On Wednesday, February 28, I visited Unilever on a field study for my Sustainable Business Strategies class. Unilever is a global fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company generating sales of 53.3 billion euros in 2015 and with 168,000 employees across 190 countries. Unilever owns over 400 brands including Lipton, Dove, Axe, Hellmann’s, Magnum, and Ben & Jerry’s. Since 2009, Unilever CEO Paul Polman has seen to it that Unilever has worked to build sustainability into its business through its Sustainable Living Plan.
We were fortunate enough to get to visit the Copenhagen Unilever office and learn about Unilever’s business strategy from Henrico, the Managing Director for Unilever Denmark A/S. We learned about how Unilever is discovering business opportunities through addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and working towards closed-loop material use. Unilever aims to make sustainable living commonplace. Their Sustainable Living brands are growing 50% faster than the other brands in their business. They have been working hard to reduce water consumption, waste, and greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously helping 538 million people gain improved health and hygiene and 920,000 women gain access to career and skills training.
Our class asked some really good questions, and Henrico happily dived into the details about the challenges Unilever still faces. It seems that Unilever is still struggling a little to decouple its growth from its resource consumption and to find better and more biodegradable packaging materials which can be implemented at scale cost-effectively. Nevertheless, Unilever remains a frontrunner in integrating sustainability into its business and has the opportunity to make a huge impact considering that 2 billion people use Unilever products on any given day.
As we were preparing to leave, Henrico told us we could grab some ice cream treats from the freezer to enjoy on our way out. I grabbed a classic Magnum ice cream bar and a Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie wich. Yum 🙂
Danny in Denmark 