Inside Idaho Milk Products' Sustainability Practices Pt.1

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 break throughs to sustainable packaging. We'll break down the complex world of food innovation, one conversation at a time. You are listening to episode one of our conversation with Jeremy Pike, the director of sustainability at Idaho Milk Products, about their sustainable practices.

Reese Clark:

Jeremy Pike, welcome to the podcast.

Jeremy Pike:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Reese Clark:

Absolutely. Hey, best beard and dairy. So I've heard

Jeremy Pike:

That's the unofficial accolade, but I'll take it.

Reese Clark:

What is your formal title?

Jeremy Pike:

So my formal title is director of Sustainability, and essentially that's a fancy, fancy way of saying I wear many hats. So essentially sustainability, obviously the topic of conversation today, but sustainability on the broader sense, overseeing all of our metrics around the environmental impact of the business, as well as then pairing together the social and governance impacts and other areas within the business community, and a little bit of everything.

Reese Clark:

Okay. So what does sustainability mean to you?

Jeremy Pike:

So broadly speaking, sustainability in just face value is essentially perpetuation. It would be the synonym that I would use is basically making sure that we can meet the needs at present to provide for the future so that we are not from an environmental standpoint, we're not creating any detriment that's irreparable to then future generations, but more specific in our world than in my role. We really look at it from the sense of efficiency, from utilizing resources responsibly, and then ensuring from an environmental standpoint, from an economic or socioeconomic standpoint, that we're thriving in a way that can be maintained long term, again in perpetuity. So within dairy ESG, again, that environmental social governance piece tends to be, again, synonymous with sustainability, but that's how I look at it.

Reese Clark:

Can you comment on the state of sustainability in the dairy industry today as a whole, before we jump into the work that you're specifically doing?

Jeremy Pike:

Sure. Yeah. So generally sustainability at the local scale, at the Idaho scale, very heavily ingrained in business, and again, maybe wasn't always considered sustainability, but at the regional and national levels, there are different organizations out there that help to promote sustainability that have frameworks and structure around them. The US has the US Dairy Stewardship commitment. That's through the Innovation Center, through US Dairy, which is under the broader umbrella of Dairy Management Inc. And so that's again, more that us, that national lens around sustainability. And then at the global scale, there are a number of frameworks that very quickly become an alphabet soup from a reporting initiatives standpoint, from an alignment standpoint, there's a plethora of different frameworks and organizations out there that are primarily focused on sustainability, but sustainability, again, is one of those things that maybe has gotten the spotlight in more recent years.

And so just greater focus around things that maybe have already been topics that us as Idaho Milk products as a business have been focusing on, but maybe didn't specifically bucket it under the term sustainability. So landscape wise, dairy as a product, agriculture, dairy, farming as an industry has had sustainability deeply rooted in its existence, really. You've got farms that are multi-generational. You've got folks that have been working the land for hundreds of years working to provide a nutritious resource to their family, to the community. Obviously varying scales and regions based on what's available to you, but certainly a cow producing milk to provide for, again, your family or communities is nothing new. And to be able to do that, you have to operate in an efficient and sustainable way.

Reese Clark:

So it's a better business model essentially to embrace sustainable practices.

Jeremy Pike:

Yeah, I mean, I think sustainability is the right way of doing business. It is, it's simply better business. I think the way that we operate here as Idaho Milk products, but generally anybody that's taking into consideration their impact on the environment, their impact on their community, the society, their economic impact, and trying to work in an efficient and positive manner and thinking sustainably is certainly, certainly the right way I would want to have my business operate if I owned and operated my own business. It makes sense. You don't want to destroy a natural resource that you're maybe reliant on in order to continue your business. Likewise, you want to do the right thing by your animals, by your community, et cetera.

Reese Clark:

That's a really interesting point. Where do you think the disconnect is? Because if you look at popular culture today in a lot of ways, depending on the circles you're surrounding yourself in, farmers, dairies, cattle raisers get demonized quite a bit. Do you know where that disconnect is happening? Is it just a lack of education?

Jeremy Pike:

Yeah, I think there's a big opportunity around education. I think there is a huge gap there, and I think a lot of it obviously is driven from the consumer side, and so you've got different generations that have different lenses on how they want to consume food. So they might think that dairy face value might seem like it's super unsustainable. You've got cows that are emitting methane emissions, and even that is something that typically gets misconstrued pretty quickly. We talk about methane emissions from dairy cows. A lot of people are quick to talk about cow farts, if I can say farts on a podcast, but I guess I did. So that's typically misinterpreted when we talk about methane emissions from cows. Yes, it does come from the backend, from the manure management and from what they excrete, but certainly the bigger impact is from the front end and actually more so on the cow burps side and from enteric fermentation.

And so you see a lot of folks that maybe are focused on environmental impacts and wanting to eat cleanly in a minimally environmentally impactful way are quick to point the finger and say, well, cows are emitting these harmful greenhouse gases, and therefore I don't want to support that as a product, as that end product, whether it be fluid milk or ice cream or an ingredient or what have you. So I think a lot of that's misinformation from the consumer side. And also you've got, obviously the competing industries out there that have comparable products or trying to, I wouldn't say comparable in a nutritional sense, but certainly comparable in what they're trying to mimic, like anything else, right? You've got folks that have certain dietary restrictions that maybe have to remain on a vegetarian diet versus somebody that's able to be omnivorous and have meat. Often there's still that vegetarian comparable of a burger.

So when you look at milk fluid milk, for instance, you'll have that pseudo milk essentially comparable that maybe they think has a lesser environmental impact. I think a lot of that, when you start peeling back the data, obviously there's work to be done on all fronts, but certainly just to pull one metric and say, that's why I don't drink dairy, because cow burps is really, that's probably one of the only legs to stand on from an argument standpoint. Obviously, there are a suite of other co-benefits, ancillary benefits that come from agriculture, from producing cows for dairy, and in turn providing nutritious ingredients like we do here.

Reese Clark:

So let's dive into a little bit to the data. You produced a sustainability report that was beefy, excuse my pun, but it was beefy. There's tons of data in it, and I'd like to dive into some of those aspects with you. But before we do that, why did Idaho Milk products produce the sustainability report? There's a lot of sustainability reports throughout the industry, whether or not you're in dairy, but this one in particular I found to be quite expansive. Can you tell me what the goal was in publishing that?

Jeremy Pike:

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, again, it kind of comes back to the previous talking points that we had around why the focus on sustainability from the consumer front. So who's that consumer? They're buying a product that is coming from a retailer that's getting it from a consumer product goods company. That consumer product goods company is also possibly a publicly traded company that has their own environmental reduction targets or sustainability initiatives. And a lot of that from a data transfer and from just a data sharing standpoint ends up our customers. We as a supplier to those CPGs, have very similar goals, similar ambitions around sustainability, and you've got any number of surveys that might come from a customer. And so for us to do a sustainability report, you start really peeling back the layers and you realize, okay, well, customer A wants you to talk about animal welfare and soil health.

Customer B wants you to talk about your workforce development and your impact on the community. Well, okay, where's that one resource that we can put together that really helps to also not only answer questions that might come from downstream customer surveys or questionnaires, but also then how can we be proactive and share, look at the great things that we as Idaho Milk Products are already doing, and then beyond that, hold ourselves accountable to say, okay, we're going to make a point to not only be very transparent. So yes, to your point, it is extremely beefy. It's very in depth for the scale at which we operate at, and so very much so open book, there's no smoke and mirrors to how we operate. The report itself is fairly comprehensive in my opinion, considering again, from a commercial standpoint, if there's ever a customer that has a question, that's always my first resources, go to the sustainability report, use that.

If the question that you might have isn't answered there, then we can have a further follow-up conversation. But realistically, it's the right thing to do. We need to be tracking these metrics because again, tying back to that whole idea of perpetuity and being able to be here for generations and for the long-term, we need to start tracking this information. We need to start working towards continuous improvement. And if we're not putting it out there for our stakeholders to see, and we don't set ourselves with targets and goals, then progress really can come to a stall, and then we're not really holding ourselves accountable. So I think the need to do the sustainability report was long overdue. When I started in my role, it was very much forefront for us as a business. We had always had a sustainability committee or a subcommittee working group sort of thing that was cross-functional throughout the business.

You'd meet every so often, but then those cross-functional heads would go back to their day job. And so there was never that single point owner to track and collate everything together. So with actually bringing somebody on in my capacity to then also have that single point owner, to funnel all that information through from quality, from logistics, from operations, to then take the data, churn it through the different programs and really understand it and how we work to improve it, I think is critical. And that sustainability report is just that repository for all that year over year data again, so that our stakeholders have full visibility on what's going on and what's hopefully ahead for us too.

Intro/Outro:

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