Q: To start off, what factors play in to Kraft making sustainability decisions?

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A: Honestly, a whole host of factors. There is this thing we call a materiality assessment; basically, we go out and we have outreach with pretty much all of our stakeholders. So, we figure out what is important to shareholders, what's important to our customers, what's important to our employees, what's important to NGOs and different political factors, as well as scientific research that is going on. We go through a huge analysis like that every two years and figure out where our priorities should be. When we look at our materiality, we can see what Kraft Heinz can actually impact. 

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Q: How does palm oil play in with your materiality statement?

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A: Palm oil is one of those funny things for us where it is hugely important to our stakeholders, but surprisingly Kraft Heinz buys very little palm oil. We buy tons of soy. Since palm oil is super important to our stakeholders, we do everything we can, but we can't change the entire system because we don't buy a ton of it.

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Q: Can you describe to me how you influence Kraft’s environmental policy?

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A: My  department works with manufacturing, agriculture, and packaging so we can figure out what is important enough to bring to the executives at the company. I directly report to our chief legal council and CEO. It is cool because it shows that it is important to them and that they care about sustainability. I get to do research about what is up and coming, look into our supply chain and figure out what we are doing, and then I get to tell the executives that this is what I see happening and then they tell me what direction they want to go in. I'm also going social stuff, like a human rights risk assessment of our supply chain, so I am working through all of our suppliers to see where there may be issues with human rights.

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Q: My proposed alternative to palm oil is soy, and I heard you mentioned Kraft's use of soy. Is soy frequently in your products?

A: Yes! Compared to palm oil, we use way more soy. In the US, many companies purchase way more soy than palm oil. For food in the states, soy is huge. It is so much cheaper for us here. Soy is not as efficient or healthy as palm, as palm oil has great yield for the amount of land it uses. Palm oil is actually way better for the environment when it is done correctly, it has just gotten a bad name because of some bad players in this space.

Q: Where do you get your soybean oil from?

A: That is an awesome question, and we are actually digging into it now. Last I looked at the numbers, over eighty percent of it is from the US. Kind of a little background about the company in general is that 70% of Kraft Heinz's sales are in the US too, so we are really a US company.

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Q: So, what do you use palm oil for if you mostly rely on soybean oil?

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A: Palm oil is in a whole host of things, but it is usually in very low quantities. For instance, in sauces, or as a binder in cookies. 

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Q: There would never be a future for Kraft Heinz to convert one-hundred percent to soy, right?

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A: We wouldn't want to, just because we only purchase sustainable palm oil. 

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Q: I was looking into RSPO and my only question about that is, do you think there are environmental impacts from shipping from Malaysia to the US even if it is sustainable palm oil?

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A: Yes, but to be perfectly honest, there are tons of shipping and logistics costs anyways. Of course, I would love to say we purchase everything locally, but a lot of the stuff we have to buy is not made in the US. The environmental impacts of that shipping are for sure a concern and something we are looking into, but we are finding so many ways to combat those whether it's using electric vehicles and bulk shipping so that are impact is low.

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Q: How does Kraft balance making a profit while making environmentally-friendly decisions?

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A: That is the hardest part. I think that doing the right thing comes before everything else. Consumers won't buy stuff from you if they find out you are doing bad things. In terms of prioritizing, it might take time to go through and do everything right, just because you don't want to throw a whole bunch of money at something in one year, you want to try to spread it over a bunch of years. So that tends to be the answer for us.

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Q: Last question, I know palm oil took off in the 1990s in the US, so I was wondering, did Kraft use a different oil in its entirety before then?

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A: Just because we are so soy focused in general, we typically used that. We also purchased rapeseed oil and sunflower oil.

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