Decarbonizing Commerce

On this episode, Keith is joined by Anne Coghlan; co-founder and COO at Scope3, the source of truth for supply chain emissions data. Before co-founding Scope3. Anne was head of product at Waybridge, a company created to make the supply chain for raw materials more efficient, resilient, and sustainable. In it they discuss the size of the emissions challenge in advertising and media and what the industry can and is doing to collaborate to reduce emissions.
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• Scope 3’s Website
• Anne’s LinkedIn

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Keith Anderson: Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce, where we explore what's new, interesting, and actionable at the intersection of climate innovation and commerce. I'm your host, Keith Anderson, and together we'll meet entrepreneurs and innovators reinventing retail, e commerce, and consumer products through the lenses of low carbon and commercial viability.

Hi, everyone. I'm Keith Anderson, and this is the Decarbonizing Commerce podcast. And our topic today is Decarbonizing Media and Advertising with our guest, Anne Coghlan, co founder and chief operating officer of Scope3. Scope3 is building a pioneering platform to help the advertising and media ecosystem, measure and collaborate to drive down emissions, and Anne, before co-founding the company, was head of product at a company called Waybridge, which helped, make the supply chain for raw materials more efficient, resilient, and sustainable, and her background prior to that was really in product leadership roles in the ad tech landscape, Anne is also, part of the Ad Age 40 under 40 list and before meeting Anne and getting to know Scope 3, I didn't understand the size of the emissions challenge in advertising and media, or what drove it, or what the industry can and is doing to collaborate to reduce emissions. But I learned a lot speaking with Anne, and I think you will too. So, I'd love to introduce you to Anne Coghlin of Scope 3.

Hi Anne. Welcome to the show.

Anne Coghlan: Thank you so much for having me.

Keith Anderson: Well, it's great to finally meet you and speak with you. And I have to congratulate you and the company on the name and especially the domain name.

Anne Coghlan: Yeah, it was a bit of a coup, I think, to get scope3.com, and certainly something that we were quite proud of to be able to name our company after a whole, a whole problem, a whole category of, the greenhouse gas protocol and really shining a light on the need to focus on supply chain emissions.

Keith Anderson: Well, that may be a great place to start. I think many in the audience are familiar with what the, the three scopes are and, what they mean, but maybe you can spend a minute or two, defining them and explaining why it was such a focus for you and your co founders.

Anne Coghlan: Yeah, absolutely. So, and also I love the fact that we're starting with some definitions that make sure that, that we get, we get those covered off at the, at the start. So, scope one, scope two and scope three emissions are the different categories within the greenhouse gas protocol as to how we talk about the, greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by, you know, as a result of doing business.

Scope one emissions are direct emissions. So the emissions that you have full control over, and then, you know, physical manufacturing companies, for example, that's, you know, as a byproduct of the processing that you do. Scope two emissions are indirect emissions from, you know, generating power, heating your offices, that kind of thing.

And scope three, which is where most emissions come from are the emissions of your supply chain. There are multiple categories under that things like business travel, employee commuting, goods and services, all of these fall under scope three for many companies, scope three emissions can be, almost all of the emissions, of a company, our company, we don't have any scope one emissions at all.

We don't own anything. We don't generate stuff. And so really, almost everything is scope three and so by focusing on where emissions are coming from in this interconnected world of, of industry, that's where we can really focus on how we help an industry decarbonize. And at Scope3, we're really focused on the advertising industry.

Keith Anderson: That was going to be my next question. You know, we're not talking about the supply chain broadly. We're talking about advertising. How big of a source of emissions is the ad ecosystem and how did you and your co founders end up deciding to start the business?

 

Anne Coghlan: So I'll take the second half of that question first, and then I can talk about how big advertising is. So, myself and my co founders, we've been working in advertising for a really long time, and specifically in digital advertising. I think it's interesting to think about the fact that no one really considers digital to have a carbon footprint.

I think when we think about emissions, as you know, individuals, as humans, as consumers, we think about and can relate more to this idea of something physical, having a carbon footprint. So, you know, you can see the end trails of an airplane in the sky. You know that you put petrol or gasoline in your car, like these things are really tangible and real.

And so thinking about the digital advertising ecosystem can sometimes be, you know, a little strange to think about something so ephemeral and fluffy like a cloud actually being server farms being powered by electricity. So like the company was kind of started because We've been working in emissions, sorry, we've been working in advertising for a really long time, and then we actually, the co founding team were working outside of, advertising with physical supply chain companies, so companies that were buying and selling metal and transporting that around the world, trying to understand and model how we could help those companies be more efficient, more resilient, more ultimately sustainable, and recognising that all of the physical connectivity, all of the modelling and mapping that we were doing could potentially also translate back into the advertising ecosystem, where we started to realise that there was actually a really large carbon footprint because of all of the electricity being used to, to power this entire advertising ecosystem. And to give you, an idea of the scale and size of that problem, it's quite hard to put an exact number on it. If you think about the, the number of servers that power the internet, I think some estimates are saying that the internet is about 4 percent of global energy consumption.

That is significantly powered by advertising, like advertising powers and funds the largest companies in the world, like the Alphabets, the Metas, you know, the Xs of this world are all, you know, funded by advertising. And so there's a huge, huge part of, emissions coming from the internet that is bactually this complexity of how ads are, delivered, how creatives or the ads, ads are, are made.

And, and that's pretty big and quite striking.

Keith Anderson: Yeah. I can imagine. And I totally understand your point about digital emissions being sort of viewed as abstract, it was certainly one of the areas that I hadn't really paid much attention to until I started discovering businesses like yours, companies focusing on ways of, decarbonizing cloud computing or cloud storage and, and the big one that I think has been in the headlines over the last several months is the emissions and, and water intensity of AI, I mean, as you, as you look at some of the disclosures from Alphabet and Microsoft, as they've invested so heavily in generative AI, the processing is, really driving resource intensity up.

Anne Coghlan: Absolutely. And I think it's that lack of realization that with these new innovations, you need to have a, you know, have a second eye on the environmental impact of those innovations. I think, you know,

when I started in the advertising industry many years ago and really focusing on programmatic advertising, I mean, it was so far from my mind. I didn't think about the environmental impact at all. I was just caring about trying to make the internet a bit better by making sure that good publishers were, making money from quality advertising and that users and potential consumers of brands were. Being found and being shown the right ad for them.

Did not think about the fact that for every single ad that is served online, there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of companies touching that transaction. All of the auctions that happen, all of the different computers that, or servers that get spun up just to do a tiny bit of computation. It is kind of mind boggling when you think about it, had no idea 10 years ago, but now we're in a position where as these new innovations happen, we can think about some of those second order consequences and realize that we should be asking those questions about what are the business benefits, but also what are the environmental considerations that we should be doing to make sure that we're not.

You know, in five years time talking about how, you know, everyone's carbon emissions have gone through the roof just because the number of servers that we've had to bring online to support the weight of this, where ultimately they're not necessarily dramatically improving a business KPI.

Keith Anderson: You and the company have published what I thought was a really enlightening report on the state of, ad industry emissions, and maybe it would be helpful, especially for those that haven't read it, just to take a minute and, unpack the ad ecosystem and where some of the hotspots are, you, you sort of set part of it up by introducing how many players, touch an ad through the whole life cycle, but I think it would be really helpful to understand, with what does the ecosystem look like and where are some of the levers that different players in the ecosystem can pull to move the needle.

And then I, I don't want to jump into it right away, but I would love to go from there to, okay, if we then came back to the business considerations. Where have we found there's actually win wins, in terms of, we can pull some of those levers and it actually saves us cost or increases effectiveness.

Anne Coghlan: Yeah. So we've released two reports to date trying to map out the state of sustainable advertising within the digital. The kind of headline number in the most recent report that we released, which looked at, 30 different countries, looked at, the kind of display inventory, as well as streaming video inventory, showed that there is 7. 2 million metric tons of CO2 E, being emitted on an annual basis, that is a lot. That is, you know, 400, more than 400 swimming pools of petrol that you would need to, to burn essentially. So significant amount of carbon going into the atmosphere there. And where we see the. most amount of emissions coming from is what we define to be the ad selection process.

So if you think about those scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions, and you think about it from the start of a, of a product, which is. The publisher trying to sell ad space to a brand. You start with the publisher. Their scope three are all of the companies that are involved in deciding which ad gets shown, and within, you know, programmatic advertising, they'll be working with tens, but sometimes hundreds of supply side partners who talk to each other, who then also talk to, the demand side platforms as well.

So this is kind of real complex web of all of the different players. And each one of those essentially like nodes in this, graph, also obviously have their own corporate emissions as well. So kind of adding in their kind of scope one and two into this, this picture. And so what we see is that ad selection process has a significant amount of waste, and redundancy.

We see the same players being called multiple times, so it's not just a linear supply chain. It's almost like a, in some cases, a circular returning supply chain, this kind of complexity that, I certainly wouldn't be able to justify having one of those if I was a publisher from a revenue perspective, because it is, seems to me to be so convoluted and so complex.

So what we see there is like a real lever in understanding that all of that from an emissions perspective is bad, but also great from a understanding where your revenue is coming from and how to maximize that too. So that's where we see kind of a significant, significant amount of opportunity from a reducing waste perspective.

And so we recognize that across the ecosystem, there are different pockets of publishers that are doing really well from an emissions perspective, often because they've had business goals that have been quite aligned to being more sustainable, even things like you care about your user experience.

If you have 20 ads on a page and each one of those is, you know, behind that is that huge crazy web that I just talked about, that's kind of going to be bad from a user experience perspective of number of ads that are there, but also potentially page loading. And, you know, you can sometimes feel your phone or your laptop heating up based on the amount of energy being used to actually load the site in the end.

We also see significant differences on the creative side, so the actual creative asset, of course, a video asset is going to be, more, energy intensive, than a, a kind of a standard banner, but lots of things that can be done there, lots of really interesting companies in the space, like a company called, SeenThis, who, enables you to stream a creative rather than download the full asset at the beginning, which is great from a user perspective as well.

So I've heard lots of different ways of thinking about the waste reduction, not just from a carbon emissions point of view, but also from an ultimately, a performance perspectiv

Keith Anderson: Yeah, and is waste reduction the primary lever can be pulled?

Anne Coghlan: I think from a publisher perspective, there's definitely this kind of looking at two axes, one in, one being revenue opportunity and one being, emissions. I think there is a really simple framing for brands when looking across the channels and across the media that they're buying as to what actual, slices of inventory are, on the whole, wasteful, so, you know, a site that's high emissions versus a site that's low emissions. You'll find a site that's high emissions could, you know, do some of their own, optimizations to be less wasteful themselves.

But even in kind of the more binary, like, do I buy this site or not? Lots of things to be done from a brand perspective where, we've been running, studies to show that they see better performance on pockets of inventory that are just generally higher value and lower emissions.

Keith Anderson: Got it. So I think we've done a great job framing the problem. Why don't we shift into what scope 3 itself does and how do you do it? Who do you work with and so on?

Anne Coghlan: Yeah, so, we started the company by thinking about how we actually can map and model the sources of all these emissions. So kind of those buckets that I talked about, the ways of being able to optimize to do that, you first need the measurement data, and you first need to actually be able to build out the model, the methodology, to be able to get to numbers that can actually be actionable.

So, we, in the physical world, we talk a lot about building a digital twin, so you take a process, you take, you know, shipping routes, and you take the way that different companies work together, and you build this kind of digital model of that so that you can play around and understand, you know, what, if you did X, like, what would the impact be?

If you did Y, what would the impact be? So we were essentially building a digital twin of a digital ecosystem, and we, open source our methodology last year and essentially provide to all players within the advertising ecosystem the opportunity to use the output of our model. So to use our data set, to understand what they can then do from a reduction perspective.

We also work with many players to offer up solutions. So our theory is that by providing solutions that are more sustainable for brands or agencies to buy, spend will shift towards greener, more decarbon-, like, inventory that's more on the journey of decarbon- towards decarbonization. And that will encourage everyone in the ecosystem to essentially be on the race to the bottom. And the only time I will ever say that a race to the bottom is a good thing, when we're talking about, carbon emissions. So, we provide kind of those solutions as well. And really what we're doing is, we are building what we're calling a Collaborative Sustainability Platform. So, this idea that all of the data across the ecosystem needs to be able to be kind of centralized and collaborated on in order to make sure that we're all talking the same language, we're all tracking towards decarbonization together, we're finding and creating an ecosystem of solutions that, again, drives that decarbonization, and we're doing that in such a way that we're reflecting the connectedness of the ecosystem without, without putting sustainability to the side.

So essentially bringing sustainability into the center of the conversation when we're talking about media outcomes.

Keith Anderson: and so you've tried to do that As you say, through measurement and introducing some new KPIs, what are the new KPIs that you're pioneering?

Anne Coghlan: So the first KPI that we've introduced in our reports Is GCO2PM really rolls off the tongue. We love KPIs. How many letters can we get into one? It's really the grams of carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide equivalents per a thousand impressions. So it's just a really good measure to start to understand and be able to compare.

The kind of value of inventory, but with a focus and a lens on carbon. So the lower the GCO2PM, the more carbon efficient, a domain is or an app or a connected TV device or a digital out of home screen whatever you can start to really compare, across channels, et cetera. We have partnerships with other companies also focusing on media quality and seeing a correlation between low emissions and, you know, other performance metrics. So, KPIs like the, carbon cost per attentive second, none of these roll off the tongue. But I think what we're, what we're seeing is that by including carbon alongside any existing media KPI, you're starting to see this nuance that by focusing on carbon numbers alongside whether it's a CPA goal or your return on ad spend, you can start to see different trends and start to recognize where maybe where there are areas of your media plan that benefits even more from bfocusing on carbon emissions?

Keith Anderson: So, am I correct in that the primary user would be the media buyers?

Anne Coghlan: We have lots of media buyers using our data, via channels to start to make decisions. Absolutely I think media investment teams also are using our data to kind of understand more holistically where there should be broad investment, into inventory again from a carbon lens, but yes, media buyers definitely focusing on, how to make buying more sustainable, and essentially adding another access to the decisions that they've been making before.

So spoke with one media buyer last week who essentially says that he takes our data on a carbon emissions perspective, overlays that with the primary KPI, works out what's high emissions and high performance. Okay, we need to lower emissions or maybe move spend slightly away from that because there's a bit of a trade off there.

If it's low emissions and high performance, like, let's go, let's put a rocket ship. And then if it's, you know, high emissions, low performance. It's a no brainer to cut that from the plan.

Keith Anderson: Well, and that was directionally where I was headed next, which was, how is the industry beginning to align and integrate some of your data with those conventional performance datasets? Is it happening at the moment, just based on the stage of maturity through innovators like intrapreneurs who are exporting data from your platform and merging it with data they already have or how is that coming to life?

Anne Coghlan: I think we're starting to see it. So our data is now alongside, you know, performance data in a variety of different verification platforms. So DoubleVerify, IAS, Ubiquity all have, many others all have, you know, essentially an omissions column that enables you to start looking at these things side by side.

I will definitely say that this is not a primary KPI, and nor will it ever be a primary KPI, but I think we're definitely seeing, especially with some of the more innovative, forward looking brands that have ESG goals front and center within their organization. Prioritizing sustainability and kind of prioritizing carbon reduction within their plans as something that, you know, is very close to, the, the primary goals of, of whatever they're trying to, to achieve.

Keith Anderson: Can you name names and if not, you know, can you at least profile what some of those innovative companies look like in terms of commitments and really what it looks like to lead?

Anne Coghlan: So, kind of zooming out from media and advertising just for a second. I'm from the UK, so I'm biased, but 81 percent of the top 100 UK companies have some sort of net zero goal, but that's scope one, scope two, usually scope one. Scope two is 2030, and then scope three is a little bit beyond that, and that's trickling down into the, marketing departments right from, from the CEO's office.

And what we see is, for many large companies, particularly FMCG brands there has been a, such a big focus on how they decarbonize their physical supply chains, right? How they decarbonize their manufacturing, how they, you know, make their products, lower emissions overall. When there's been a focus there, the marketing department feels like there's, they need to do something and they're, focusing on, what they can do across their media planning and digital can be a significant portion of that. So I think, MasterCard, said recently on stage that half of their spend in marketing goes to digital, but 80 percent of the emissions come from digital. So there is an opportunity there and we see forward thinking brands recognizing this and lowering their, their footprint.

It becomes a higher priority. And if they can get good performance. Then it feels like it's more of a no brainer. It's a kind of a double win. We did work with some brands, through a pilot with the WFA earlier this year. So, Reckitt, MasterCard, Philips, Diageo were part of that. And we saw this testing around reducing emissions and whether that should be, good for performance as well, kind of come to life and be realized.

And so those sorts of brands really kind of leaning in, but we see case studies coming out from some of our partners where our partners are using our data to help brands optimize. So AdForm, DSP has been doing some case studies. I think they released one recently with Vodafone, with Audi. So seeing kind of brands in multiple different verticals looking at this and recognizing that there can actually be quick wins within their marketing departments because something like, I know, changing your factory and that you know, reducing your water usage if you're a, an alcohol brand and making everyone commute in a different way is a lot harder than making some configuration tweaks that you can see the progress and the results month over month.

Keith Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing really similar and I, I think historically so much of the action has been really originated by sustainability teams and naturally to your point, their focus is on energy and transportation and the macro drivers of a company's scope one and two emissions, where I see things headed and what I think is so interesting and what we're really focused on is in all these conventional functions and disciplines, you know, you may as a marketer not be responsible for energy or transportation choices, but within your remit, you can reduce emissions, strategically and, and at least for the foreseeable future there's typically that low hanging fruit that you have highlighted, that is, you, you can recover waste, or you can improve experience or effectiveness with new data that helps you pinpoint, here's where the sweet spot is, and, I think in some distant point in the future, we're going to have to make even harder, choices, and it's not going to be, quite so straightforward to win win, but I think what's, opening a lot of people's minds at the moment is, with data like this, they can start to add a new layer to their analysis, and when you can do that, you can see, oh, this is something that's just a sensible decision any w ay you look at it.

Anne Coghlan: Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I think, yeah, we you always know that. If you're, if you're starting from a relatively high number to get to the average, if you're talking about benchmarks, it's maybe not that much of a work to do, and that's really hopeful and promising that we can actually dramatically reduce at the beginning.

You're totally right that probably in a couple of years time getting that last mile that last hurdle is always the most difficult part but we actually ran again can't name the brand but, specifically but we ran a test where the average emissions across this brands campaign were already below the kind of the median for that specific country.

So they were already starting from a place of, you know, being better. And they still managed to over the course of the campaign to reduce their carbon emissions by 9 percent and performance improved. So,what that shows is that even if you're actually on the journey and you've already been kind of putting best practices in place without even realizing potentially that there was this positive effect, there is still jobs to be done and there is still work that you can do to further enhance.

So, I think that gives me hope as well that, there are things that can be done from a low hanging fruit perspective, to use your words, bbut also when you're already operating your marketing department with significant best practices, with, you know, really good hygiene on all of the other areas of what it takes to run an effective media campaign, you can still do better from an emissions perspective, and it's not going to hurt.

Keith Anderson: Absolutely. And I mean, that, that makes me think about some of the adjacent or intersecting potential emissions drivers within media and advertising. How do you think about and what are you seeing in areas that maybe Scope 3 itself doesn't directly touch, but what other ways are advertising and media, defining and working on this problem?

Anne Coghlan: So one area that I've.Being more interested in, recently, is the production side of ads. So the production of a creative itself. The, the use of materials there. The use of, emissions from a travel perspective. So, someone was talking to me about how There was a, they ran, it's a European company, they ran a, a commercial for, you know, an everyday household object, and of course the, the shoot was a week long in South Africa, but it was in, with a green screen, so you could have done it, you could have done it anywhere.

So I think, thinking about the creative production, world within media, so that's something that I think there are, again, really interesting ways of, thinking about how to reduce and optimize, emissions and waste there, that flows in, just extends the, the supply chain out. I think, lots of work being done in that area, in the industry as well.

Keith Anderson: Is Green the Bid someone you're familiar with?

Anne Coghlan: Green the bid. Yep. Add green.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, that's, that's probably the closest thing I've encountered that's really focused on the commercial production side of things.

Anne Coghlan: Absolutely. Yeah. And I know that they're pushing for so many best practices, like you use a hard drive once and then you put it in cold storage and it has to be, you know, in a special place that is in a controlled environment that uses electricity. Can't you reuse those hard drives, for example, and lots of, lots of work and thinking being done there and in that area of the industry too.

Keith Anderson: I never would have thought of that, but that's a great great point.

Hey folks, this is the part of the show where we say thank you and see you soon to the general audience, plus and higher tier members of Decarbonize.co, stay tuned for the rest of the episode.

What do you think is next? You know, both for Scope3 and the industry at large, if you had to speculate or project the next three to five years, what do you think is on the horizon?

Anne Coghlan: With the competitive nature of the industry,

 I think sustainability is this kind of new one where we talk a lot about needing to be collaborative, needing to learn and share as much as possible in the open, because this isn't just about how we win business and how, you know, you grow market share as a brand, or, you know, how you beat your competitors.

This is about fundamentally the existence of not just the ecosystem but of humanity in the years ahead. And so in the next three to five years, I see a real need for a collaborative approach to how we take this data and drive action in a way that is beneficial to the future of the planet. Sounds a little bit lofty potentially, but I think really, really important to underscore that this needs to be really good for business, but also it really needs to be good for the planet, or rather humanity's continuing to exist on the planet.

I think the planet will be fine, whether we live here or not. And so we at Scope3 are really focusing on creating this collaborative sustainability platform. We actually opened up not just our methodology, which was last year, but this year our insights. So anyone can go on our website and type in your favorite app or website or connected TV source of inventory and or social channel and see, you know, what do we see, how good or how bad is, you know, your favorite news website from an emissions perspective, how can we showcase that, make sure everyone is on the same page and be driving towards more positive business outcomes together.

We just raised a Series B. We just raised a Series B. We just raised a Series B at Scope 3 of 20 million dollars and so we'll be using that to fund this idea of a collaborative sustainability platform and try and and create solutions for the entire ecosystem drives decarbonization as quickly as we can.

So in real, like, fast, fast tracking of innovation, recognising that this does have the opportunity for better media outcomes. So kind of a reimagined advertising ecosystem. You asked me, and we talked a little bit in the beginning about this idea of waste reduction and what does it mean to pull levers so that you're actually driving towards decarbonization.

We see so many opportunities to combine media quality data and insights with our data to show that by focusing on decarbonization and the reduction of emissions you're also seeing better outcomes overall, like three to five years feels like a long time, but it's really not especially when you think that, you know, we're six years and two months away from the 2030.

Keith Anderson: Milestone?

Anne Coghlan: Yeah.

Keith Anderson: Well, and I, I, I think a lot about the power of compounding effort and exponential either growth or decline, and how important it is to do what you can sooner than later. Because it's much lower effort, much lower cost if you do the right thing as soon as it dawns on

Anne Coghlan: Exactly.

Keith Anderson: you. Which is why, I mean, one of the big CPG brands just released their refresh of their net zero report and they had what I found to be a really helpful chart in it showing now listen, you're gonna see a lot of, commitments. 2030, 2040, 2050. Here's why the cumulative emissions are a lot higher if you wait until July 2029 to drop your emissions before your 2030 commitment and you know, I think to your point, the urgency is starting to be better understood, but, I think it's really interesting that you're, you're driving on the collaboration front, because it's a perfect fit with the name Scope 3, because by definition, nobody is going to be able to solve that end of things where the majority of emissions lie in a vacuum.

Anne Coghlan: Yeah, that's a great point. And I think it's, it's something that we've been doing a lot of education on. I see this a little bit less now, which is well, I'm not responsible for those missions because. I don't control them. Well, first of all, that's the very definition of Scope 3. Like, they're indirect. Like, but, there is so much power and leverage in recognizing that you do have options.

And you do have the opportunity to educate and drive your, your partners along that supply chain to be doing the right thing and to focus, and you can bring and pull people along. And so, yeah, I think that the collaboration piece is, is really important and also brings up some interesting and sometimes valid concerns from players across the ecosystem, wanting to share what they've done because they want to share because we need people to share what's worked, what's not worked.

It can't be competitive insight that you wanna keep to yourself if we want to be, to your point, making sure that we're reducing as much as possible as soon as possible. But at the same time, if you, you know, do what marketing, the marketing industry does really well and don't talk about the nuance.

Then you can get slammed from, from standards agencies around being accusive greenwashing and we've seen examples of that, so.

Keith Anderson: Well, yeah, that's intensifying, especially in your general region.

Anne Coghlan: Absolutely. So, a large bank was fined by the Standards Authority in the UK recently for talking about, you know, their green investments. There wasn't enough asterisk, asterisk over the, over the page of their ad around, you know, other areas of their business and I think that concern I have there is that there should definitely be a difference between greenwashing and greenworking, like we're working on this almost in a B2B context, like we're trying to do the right thing, this is what we've tested, this is what we're learning, it's not all about it being kind of blanket good and blanket perfect because we know that, there's so many labels that can be misleading. But if we don't talk about and communicate what is working because we are scared of it coming across as you know, the fact that I'm so great and, ignore all this other stuff, then we are at risk of going too slowly.

Keith Anderson: By the way, congrats on the series B. Is that public or are you breaking news on this show?

Anne Coghlan: It is public as of a little while ago,

Keith Anderson: Okay. Okay. I did a quick search and didn't see it, but, I, I didn't know that. So that's exciting.

Anne Coghlan: As in like two hours ago.

Keith Anderson: Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Well that'll, that'll create incentive for me to get the episode out a little earlier if I can.

Well, this has been super interesting, and, you know, I discovered your company when some former colleagues and friends updated their LinkedIn profiles to say that they worked at Scope 3 now, and the name caught my eye, and I thought, boy, isn't that interesting? Right around when I was planning to start a new venture focused on if basically studying how companies in, in some of these industries that we've spoken about and people in conventional roles are, are working in this area, I started seeing a pattern in my own network.

And so, I'm, I'm really intrigued by what you're doing and, appreciate you sharing so much insight. If people want to connect with you, how should they reach out?

Anne Coghlan: To me personally, LinkedIn, I'm pretty good on. To Scope3, anyone can go and have a play and see what we're talking about. It's open on our website and then various access points into talking to our team.

Keith Anderson: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, and, really appreciate you participating.

Anne Coghlan: Thank you, Keith. Thanks for having me.

Keith Anderson: Thanks for listening. I'm Keith Anderson, the executive producer and host of Decarbonizing Commerce. Sonic Futures handles audio, music, and video production. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you took a moment to subscribe and leave a review or share it with a colleague. For the full episode and more member exclusive insight and analysis, join the Decarbonizing Commerce community at Decarbonize.co. Thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next episode of Decarbonizing Commerce.



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Keith is joined by Caroline Buck, Co-founder and CMO at Petaluma. Petaluma is on a mission to create a more sustainable and humane agricultural system by using ingredients that offer optimal nutrition, reduced ecological harm, and humane treatment of farmworkers and animals. They discuss a plethora of fascinating topics such as her career trajectory from tech to CPG, the economics of sustainable pet food, choices about distribution, direct to consumer, Amazon, brick and mortar, and much more.
Learn more about Caroline:

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• Caroline’s Email
• Caroline’s LinkedIn

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Keith Anderson: Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce, where we explore what's new, interesting, and actionable at the intersection of climate innovation and commerce. I'm your host, Keith Anderson, and together we'll meet entrepreneurs and innovators reinventing retail, e commerce, and consumer products through the lenses of low carbon and commercial viability.

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Decarbonizing Commerce podcast. I'm your host Keith Anderson. Today's guest is Caroline Buck, co founder and CMO of Petaluma, a radically sustainable pet food brand. Caroline and I get into all kinds of fascinating topics like she and her partners Interesting career trajectories from high tech jobs into CPG, some of the economics of pet food broadly and sustainable pet food, choices about distribution, direct to consumer, Amazon, and brick and mortar, and much more.

It was a really interesting conversation, and there's even a cameo from my best friend Otto, who's also a big fan of Petaluma. So, here's Caroline.

Caroline, welcome to the show. Great to be with you and thanks for joining us.

Caroline Buck: Thank you so much for having me.

Keith Anderson: Well, when I discovered, you, it was through your, your company's food, which my dog Otto, really enjoys. And I just thought it was fascinating that you have sort of come from a background in software to starting a radically sustainable pet food company.

So I thought maybe we could start just by hearing a bit about, your trajectory, into CPG and specifically sustainable CPG.

Caroline Buck: I'd be happy to. Yeah, it's definitely not a conventional route. But as a bit of background, so my co founder of Petaluma is also my husband. His name is Garrett Wymore. Garrett worked in pet tangentially before this. So we have a, a more of a concrete tie to the pet space than, maybe it would appear from the outside. So both of us are working, in tech jobs. Garrett works for a company called Whistle Labs. They make a GPS tracker, it goes on a dog's collar, in addition to helping you find your dog when it gets lost, it also tracks some biometric data and can do some interesting things with it. And so he was responsible for kind of using the data that the whistle would throw off about, you know, how often is your dog drinking water?

Are they slowing down? Is that trending up or trending down? Stitching that together with some health data, particularly after Whistle was acquired by Mars Pet Care. Mars is the biggest pet food manufacturer in the United States. They're known to most of us as like the candy bar company, but they are quietly massive in the pet world.

They also are the owner, I think, of the largest veterinary clinics now in the United States. They have a very large purview into the pet world. And it's very interesting, for, for those not familiar with the pet industry, it's very dominated by a handful of CPG companies. So I like Nestle, Purina, Mars, Hills, maybe one or two others that make up, you know, 80 percent market share in the pet space.

It's a, it's a scale business, so it kind of makes sense in some capacities, but I think with the advertising you get these days, it can seem like. Other companies are bigger than, these behemoths, but they still largely run the industry. So Garrett was getting some exposure to the world of Mars, and to the world of veterinary developed, formulas for dogs, and learned about kind of this interesting, the, kind of the interesting reality of how protein ends up in dog food, is, can be quite strange, and also there's lots of really interesting applications for alternative and plant based proteins, if they were marketed properly, they have the scientific backing to be digestible and healthy sources for dogs, but they needed kind of these champion brands to go the extra mile of explaining to customers, you know, that the dog that sleeps in your bed is not a carnivorous wolf, so that was kind of permeating between the two of us, that was kind of percolating, that was in the air, we were talking a lot about pet food and, we're huge dog lovers ourselves, we have, one dog who's 11 that we've had since we graduated from college, and another dog who's six, huge dog people.

And I was working, as you mentioned, the top in tech I had of various startup tech jobs. Was interested in doing something entrepreneurial and it ended up being very related, but just was kind of similar to probably a lot of people who listen to your podcast. Had a just kind a overwhelming climate anxiety. I know I do something in the environmentally, friendly space and was kind of searching for ways to build a meaningful, meaningful company that could address maybe a, a less obvious aspect of reducing your footprint. I had cut out meat myself as part of that, partially because of animal rights and ethics, but partially because of this, just growing sense of dread about where, human accelerated climate change was going.

So if you kind of mash those two people up, you get Petaluma pretty quickly, but, it makes a bit more sense. Probably knowing where we were coming from, but it felt like the right moment to try to tell a different story about pet food. It's a really interesting space to make a difference in because it's mostly a marketing challenge, more than a science challenge. And there's a lot of brands telling different stories that can be very confusing to a customer, but that's, that's kind of where we landed and that's kind of how it came to be.

Keith Anderson: Well, and do you think it's going to take someone, not to say you're totally outsiders, because as you explained, your husband has some prior exposure and, but do you get the sense that. It actually will take, sort of industry outsiders to move at the speed and scale necessary to really transform the category?

Caroline Buck: You know, I, I, I'm kind of of two minds about this because of in the Petaluma world, like, I really do think it will take a challenger brand. I think it's taken that for pretty much every other CPG space to rethink itself or to do something different. I think a lot of the incumbents just haven't had the same economic motivations to change course, but if tomorrow morning the biggest CPG companies woke up and decided they were going to remove factory farm protein from their diets, which, you know, I don't think we'll ever see that happen, but if they decided that's what they're going to do, I would applaud it and be thrilled and be psyched that they were participating in a solution. I think a lot of these big brands have focused and set on investing in those upstarts and kind of seeing how things shake out. But I think, you know, pet food is unique in that it is like a scale business. So I think it will take some of these bigger companies. I'm hoping to see the writing on the wall and make some bigger changes, but I do think that the energy will come from some of these smaller brands who are challenging conventional wisdom a little bit or challenging these brands to do a bit better.

Keith Anderson: So you've highlighted marketing, which obviously is your role, and the company is positioned as being radically sustainable. What does that mean?

Caroline Buck: It's a great question. So I think, and maybe this is a bit of a bias or a perspective developed from working in tech for so long, but there's kind of a notion of trust, but verify in the tech world of like, you know, I'll believe what you say, but you have to show me some evidence that you're actually doing these things.

I think pet food is like a intentionally kind of obfuscated world where you're getting a processed product where you can't really tell what's in it and you're not eating it, your dog is. So there's like a level of distance between the customer and the product. So for us, that's meant being super, super transparent in terms of like what you're getting in this product.

So most companies will give you like, you get a nutrition label on the narrow side of the bag that will list out the ingredients. We know that being, being an alternative product or being kind of a newer brand, we need to go a bit further than that, so we post the full nutritional analysis from every batch that we make, we partner with other third parties to verify, like, the claims we're making from a sustainability perspective, so we became a certified B Corp pretty early on in our journey as a company, we're a public benefit corp, we offset through climate neutral, so we're trying to do these things that if you Google us and Google some of our impact numbers, there's someone else who has checked this out, someone else who is holding us accountable to these, either environmental, social, or otherwise standards that we're trying to set for ourselves.

I think it's a lot easier to set some of those goals and put some of those guardrails in place when you're younger and smaller. It's, I'm sure it will be a bigger challenge for us as we get larger to stay true to those values, but it's very core to why we are in the business in the first place.

So I don't, I don't doubt that that will deviate, but I think that's kind of our approach is to trust the verified mission of you want to know what's in this. We'll turn over a relief. We'll give you every study we've run on this food. You can see for yourself versus, and also like a bit, a bit of a different direction too, but we don't really make any claims about our food, which is not because we don't think it's a great food, but you'll see a lot of companies will say things like shinier coat or, you know, healthier dogs, but there's no, there's no data, there's no asterisks at the end of that claim, it's just kind of out there in the ether, so, you know, that probably hurts us short term, in a marketing copy sense, but I think that's part of the, kind of the brand we're trying to build is one that you can trust, because if we say something, it'll have a citation it will have some specificity to it or the circumstances around it, which I think is helpful for people if you are shopping for a product that is going against the grain a little bit. So you feel comfortable, you know, if you were to forward this webpage to your veterinarian, they can read it. It'll be in a language that they understand and they can double check it for you.

Keith Anderson: Well, and I remember, when I first encountered it, I was initially intrigued by the positioning and went to go see, okay, what makes it radically sustainable. And as you mentioned, it's a plant based formulation, which is relatively rare. But then, you know, it's also clear that you've thought deeply about packaging and the production facilities and sort of the end to end value chain, and I would tend to agree, it can be challenging as you go from, you know, small to big to sustain some of those commitments, but on some level, part of the reason I asked earlier about, is it going to take a challenger brand is I've observed similar trajectories, as you mentioned yourself, where it often takes somebody starting from scratch without any incumbency or a legacy of dominant market share and shelf space.

And I mean, inertia is a powerful force. And so if you're trying to do the right thing in a new and different context, starting over is often the fastest path there. And so I think it's, I often look to emerging brands like yours to see, okay. If you think of this as a sort of canvas for what would you do if you were starting a pet food company today, or over the last couple of years, you know, what would be the same and what might be different?

Caroline Buck: I totally agree with you. And I think one of the challenges that any legacy or traditional pet food brand would have is that the traditional protein used in dog food is so cheap, it's just so absurdly cheap, so it's very challenging, I think, to make a case, beyond, like, it's very hard to make a business case, I would imagine, internally to say, let's turn away from this almost free protein source that we are able to get as a part of the human food supply chain and move over to this very expensive organic chickpea protein.

Like why would anyone do that? Unless you have, unless you have another reason to focus on it or if you can build a case for other reasons, or I think it would just be really really hard. I think that the gulf between those two things, just from a price point perspective is I think probably too much for most people to swallow unless you're willing to to fight that fight, or unless you're really willing to make a big, a big swing. I think it would be a bridge too far probably for many of those companies.

Keith Anderson: For the immediate future I totally agree. Do you foresee over a 5 to 10 times scale things like agricultural incentives changing in ways that maybe level the playing field or if not level it, make it a little easier to choose protein sources that, have, you know, a different resource footprint, but are closer to cost parity?

Caroline Buck: You know, there's,

there's interesting things changing all the time within like the different markets for different ingredient suppliers. And I don't want to be pessimistic about it. I think we would have to see some pretty like widespread change in like what America grows. For price parity to get, become more of a reality, so much of, like, so much farmland is dedicated to growing corn and soy to feed to animals.

There's just like, there's some pretty giant uphill battles. I do think that demand for some of these proteins just amongst humans, or like, for example, like barley and chickpeas and peanut butter and some of these other ingredients are very expensive to use today in pet food. I think as people become more aware of the health benefits of those individual ingredients, or as there's more demand for, organic versions of these conventional ingredients, I'm hopeful we'll start to see the price difference chip away.

I don't think we'll ever get to a point where a product like Petaluma's will be at price parity with, like, an IM's dog food. I don't think we'll ever have, we'll never, we'll always be, like, on opposite sides of the aisle, for a long time, but I do think that there will be we won't be at quite the extremes we're at today.

If I maintain a little optimism for farming in the U.S and maybe some, some different government or otherwise incentives for people to grow different foods and have additional markets for those foods.

Keith Anderson: Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. And I believe I read on your site. The agricultural piece is part of the mission. Tell us a little bit more about why that's such a priority and how your approach is different.

Caroline Buck: Yeah. You know, it's very ambitious and probably a little lofty for a brand of our size, but it's something I think we're both motivated in terms of selecting organic ingredients. I think there's a lot of. You know, genuine concern about using conventionally grown crops from like a pesticide application perspective or other things that might end up in the food.

Which I don't think that those are necessarily bad reasons. I think the reason we've mostly tried to use as much organic as possible or more sustainable crops as possible is partially because the same reason like you might be rinsing your strawberries because they have pesticides on them, like someone is spraying that in gigantic quantities in a field and, there's some very real health consequences for the application of pesticides in the U.

S. by farm workers. So I think partially it's just to kind of like build in some of that social awareness This isn't just about, you know, dogs and the animals we take care of, like, the human aspect of farming, and the application of, like, wide scale pesticides for most crops in the US, has some real consequences for the health of those communities.

So it's something which we consider in the food. I think there's other good reasons to buy organic, too, beyond just that, but I think understanding the reality of how, how food gets to our table and who grows it is something we're just trying to be aware of. You know, if we're choosing between two ingredients, and the price is not that different, we're going to go for the organic.

Keith Anderson: I'm thinking a bit about the competitive context that you've framed for us. You know, a handful of companies have fairly dominant share of total category sales. Given your positioning and, what makes you different, how, how do you think about go to market and where to play?

Caroline Buck: Yeah. It's a great question and one that's evolving all the time. I think what's interesting about pet food is it kind of trails the human food world from a trend perspective. It lags quite a bit. It lags like, I would say, sometimes up to a decade. And we're still kind of in like, call it the like, paleo, keto era in dog food.

There's a lot of marketing about like, low carb, no carb, raw feeding, a lot of like, marketing tropes of wolves. Like catching prey on the bag. Like there's a lot of that still kind of in the air in the pet food world. And I think, for any of us who had friends who tried keto, like they're probably still not doing keto.

That was like a 2014, 13 phenomena that they've given up on. So in a strange way, pet food follows human food and pet food owners can be a bit fickle. If they think that something is healthier for their dog, or they find out that their dog is really into something, you know, they are willing to try new things, which I think is interesting.

Perhaps because if you're, you know, if you're thinking about the health conscious pet owner, it's a lot harder if you're trying to change, say, your children's diet, they have to, you know, they're going to give you a lot of feedback about it. It might be hard to stick to because of convenience or taste preferences or otherwise, if a dog likes something and they're doing well on it, people are unlikely to change that.

Like if their dog likes it, they can make a big swing from a dietary perspective, without needing to make a sacrifice themselves. It's something that I talk about a lot with customers of ours too, like it's really hard for some people to give up animal protein. It's not that hard for your dog to do it.

If you're thinking about like the overall household, your dog is eating like a similar amount of calories to a person. So I think the marketing of it has to kind of like meet people where they are. I think because we are still in this kind of, maybe trailing off paleo era for dogs. We've, we've probably been in it for, for a while now, but because we're kind of there, I think that's a lot of the messages that people have currently, that that's the right way to feed their dog.

I do think though, that as the trend, the trend, which I hesitate to even call it that, of eating more sustainably, eating more plants, eating more whole foods, eating less processed foods, I think as that becomes, a bigger and bigger part of the American consciousness, that will trickle into dog food. It has trickled into dog food. I think it has a bit more staying power as a, both a diet and, trend. So

I think where I currently am as a marketer of this is I'm, I'm conscious of those, conscious of the fact that most people have been fed like a half century of marketing that their dog is basically a wolf with a collar on, and they have been, have certain expectations about what they should, should and should not eat. And we kind of need to have some empathy that that's what they're going to be working with. That's what they're going to be used to. But I hope that as kind of the scientific basis for this, these types of diets continues to build, as people kind of drop some of these kind of like, outdated, kind of like Eagle Scout imagery about pet food, we can be a little bit more aggressive in the marketing and we can be a little more specific in it, but I think for now, we're kind of keeping this, like, you can trust us because we'll show you our homework, style of marketing.

Keith Anderson: Sure. Well, my sense is, I mean, you've got veterinary support for the, you know, nutrient profile and, health implications of feeding a plant based diet to the dog. And you've got the life cycle analysis and some of the other, evidence for the lower resource intensity and lower footprint. So, I mean, earlier you said you don't make claims.

I would say you don't make the same kind of claims that you typically see at the shelf, but I think there are some some positioning claims that help differentiate.

Caroline Buck: Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think in the world of, it's kind of, it's kind of similar to human health and like, you could almost find a doctor who will say anything. But you won't find very many cardiologists who will say anything. Like, there are a few rogue cardiologists roving around the internet or espousing some wacky diets. But for the most part, they are not advocating for all diets. They are advocating for a more specific diet or for, if you're conscious of heart health, for example. I think that's what we're trying to achieve by working with veterinary nutritionists, like, they have specialized degrees in nutrition beyond, like, the clinical vet who may have had, like, one semester of coursework in nutrition, and veterinarians have to learn about every single type of animal, and if they are learning about nutrition, it's often in the context of, like, large scale feeding lots and not the same as your dog, so I try to make that distinction with people, too, like, you could find me I don't mean this to sound overly dismissive to veterinarians, but you can find a veterinarian who would endorse, like, any number of products, but I think it's really important if you're, if you're in the market for dog food to see, like, the letters after their name, or to find, someone who's built their career in the nutrition space specifically, because they're going to be looking to hit some very specific parameters, and it's a, it's a bit of a different standard than your clinical vet, but something that your clinical vet would obviously understand and appreciate if you were to bring it to them.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, that makes sense. And am I correct? I know that you began direct to consumer. And

Caroline Buck: Yes.

Keith Anderson: it looks like you've got some brick and mortar distribution. You know, what, what has it been like starting a direct to consumer and growing that way, where do you think you'll end up in three years?

Caroline Buck: That's a great question. I mean, I think it was mostly our own bias, between my co founder and myself having worked mostly in digital companies and felt like the way to go. We didn't have experience in brick and mortar. It's kind of its own beast. It's very expensive for a lot of brands. It's really expensive for pet food where there's lower margins than conventional products.

So for us, it just felt especially launching this product during COVID, this is a predictable product that people want on a certain schedule. It's annoying to buy, it's heavy, it's bulky, it's not something you can, like, tuck under your arm easily and walk home from the store with. So for a lot of people, they just want to buy it that way, so that was, that was where we started.

We do have limited distribution in some natural grocery stores. There's one in L. A. called Erewhon. We're in their stores. Just knowing that, you know, where we have our pockets of customer bases, that those are places for people to discover us. But for now, we're mostly thinking of retail as a discovery point versus, a main channel to buy.

We see people who buy things in those, select stores, and then they end up subscribing online just out of the sheer convenience. I think it's a just a natural, convenient subscription products, but I, I don't think we'd rule out retail. I think retail is always changing and there's different opportunities for brands.

So I, I won't count it out, but I think for now it, it just seems to just make a ton of sense for what our customer is asking for beyond like the use case of someone's on a road trip and they wish we were at Petco. It's usually more convenient for people to just get it on the schedule to their doorstep.

Keith Anderson: Totally. I mean, when you were talking earlier about the feedback loops and how they're different between kids and dogs, 10 or 15 years ago, we were analyzing, in my consulting days, why different categories were migrating online at different speeds and to your point, two of the big drivers of pet, which was actually further on the adoption curve than many CPG categories, the weight of, you know, the 40 or 50 pound bags was a big one, so people felt like they were hacking the system if they could have somebody else bring that heavy bag to their doorstep instead of loading it into the trunk and doing it all themselves.

And secondly, the subscription point. I mean the subscribe and save model, you know, has really proliferated since those days, but pet was one of the categories where it just makes a ton of sense. And one of the things I find so interesting about it, in contrast to the increasing same day, next day, used to be two day delivery, predictable, low speed shipping is a lot lower emission and can be lower cost also in terms of, you know, freight and logistics.

So I think there's also upside in a category like that, like this, where you can, you can lock people in because they're not going to want to switch and substitute, unless they encounter something.

Caroline Buck: Right. Yeah. Totally agree. We've. We've dabbled in a few different career models too that we've had some success with, where because of the weight and the price point, it's a decent fit for these kind of micro fulfillment centers, where you're not actually putting in a cardboard box, you're just delivering it to the doorstep.

We've found some success with those, but I think to your point, like, if you have, if you have a subscriber who's on like a, you know, seven week cadence, we don't need to ship it the day before it needs to get there. We have a pretty good window to get that back to them and there's not, you know, there's not a need to have this like expedited shipping model, which can be a challenge.

I think we've, we've been, it's a perpetual operational question and something we're always tweaking to try to improve the ship speed by having warehouses in different locations and kind of moving around as our customers distribute themselves. But it's just a challenge, Amazon and Chewy have really trained people to get that next day arrival when they buy something, especially in the pet category.

So I think that's something that's a reality of the space that we have to kind of grapple with that maybe unlike some other categories, people just really expect pet food to come fast.

Keith Anderson: I mean, I think in many categories they do, unless they're on subscription, in which case, to your point, then it's set it and forget it. How do you think about Amazon and Chewy in terms of distribution?

Caroline Buck: So we, we have our treats on Amazon. We have not put our food on Amazon. We are not on Chewy. You know, I think it's interesting to kind of our earlier conversation around retail. Most of the, like, there's kind of a really specific ladder that most people expect you to go through for pet. They expect you to sell to like boutiques, then to regional pet, then maybe to like larger regional pet, and then to like a Petco, and then to a Chewy.

And so a lot of the people further down that chain won't even speak with you, if you're on Chewy, or they will be really finicky about it, or expect you to pull off of Chewy if you're selling in their stores, because I think they've really been hurt by the rise of Chewy, and are really conscious of, you know, maybe some window shopping that happens in their store, people are ultimately buying online.

So I think from a like a strategy perspective, we've avoided those places. I think they're also, it's really hard for most small brands to have a healthy margin on those platforms. They take a fair amount from you as a brand. But I think, like, I think beyond maybe some environmental, like, headaches that I have with Amazon and Chewy, I think, like, in general, as a marketer, you want to be wherever people are shopping.

So I'm sure it will make sense for us at some stage to just be available on some of these channels. I've been frustrated with Amazon, like, personally for a long time with their, like, kind of I'll say like flimsy climate efforts. At least as a shopper, they've created some spaces within the platform that give you a lot of like back padding for having right sized packaging, but don't do anything about the products themselves.

So there's, I think for a lot of people, they have like a lot of, hand wringing about launching on Amazon. But I think at the end of the day, it's a great experience. People are searching for your keywords. It's a high volume browser that people want to be in, but we're probably, we're, we're very much like tiptoeing our way in versus diving straight into something like an Amazon and Chewy is probably pretty far down the line for us.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, yeah, I think, especially from a search and discovery point of view, to your point, I think it makes sense to have at least a brand present in some capacity, particularly given what differentiates this type of product or this type of brand and the affinity shopper that, that is trying to find you and that you're trying to find, uh,

Caroline Buck: Right.

Keith Anderson: It's interesting Amazon, in their most recent sustainability report, they disclosed they're going to start collecting more, data from suppliers and pressuring suppliers more and, I just think it's going to be a fascinating 6 or 12 months ahead as they start involving their supply chain a bit more in, in, what they're doing, because to your point, I mean, so much of the footprint is up and down the value chain and they in many ways, have done more than other retailers, but I think, in many ways, It hasn't been fast or enough.

And I think starting to engage, hey, here's how we want to align and coordinate with some of our partners is going to be an interesting thing to see how it evolves.

Caroline Buck: Yeah, yeah, I think to your point, like, as a search engine, it's very challenging to ignore, but I think, one of the easiest ways they could help from a, like, customer choice nudge perspective would just be to have, like, to pair that search engine with some better filters. I think it's just been, it's been hard for smaller brands to feel like they can be, brand safe is too strong of a word, but feel like they can articulate their value proposition up against kind of the world of other brands, like just the volume of brands is so remarkable on Amazon that I think for a lot of smaller companies, it's very hard to distinguish what makes you set different, distinct, and having Amazon could easily become like an authority on that if they chose to invest in it.

So I, I'm watching them eagerly to see if they can make good on some of those promises.

Keith Anderson: Hey folks, this is the part of the show where we say thank you and see you soon to the general audience, plus and higher tier members of decarbonize.co. Stay tuned for the rest of the episode.


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George Wojciechowski is a Cofounder and CEO at Manifest.eco. Prior to launching Manifest.eco, George cofounded ShipBob, a predominant name in the global ecommerce fulfillment space. He joins host Keith Anderson as they discuss a wide range of topics including packaging, transportation, and freight, and powering, lighting, and cooling a massive fulfillment center. 
Learn more about George:

• Manifest.eco
• George’s LinkedIn
• George’s email

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Episode resources:

• Decarbonizing Logistics - Alan McKinnon

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Keith Anderson:
Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce, where we explore what's new, interesting, and actionable at the intersection of climate innovation and commerce. I'm your host, Keith Anderson, and together we'll meet entrepreneurs and innovators reinventing retail, e-commerce, and consumer products through the lenses of low carbon and commercial viability.

Hey everybody, it's Keith and we've got an awesome episode of Decarbonizing Commerce for you today. My guest is George Wojciechowski, co founder and CEO of Manifest, a sustainability first third party logistics company for e-commerce and DTC fulfillment. And before that, co founder of ShipBob, another leading 3PL.

George has more than a decade of experience in fulfillment and logistics, and we cover topics like packaging, transportation, and freight, and powering, lighting, and cooling a massive fulfillment center. I learned a ton, and I know you will also, so let's welcome George Wojciechowski of Manifest.

Keith Anderson: George, welcome to the decarbonizing commerce show. It's awesome to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

George Wojciechowski: Yeah. Pleasure to be here. Happy Friday.

Keith Anderson: Happy Friday. And you know, I, I discovered manifest as part of our work, really on two vectors, we were looking at, what it's going to take to decarbonize fulfillment and logistics, and we're also sort of mapping the ecosystem of technology and service providers that are out there in service of working on, on decarbonizing commerce and, you know, your company and you popped up pretty early in my, research. So I thought maybe just to kick us off, you could tell the audience a little bit about yourself, you know, your career trajectory and, how you ended up deciding to start manifest.

George Wojciechowski: Yeah. Wonderful. Absolutely. So been in this business, almost 10 years now, in logistics and e-commerce fulfillment. Previously, I was co founder of one of the pioneers of the, D2C fulfillment space, a company called ShipBob based in Chicago. And, we really had built a wonderful company and, You know, it was, it was, it was some of the best seven or seven and a half years of my life.

But, you know, I couldn't help but to notice, along that journey, how much waste our industry produces. And it's not any one particular person or companies or generations fault. It's just never been a priority. It's not necessarily, sustainability hasn't necessarily been in the DNA of fulfillment in commerce.

Probably because margins just across the board are, there's always pressure to lower your cost, and still eke out a profit and continue to grow, but I couldn't help but to notice, you know, I've, you know, I, I've started and operationalized like four or five different fulfillment centers, in the past, in cities all around the country, and I have many, many, many memories of the team and I jumping in dumpsters And just jumping up and down on the, on the, on the trash bin just to get it lower so we can put all the waste that is being, you know, the discards from the fulfillment process into the dumpster to get picked up.

And that wasn't unusual. And, you know, as I went further and further in my evolution and my journey in fulfillment, you know, seven, eight years in this business, there were so many technical innovations. And I'm going to be talking about a few of the things that were happening. Apps, tools, ERPs, so much money was being invested in furthering commerce from the technical standpoint, but fulfillment, the way that fulfillment was generally performed and done, hadn't evolved very much at all.

It was still predominantly done the same way that it was done 25 years ago. And I felt, hey, we're in a new century now. We have different priorities. And with all of these different motivations, different standards, different responsibilities, we need to reimagine what 21st century fulfillment looks like and what it should represent, both from a social and environmental standpoint, and thus the journey to create a solution for the 21st century. Began, and that's what Manifest was born from, the inspiration to lead the change towards sustainability and fulfillment, make it more environmentally responsible, sustainable, less wasteful. The amount of waste that's produced in our industry is incredible, and as you and I'm sure your listeners know, nobody's taking our trash anymore, so all of these discarded vessels for shipping and, all the stuff that goes into the fulfillment process.

You know, single use transport from point A to point B and to never be used again. And it's kind of tragic and alarming to me. So, that's, that's the North Star of Manifest. We're trying to lead the change. We are leading the change towards sustainability in e-commerce. And e-commerce is super unique, and we're leading by example.

But it's super unique in that a lot of the businesses that we work with aren't big corporations, not Fortune 5000 companies. These are businesses with a founder or a co-founder and a founder and a small team. So to, you know, lead the change with like a groundswell movement. And, you know, one merchant at a time is a lot, I think has a lot more potential than just, you know, trying to go to the big Fortune 5,000 companies of the world and be like, Hey, here's how you can change everything to be more sustainable.

So I'm really excited by the path that we're on and the progress we've made over the last two years. And the velocity just continues to pick up, day after day.

Keith Anderson: Yeah. I, I can tell you in my experience. You can segment the industry a lot of ways, but one thing I, I noticed as a analyst and observer of the first wave or second wave of e-commerce was, you know, you have new brands, entrepreneurial, really designing a business model and to end with an eye on the future, they don't have any legacy business, or status quo really to maintain.

And so they tend to be at the frontier, leading the way. And then over time is it becomes clearer, even if you don't want it to happen, if you, even if you don't like it. Many of these changes are inevitable. That's when I've seen some of the, you know, larger scale incumbents either adapt and evolve or start to wither.

So I think, you know, part of what I'm always exploring is, all right, who is at the frontier leading by example, you know, learning at the, at the front of the unsorta unpaved trail. So, I think that's super interesting.

George Wojciechowski: Yeah, it's, it's, it is very interesting and I always say that the shift towards sustainability at some point is inevitable, but someone's got to do it and it's not just you and I and other companies trying to build businesses with a sustainable focus, it's the merchants. You know, we, I don't ha, I didn't, you know, we don't build a business by ourselves, our merchants build the business for us, with us, and, you know, and merchants come in all different shapes and sizes and sentiments, but what a lot of merchants are starting to realize is that it's not just the right thing to do to pursue more sustainable practices in your fulfillment, but it's also a competitive advantage.

I am of the thought that it's the new brand loyalty. You know, I had a white paper that came out a couple of quarters ago, and we polled like 2,000 consumers around the country, and 74 percent would buy the product that is more sustainable if you get two similar products, and it costs more, they would still buy the sustainable product.

Why? Because consumers shop with brands that match their values around social, environmental, Issues that match the values of they, what they want, what they have themselves or what they want to have, what they see in themselves or what they hope to have in themselves. And so that's the new brand loyalty. There's so much noise out there. How do you get business? How do you get consumers to continue to shop, at your store, buy your products, and be a cheerleader on socials and say, Hey, this is a brand that I love. And, you know, It's, yeah, it's the new customer loyalty. You see brands come up that have a sustainable focus, like, for example, Liquid Death.

And it's undeniable how loyal people are to a brand like that because they see parts of themselves or what they aspire to be in that brand. And the same thing goes to the base level of fulfillment. Hey, the practices that this company espouses is something that I'm on board with and it makes me feel better about the products I'm buying.

Keith Anderson: So you've hit on a theme twice already that I, I suspect is going to be a recurring theme on the show and I'd love to unpack a little bit, which is, you know, a, the idea that, shoppers are willing or will need to pay more for. The sustainable equivalent of, you know, the more conventional choice and similarly that, you know, in, in a business like fulfillment and logistics or other parts of the value chain, the economics aren't always favorable. I don't know if you're familiar with, a book by a guy named Alan McKinnon called Decarbonizing Logistics. But I mean, it's a textbook, so it's not a, summer read.

George Wojciechowski: probably not.

Keith Anderson: Yeah. But I, I encountered it, as part of, you know, our, our research into the key sources of emissions in fulfillment and logistics, and he's got this fascinating framework that sort of lays out the phases of the likely phases of decarbonizing logistics. Into three distinct eras. And the first he sort of says is the low hanging fruit because it's largely going to pay for itself through the elimination of waste. That is, you know, a lot of the stuff that is, is easiest to do without a lot of additional. Infrastructure development, collaboration between companies or across the industry. It's, you know, reducing the amount of air that you're shipping across the country. It's reducing the amount of material that you're using, which in most cases is pretty correlated with lowering your costs.

So, you know, I think we can discuss it from two angles. First, I'd love to get a deeper sense from you of You know, where you view the low hanging fruit economically and operationally, what's the stuff that, you don't have to worry about your investors or board or others saying, boy, is this really a sensible direction for us?

So why don't we start there and then we'll, we'll continue it.

George Wojciechowski: Yeah. So are you, are you asking from like a basis of like, of, of, of, of, of cost and potentially lower margins because you are making the more sustainable decisions?

Keith Anderson: Or higher margins, you know, I mean, basically have you uncovered elements of a fulfillment and logistics model that is both more sustainable and higher margin or more profitable because you're eliminating costs, you're eliminating waste.

George Wojciechowski: Oh, great question. So you hit some of it on the head, optimizing packaging, low hanging fruit. You're absolutely right. The less materials that you use, yet. You know, shape, continue to safely ship a package, the lower your costs, the more competitive you are because you can lower your, make your prices that you're charging, your, your, your loyal merchants, lower as well.

So it's a win, win, win for everyone and win for the world and win for the environment. So that's something that we've incorporated from day one at Manifest. You know, we need it, you know. I don't view, you can't walk into the street today and say, Hey, I'm going to live my life sustainably, not in 2023, because the world around us just isn't sustainable.

But, you can take actions that it's so I view it as a journey. It's not binary. It's a journey. And so the first thing that we did when we set up shop from day one was eliminate plastics from the fulfillment process, that for us wasn't necessary that, that, you know, didn't increase our costs in any way.

It was more just re-imagining, hey, how can we make, create the same shipments with alternative materials than what the rest of the industry is using. And that was a no-brainer for us too, and we were super surprised how easy it was to, eliminate plastics. Like I, I, I know your viewers are educated on the topic of, you know, Environmental Responsibility.

But I remember reading a statistic early on in my R& D process of kind of, working on Manifest as a, as a concept with my two co founders. And I remember reading that, like since 1955 of all the plastics produced on the Earth, or on the Earth that 93 percent are still in the Earth in some capacity, they're either, you know, on top of a large heap of trash or inside the ground, but they're not going anywhere.

People don't know something as simple as the plastic tape that goes on like 95 percent of the packages that arrive at our door can take up to 500 years to completely biodegrade all the compounds in that tape. Well, why in the world are we using it? You know, knowing that this is going to be the legacy that our generation has left behind.

e-Commerce has created so much democratized prosperity and we have an ability to, to, to, to, you know, to show future generations how you can kind of break down commerce from big retailers and big companies to somebody who has an inspired idea sitting in their apartment in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn, New York, or something like that, and they can now provide an income for themselves and be an entrepreneur and build a team and build a business.

Wonderful things. But then when you look at the, the, the, the byproduct of that from an environmental standpoint, which is even a longer timeline, no, we can do better. And so for us, it was not only exciting to reimagine how we can be more sustainable in the fulfillment process, it felt like a duty, to do so.

Keith Anderson: So you mentioned that, eliminating plastic was easier than you anticipated, what are some of the swaps that you made, or how have you solved that problem?

George Wojciechowski: Yeah, so, um. There's already a lot of products available where, you know, for example, plastic tape, we use paper tape. Paper tape works just as well. It's a little bit more maintenance. You have to wet the tape, but it's completely biodegradable. So much tape is used. That's one of the easy low hanging fruit.

You just have to put your, a little bit more work into it. Void fill, instead of using big ass plastic air pillows. That, will never have a use again. All of, all of the materials that we use in the fulfillment process are biodegradable and or curbside recyclable.

So we spent the first six months, after we decided to pursue building a company, like Manifest, just calling around to suppliers from all around the world. This was still during the lockdown time of COVID and I had calls from South Korea to South Carolina, with different packaging manufacturers. And one of the things that just blew my mind was that it's not necessarily more expensive to produce the more sustainable product for these manufacturers.

It's that everyone is ordering 5 million of the same SKU that they've ordered for the last 10 15 years. And maybe 50, 000 people are ordering like the one SKU that, or the set of SKUs that are sustainable. So it's just more to manufacture it, but it's not necessarily more to produce it. When I came to that conclusion, I was like, boy, this laziness is unacceptable.

So somebody has to go out there and proactively seek these alternatives. And that's what my partners Max, Bob and myself did is we talked to manufacturers. We took, we looked at poly mailers, or except, for example, our poly, the typical poly mailer takes 22 to 25 years to biodegrade. And we looked at a whole bunch of poly mailers, everything from hemp to, to corn, some of the, and, and we would test them on themselves. We would ship something to ourselves and it would come back to our, to our to, to our address. And sometimes they didn't hold up. Sometimes they looked like somebody had shot a machine gun through the poly mailer. It was like, okay, we're not going to be using this. But, through that trial and error process, we found alternatives that were super acceptable to our merchants and to us and to our high standards of like, okay, this is secure packaging.

And, our, for example, so traditional polymaler 22 to 25 years. Unacceptable. Our poly mailers biodegrade within like 432 days or, or some number like that. So a lot less of a tax on the Earth for just being this one time used vessel to transport product from point A to point B.

Keith Anderson: So you mentioned, single use a couple times, are you using, or have you explored reusable packaging?

George Wojciechowski: Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of, yes, we have, and we have some wonderful partners that we've had ongoing discussions with about using reusables. It's a little bit more complex because not only is the cost to merchants who are always, you know, understandably very cost savvy, but you also have to, influence consumer behavior to cooperate in using this reusable packaging.

So there's some difficulty there, and we haven't necessarily pulled the trigger yet on utilizing that and it has to be a specific type of product too. For example, something like shoes would be really good. For, you know, products, because they're, they're a big box, they take up a lot of space, a lot of materials, but if you can send it in a container that can be sent back, and shoes already have a higher rate of returns than other products, so, you know, instead of having to put it in another box and then drop it off at a, at a, at a returns center, you could just send it back in the same box.

So, we're heading in that direction, but it also, like a lot of things requires scale. You need a lot for to incorporate it at a point where it's economical. You need large amounts of variety and volume to be like, okay, this makes sense. And, you know, we, we, we have a wonderful mix of merchants that we love working with and that we truly look at each merchant like a partner and that where their critical partner and their supply chain, but we don't have the hundreds and thousands or thousands of merchants, perhaps necessary. to make that a scalable solution.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, I I mean within the DTC universe, one thing we've noticed is in categories like personal care and increasingly beauty, household cleaning, for primary packaging, The refill reuse model seems to have potential, particularly when the product itself can be concentrated and the reuse is happening at home without any need to return the package to a 3PL or, or somebody else, to your point, you know, we are seeing more and more of these, solution providers popping up that have reusable mailers and some of those things.

But it seems to me with, you know, admittedly limited research into it at this point, exactly to your point, there's going to need to be huge infrastructure development, even in basic ways, like, you know, more traditional pickup points, accepting the reusable packaging for reverse logistics, because in a lot of these cases that we have looked at, you know, the cost of recovering the reusable packaging is a big part of the challenge.

In addition to the behavioral change that you mentioned, you know, most of these have a payback of anywhere from 5 to 20 uses before you're actually emitting less and making it economically viable. So, you know, we're paying close attention to see how much, is changing and how quickly and in which categories.

George Wojciechowski: Yeah. You know, it's hard because everyone merchants are under so much pressure to continue to grow, continue to make the customer experience of people who receive their packages. One that is pleasant so that they keep re ordering. But at some point, somebody's just got to bite the bullet and be like, hey, we use reusable packaging.

I'm checking out of my shopping cart, I'm clicking that I understand that this is a reusable package, and that I can send it back, or pay whatever it costs for that vessel, an additional $3.50 if I don't, return it. I feel like that's what has to happen, but someone's gotta go first and be like, okay, I'm willing to alienate, some merchants, or some customers by asking the, adding on another $5 to their order if they don't send back this reusable, packaging.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, I, I'm starting to find, there are both those sort of stick approaches to, penalizing the consumer or the merchant or the brand, depending on at what stage of the, the value chain we're targeting. There are also some that are incentivizing it sort of like the reusable, shopping bag model where, you can either you know, save a dime if you bring a reusable bag or some municipalities charge you an extra dime if you don't bring a reusable bag. I don't know yet which model is more effective, but I do see more experimentation.

George Wojciechowski: it's changed my behavior for sure. I remember like three or four years, I was never one of those people that brought their own bags to the grocery store. And, you know. After repeatedly, you know, showing up at the, the counter and being like, it's 39 cents for an additional bag. Okay, fine. All right.

I'm going to take this bag and like save it and bring it with me next time I come to the grocery store because I have four bags and it cost me an extra dollar 30. It's not going to break the bank, but it is annoying. And, yeah, change is uncomfortable. Change is almost always uncomfortable. And, You know, we have to be willing to experience that discomfort to, to, as I did in my own personal, life, with how I, I go grocery shopping, so.

Keith Anderson: So we, we've drilled in on packaging.

What are some of the other major sources of emissions and waste that you've identified in the fulfillment and logistics process?

George Wojciechowski: There's a whole bunch. It's I think logistics just globally is the number four or five, the waste producing carbon producing industry that there is. Some would say that it's daunting that Manifest is on this journey to, to change the industry. For me personally and, and, and my team, it's incredibly exciting, against those odds, you know, and because like, hey, if you succeed, the change that comes from that is how amazing to, to be able to achieve that and be a catalyst for it.

And I, and I, you probably feel similarly, similarly on the journey that you're on. But, transportation, I mean, it's low hanging fruit, you know, moving products from supplier to shipper to, another shipper that takes it to the fulfillment center and then fulfilling it out of the fulfillment center and sending it all over the country.

Each step in that process, if they're using fossil fuel vehicles or boats, which 99. 9999 percent of the time they are, it's producing emissions and, you know, what we've done at Manifest is, is not only work with, regional carriers, but try to find, regional carriers to optimize routes, but to also work and have conversations with the major, carriers, FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL to, utilize some of their more sustainable services. And, you know, we're, we're, we're very candid and conversational with our merchants about what their options are. Again, priority number one is to run your business successfully, because then we don't have tools for change if you're not in business.

So, and it is more expensive if you're working, expensive, if you're working with a major carriers, and you're like, oh, I want to change, ship this, these products, this more sustainable way. But, optimizing routes, and, you know, trying, and investigating services that use, emissions free delivery trucks or transportation vehicles, is, one way that at Manifest we're pursuing a cleaner supply chain.

Another obvious one for us is energy use. We've all driven through, outside of our cities, if you live in a major city, and then, you know, you drive about ten minutes and then you see a gigantic fulfillment center, whether it's an Amazon fulfillment center or some other company. These buildings are like half a million or a million square feet. The energy use in these buildings, is another, component of emissions in the fulfillment industry. And, you know, I can go into some of the things that we're doing at Manifest, to make our, fulfillment center, more energy efficient and, sustainable. And again, it's a journey. We don't have all the answers on day one, but we're actively pursuing better and newer solutions. But that's another component of, you know, carbon waste in the fulfillment industry.

And, returns and logistics. It's a problem and no one's figured it out yet. But, you know, reverse logistics. Now, you're double, doubling the emissions of that purchase, and, you know, if you don't have, a circular solution where that product is reused or can go back into stock, it's just thrown away, well, shoot. We just went from Austin, Texas to Toronto, Canada and back and that nobody's satisfied and got that product. So it's a lose lose lose for everyone in that scenario. And, and that's another component too, consumer behavior.

You know, Amazon kind of pushed this world of fast shipping, frequent returns, single item orders, and that mentality for consumers has become the standard. And what I've seen in the last couple of years is that people who recognize how wrong that is, not only just on like an environmental level, but on a person level, the amount of stress that that puts on the people in the supply chain, people working in the fulfillment centers, truck drivers, et cetera, is incredible and it's not worth it.

So I'm seeing more and more consumers and merchants that are having candid conversations with their clients and say, hey, our shipping. It's going to be three to five days. It may not be overnight. Here's what it costs for shipping, but here's the sustainable steps that we're taking to ship this product with the least amount of impact possible.

And people are responding to that. It's a small number, but the fact that it's there tells me that there's potential to change the sentiment among consumers, building off that base that currently exists.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, I see the same thing. And I think, again, most of what I've seen so far has been what looks to be experimental versus largely scaled. But, you know, when you were talking about transportation, I tend to think of transportation emissions as a function of distance, you know, how far is the product traveling and what mode of transportation is it?

And that sort of, slower shipping model, to your point can typically not reduce the, the distance traveled. Although depending on, you know, whether you're forward deploying inventory and those sorts of things, sometimes it can help, but it can definitely, you know, enable you to use ground instead of air, which A, you know, is much lower emission, and two, I guess I should say B, is, you know, typically lower cost, and so I've seen a few merchants offering incentives, hey, you know, additionally batching orders, like you said, I mean, during the pandemic, one of the huge points of friction at the household level that I think we've all personally experienced, but I'm seeing it becoming a bigger factor in the industry is, you know, wasteful packaging arriving with single items every day shifted a ton of you know, effort into households that historically was handled in brick and mortar retail outlets.

And I think it opened some eyes to, wow, I don't need everything that I buy online tomorrow or the day after. And when you get people on a subscription or auto replenishment model, you know, not only does it make the revenue more predictable and help you pass a little Incentive onto the consumer, but you can switch from that urgent air, freight to ground-based, save a little money, save a lot of emissions.

Hey folks, this is the part of the show where we say thank you and see you soon to the general audience, plus and higher tier members of decarbonize.co stay tuned for the rest of the episode.
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On this the very first episode of Decarbonizing Commerce host Keith Anderson is joined by Nora Schaper. Nora is an eco-preneur and a co-founder of HiBAR, the world's first salon-quality, plastic-free hair care (and now solid luxury face wash and natural deodorant). A lover of nature, Nora despises plastic more than the average person, but believes in the power of many people making simple swaps to inspire a movement toward a more beautiful planet. They discuss the innovative design of HiBAR’s products and how this aligns with both their mission and customer experience goals as a company.
Learn more about Nora:

• HiBAR’s website
• Nora’s LinkedIn

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Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce, where we explore what’s new, interesting, and actionable at the intersection of climate innovation and commerce. I'm your host Keith Anderson, and together we'll meet entrepreneurs and innovators reinventing retail, e-commerce, and consumer products through the lenses of low-carbon and commercial viability.

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