I cannot discern how it all hangs together in a clear strategy or workplan in each of the different dimensions. I lack a stated approach to strategy - goals, objectives, targets - presented in an orderly way. This report is a collection of snippets of good news, which is good news, I suppose, but I would have liked to have seen a more consistent buzz. I tend to think this review has been sort of force-fit into the form of a Sustainability Update, pieced together based on limited bits of information availabe.  It includes an aspirational reference to the GRI (and a somewhat meaningless table of how the 2008 report (not the update) broadly aligns with the different sections of the GRI framework. It doesnt hang together all that well, despite evidence of  continued progress. If the Company plans to introduce an update every interim year, I would find it easier to follow if conceptually it were a little sharper.  

Anyway, its hard not to get stung by Burt's Bees, and to admire them for their contribution to the pollenation of sustainability. In the meantime, I will just bumble along back to my apiology-free  corner, where life is positively buzzing.

elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm. Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en