Companies following product sustainability best practices are gaining benefits that include reduced costs, improved employee engagement and productivity, and increased consumer trust and brand enhancement.

A company may not know how it will achieve the more ambitious future goal but it knows it needs to be investing in innovation and motivating its employees to develop game-changing solutions. The longer-term targets also help ensure that the company’s short-term investments support lasting solutions, such as renewable energy or product innovations.

Just as companies evaluate their carbon, water and waste footprints, the CFP finally provides a tool that enables purchasers and brands to: benchmark and measure progress towards safer chemicals; recognize and reward suppliers for doing what matters most to retailers and customers; create greater accountability across value chains; encourage chemical information sharing; and provide a metric to compare and measure continuous improvement of suppliers.

Unfortunately, taken as a whole, the corporate response wasn’t aggressive enough, brilliant enough or visionary enough. The gulf between the scale of the challenges and the level of response is too vast, with too many companies still citing modest, multi-year reductions in emissions or water use as the sum total of their sustainability goals.

Engaging a group of suppliers through a specific product category survey is one of the most effective ways to tackle key product impacts, especially for retailers seeking to elevate the performance of an entire category of products, as opposed to select companies.

Companies should use World Food Day and the examples of these leaders as an opportunity to evaluate how they could strengthen their producer partners while improving the long-term food security of the communities they touch.

As Ben & Jerry’s and Seventh Generation demonstrate, having a clear direction that aligns with consumers’ values is an important business foundation. These companies have created loyal networks of consumers and employees and have successfully leveraged their enthusiasm in pursuing campaigns for political change.

However, exceptions aside, the food industry trails other sectors with only 47 percent of the food companies surveyed achieving manufacturing cost savings, compared to 86 percent of the survey’s overall top-performing respondents. Among consumer electronics and home and personal care companies, 88 percent and 78 percent of companies, respectively, reported securing positive results. The food industry’s shortfall in this area extended to all of the benefits studied, including employee engagement, trust and brand enhancement and other potential gains.

Walmart is a leading motivator for investment in product sustainability with nearly 80 percent of respondents that identified a retail-driver citing the company in an open-ended question. This was followed by Target at about 50 percent, Costco at 18 percent, and Nordstrom at 12 percent. Walmart and Target clearly stand out from crowd. These retailers’ priorities are trickling through the supply chain and influencing supplier product sustainability programs.

To make the most of this organizational alignment RB honed in on improving carbon, ingredients, packaging and water to meet this target and to keep the business focused on critical improvement opportunities. These four priorities shaped the program and the limited set of issues enabled faster training, tool development and integration into the product development process.