Inside Idaho Milk Products' Sustainability Practices Pt. 2

Intro/Outro:

Welcome to Milk Theory, the podcast that decodes the future of food. In each episode, we talk to the innovators and leaders who are shaping the multi-billion dollar dairy industry from processing breakthroughs to sustainable packaging. We'll break down the complex world of food innovation, one conversation at a time. You are listening to episode two of our conversation with Jeremy Pike, the director of sustainability at Idaho Milk Products, about their sustainable practices.

Reese Clark:

When I surround myself around folks in the dairy industry who are focused on sustainability, I hear the terms scope one, two, and three dropped a lot, and that is something that was new to me Upon entering this field. What are those scopes, and is that a good place to start when understanding the sustainability report in your mind in terms of just downloading the information and where things fall?

Jeremy Pike:

Yeah, I mean, I think if we're going to look at the sustainability report and funnel it down from the environmental pillar, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Scope, scope one, two, and three are going to be really kind of just the good level set of really how industry or how us as a business or any business that's tracking their emissions, is going to categorize their various emissions. So when we look at scopes one, two, and three, scope one, those are those direct emissions that come from us as Idaho Milk products hereat the plant in Jerome from our operations. So think of things here. Again, we're primarily producing powders. We have to dry those powders, so we're using natural gas in our dryers to do so. We also own and operate our own internal fleet of milk hauling trucks. Those mobile emissions that come from the diesel trucks running back and forth, that the dairies would fall in scope one, you jump to scope two.

Scope two are those indirect emissions that come from purchased energy, and more specifically for us, in our case, purchased electricity. So again, keeping the lights on for Idaho Milk products falls under scope two. And then scope three essentially is everything else. It's all of those indirect emissions that come from our value chain. So upstream emissions, downstream emissions, and within scope three, there are a number of categories, things like your purchased goods and services, and so in our case, our purchased milk falls in category one of the broader umbrella of Scope three. There's different categories as well, such as business travel, employee commuting, upstream transport, downstream transport, product end of life. There's a slew of categories, and it all ties back to an alignment with an organization called GHGP or Greenhouse Gas Protocol. And so those are basically the governing body that sets the standards of how companies should be accounting for their emissions, so that at the end of the day, you're hopefully on a, like for basis, if you're somebody in the dairy industry and you're somebody in the energy industry, if you're calculating your Scope three category one purchase goods and services emissions, the inputs though they will be different.

They'll be calculated in the same way, and it creates that apples to apples ability there. So that it's just a universal way.

Reese Clark:

It's universal standard across multiple industries.

Jeremy Pike:

Correct. Yeah.

Reese Clark:

Okay. When you mentioned something, and I want to cover just a question that kind came up in my head, right? As you mentioned the transportation and how Idaho Milk Products owns its own fleet. A lot of folks in the industry contract elements of their logistics out such as transportation. Is there a benefit to having that fall under scope one by taking that in, or is that just something that we do?

Jeremy Pike:

So generally, I mean, the short answer is yes. I mean, the more data you have, the better. And having it under our scope one and having the visibility of that primary data visibility is great. From a GHG, from a footprint, from an inventory standpoint, accounting, those emissions, we have access to that usage of the diesel. Beyond that, owning and operating our own fleet positions the opportunity, I guess I would say for more immediate progress or improvements, I guess I would say as far as you think about what opportunities are out there to reduce our diesel usage. So can we do things like either implement a different tractor trailer technology, whether it be a different energy source as opposed to diesel, or are there other efficiency things that we can do within our fleet from the trailer side where maybe we're able to utilize a larger style trailer to that same truck that's running down the road to go to the dairy instead of, say, bringing 60,000 pounds of milk back to the plant, maybe they're able to bring 80 or a hundred thousand pounds of milk back to the plant, and so thereby reducing that over the road time to go back and forth to that same destination.

So I think there's an opportunity there where we have that more direct tie, again, from a data and inventory standpoint, as well as from a mobilization, I guess, not to be pun, but mobilization of implementation of technologies and practices.

Intro/Outro:

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