Stacey Tank:
Thank you so much for having me, Simon. Great to be here.

Simon Mainwaring:
Stacey, I was digging into your background and one of the things that I took away was you like to take on complicated problems. The projects you’ve done at General Electric and Home Depot and Heineken, was that just a happy accident or do you like solving really complex issues?

Stacey Tank:
Yeah. I was raised by a teacher, an educator, and she really instilled in me and also in my sister, this love for the adventure of learning and to climb new mountains and to let curiosity be your guide. So I never really process, some of the moves I made going from marketing and communications and audit into finance from industrial businesses into movie studios at NBC Universal into banks into beer, some of these things that seem now like non-sequiturs were just an expression of curiosity being my guide.

Simon Mainwaring:
So is there anything about scale that fascinates you because most people shy away from that inherent complexity, but you seem to be drawn to it, is it because it drives change more effectively? What would you say?

Stacey Tank:
Yeah. I think I was inspired by my grandfather’s career at IBM. He was in a big giant company. And so for the people I knew in business, but essentially my grandfather, they worked in big organizations and I saw how he could make change on a scale that mattered, that helped people working on the first personal computers. So it was natural to me that I would go into a big company to start in General Electric. And from that first 10 years of my experience, I saw how when they set their mind to something, they could really shift a whole global mental model, a whole global system. And from there I’ve largely stayed in Fortune 500 companies for the last few decades.

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. One of the key steps in your career is your leadership role at Home Depot. You were, I believe, chief commercial officer and then president of the foundation. What drew you to that opportunity? And what did you learn when you were there?

Stacey Tank:
Yes, I grew up in a very DIY household. So I was always holding the boards for my father when he was cutting on the table saw, up on the roof replacing shingles, painting, doing all the chores. And I always thought of Home Depot as a store and never even processed that it was a big company. And when Craig Menear was promoted into the CEO role around 2014, 2015, he reached out and asked if I would join his team. And it was such a unique moment in the company history. And he is such a phenomenal and incredibly humble leader that I thought, hey, why not? Let me jump with both feet. And it was fun making that phone call to my dad who said, you’re joining which company? You’re joining Home Depot?

Simon Mainwaring:
Finally, my daughter has come good to this.

Stacey Tank:
He deserves some credit for sure, for the decision. Yeah.

Simon Mainwaring:
And then you had an unusual few years, well, not unusual, but you worked at the National Association of Beverage Importers. So how did that transition happen and what was that like stepping into the beverage industry?

Stacey Tank:
Indeed, I went from 10 years at GE into Heineken. And while I was with Heineken the first time because I’m a Heineken boomerang, I was part of the National Association of Beverage Importers at that time as their vice chair. And that was a trade association that was advocating for beverage importers like Heineken. And my first entry into the beer industry was first a lot of fun. I think if you’re in the beer industry and you’re not having fun, you’re probably doing it wrong because it’s an incredibly interesting creative human industry and full of interesting innovation and focus on customer and consumer. So a wonderful experience there. And then I went into Home Depot after that and was most recently running services businesses for them based in Atlanta. So if you didn’t want to do it yourself, we could do it for you, renovate your kitchen, floors, doors, windows, roofs. And then in 2020, I boomeranged back to Heineken this time in Amsterdam.

Simon Mainwaring:
And what drew you back at that time? Was there an opportunity? Was it the transformation role? What drove that?

Stacey Tank:
Indeed, Heineken is 158 year old brewer and we’re a fourth generation family owned. Our largest shareholder is Charlene, Heineken. And it’s a company that in my experience does things the right way for the mid and long term to really create value not just to make a quarter. We also had a CEO who was in role 15 years, who retired and there was this next chapter starting with our new CEO Dolf van den Brink, a new executive team. And at the same time we had COVID completely shifting what was happening in the world from an economic perspective, from a consumer preferences and behaviors perspective. And now we continue to see with the war in Ukraine and otherwise this incredibly volatile environment that we’re operating in.

Stacey Tank:
So the question on the table was, we know that what got us here, won’t get us there. How are we going to write this next growth chapter? And how will we continue to be a top quartile growth company in a very different context. And that’s where the transformation role came into play. And it just felt like a very unique experience to be able to be here on the ground floor to write the next chapter.

Simon Mainwaring:
And I want to speak to that transformation role specifically, but just for those who don’t know, give people a sense of how big Heineken is. How many brands you have? How many markets you’re in, because it is a large ship to steer or course correct or evolve and transform.

Stacey Tank:
Yeah, indeed. So in addition to the green bottle and of course you always have one within arms length. So in addition to the Heineken brand which is about one in five of the beverages that we offer to consumers and customers, we actually have 300 brands all over the world. Over 80,000 employees, 80 operating companies from Brazil and Vietnam to Nigeria, to, of course, Europe, big operating companies, small operating companies and everything in between. So it really is a United Nations of colleagues and we say the world’s most international brewer.

Simon Mainwaring:
And some of those brands are localized. They’re just in a certain region. They’re not all brands are everywhere.

Stacey Tank:
Right. Exactly, because local matters. Consumers want local brands, of course, we also know that that makes them often more sustainable because they’re dry a lot of the raw materials from the local community.

Simon Mainwaring:
So you come on board in this very exciting position as chief transformation officer, help us understand what that means, because there’s almost a new title out there, but it’s self evident the need for it. But what does that look like in terms of your role?

Stacey Tank:
Indeed, and when I talk to other Fortune 500 folks in similar, we all define it a little bit differently. But essentially what the role started out as with a co-creating essentially our new growth strategy, which we call evergreen, which is all about renewal. We co-created that with 150 evergreeners from all over the world thinking about how are we going to write this next chapter? What are the key component parts of how we are going to win the hearts of consumers all over the world, focused on growth, focused on being smart with costs, focused on digitizing the business, becoming the best connected brewer, focusing on investing in our people, our culture, and then weaving sustainability and responsibility into the fabric of how we run the business.

Stacey Tank:
So we co-created the strategy with many, many folks across the world. And then we started to operationalize that strategy and bring it to life. So from a transformation perspective, we built a new transformation network in every country, every operating company across the world to help to support some of the trickier aspects of this transformation in particular places where we hadn’t had that muscle trained in the past, we were trying to learn to do something new.

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. I could only imagine that some brands are at very different points in their journey and local markets or otherwise. So you talk about this transformation network, can you help us understand what that looks like? And what are the dynamics? Is it like HQ speaks to the brands and the local markets and they respond or do you surface up input from the local markets or is it both?

Stacey Tank:
Yeah, so historically Heineken has been run in a pretty decentralized way. Decision making made very close to the customer and consumer which is great. And that’s why you see all of this innovation happening that’s in the market, for the market. The challenging part with that is that there are really great ideas that in a way get trapped in these silos. So we haven’t really learned to work together as a network, as a neural network in an interdependent way.

Stacey Tank:
And that’s part of what the transformation network is trying to support to bring some of these practices, these learnings, whether they’re new brands or new consumer insights or they might be new ways to decarbonize our production. It could be many different things, but to lift them up and move them across for the benefit of the system also so we don’t and have to replicate the same thing everywhere, because for example, last week we had hundreds of our employees together for the first time since pre-COVID, from the first time since 2019. I think we had 600 employees here in Amsterdam together to celebrate the Heineken Silver Launch which is a 4% ABV product, it has lower bit bitterness. And that product is launching all across Europe right now, but it was invented in Vietnam.

Simon Mainwaring:
Interesting.

Stacey Tank:
But that product spoke to customers and consumers all over the world. So we had to lift up that idea and then bring it to consumers far beyond the boundaries of Vietnam.

Simon Mainwaring:
And you mentioned something really important a moment ago which is that you want to integrate sustainability into the core business. And I think sometimes there’s this false separation between the business and sustainability when really it is the business in terms of your entire supply chain. Why did you do it that way? And what does that process look like to make sure it’s not bolted on or an add-on?

Stacey Tank:
Oh, no. Exactly. So the first thing or one of the first things we did, we look looked at our value creation model and that essentially tells you, what does success look like? So we have historically had top line growth, capital allocation, so being smart with your money, and profit, right? All companies, I think have some version of these types of KPIs. We had what we called a golden triangle. We made that into a diamond, we call the green diamond and the fourth dimension is sustainability and responsibility. So you have to now ask yourself four questions. Does it grow top line? Does it grow sales, revenue? Does it grow our profitability? Is it a smart thing to do with our capital? Is it sustainable and responsible? And if it’s not, yes, yes, yes, yes, the answer is no. So that is what success looks like.

Stacey Tank:
And now we’re weaving that into the fabric of how we run the business, how we design remuneration. So how are people compensated? How do we set goals and objectives short term, long term. And hopefully going forward, will be making choices about how we invest in the business, embracing the true cost of raw materials. We talk about true cost of carbon, true cost of water is another really important topic. And now we’ve made a commitment, we were the first global brewer to make a commitment to reach net zero in production by 2030 and for the carbon and climate change enthusiasts out there you’ll know that as scope one and two. And then scope three, which are our full value chain emissions, we will be net zero by 2040, and that’s 90% of our value chain. So that’s working with our farmers, that’s working with our packaging suppliers, logistics, cooling, are some of the top four categories of our full value chain.

Simon Mainwaring:
And it’s so important that scope three, for those who don’t know, scope three is really the indirect consequence of your supply chain. And that’s where the vast majority of carbon emissions are actually found in the scope three. So it’s really important.

Stacey Tank:
Indeed, yeah.

Simon Mainwaring:
And how do you help the different brands at different stages in their sustainability journey level up independently yet still be part of the whole, the larger ambition of the enterprise, because the how of getting it done is so complicated. So do you start with them on a case by case basis or do you set broad targets that everyone’s got to level their game up to?

Stacey Tank:
Yeah. On the sustainability commitments, and we actually have a broader program we call Brew a Better World and Brew a Better World has 22 commitments. One of them is net zero carbon, but we focus on environmental topics like carbon circularity water. We focus on social sustainability topics like equal pay for equal work, fair and living wages, and then responsible consumption of alcohol is the third. And from a net zero carbon perspective, if we stay on that topic, we have about 160 breweries all around the world and 80 operating companies. So now each operating company is mapping out a roadmap through 2030 and through 2040. How exactly are we going to get there? And there are a lot of brands that would come into play because different markets have different brands. You might have five, you might have 40, you might have more than that, but it all comes down to our footprint, the breweries, the malteries, which technologies can we introduce to get all the way there.

Stacey Tank:
And one of the extra special challenges we have as a brewer is that we use one third electricity and for electricity, you can use wind, you can use solar. So those are the renewable technologies we tend to think of. But two thirds of our energy use is thermal. That’s heating energy. And for that you need heat pumps and biogas and all kinds of other technology solutions that are a little bit less obvious. And historically, the technology has had to come a little ways further before we could fully commit and feel confident in getting to net zero. But I was just talking to the team this afternoon, we really feel like we’ve hit a tipping point where the technology is there. We have a very clear goal, and now we’re working these roadmaps operating company by operating company to make sure that we can get all the way there and meet our commitments.

Simon Mainwaring:
Do you find that as opposed to waiting for those technologies to be developed by other suppliers, providers, technologists, is there an onus on brands like yours or others to actually invest in R&D and speed up that evolution?

Stacey Tank:
Yeah, absolutely. We have such creative engineers who are constantly trying to find a way to build a better mouse trap essentially, or build a better carbon solution. And sometimes we do it ourselves. Sometimes we’re co-investing with third parties. Sometimes there’s a third party who could simply do it better than we can. And so we go that direction. There are many creative ways now to advance the aim and it’s going to take all of them because this challenge is huge. Especially when you talk about scope three as you were saying because that’s the majority of our footprint and there are thousands and thousands of suppliers who need to get down to net zero if we’re going to be able to make our commitment.

Simon Mainwaring:
And what does that look like from a narrative of storytelling point of view because you have this strategy, you set these targets, but as you say, in these local markets, many businesses and suppliers are just trying to survive. And they’ve got mindsets that have been fine for decades, and there may be reluctance to shift. So how do you go out to the markets and say to them, “Hey, we’ve got to work together towards new goals.” How do you win them over?

Stacey Tank:
Indeed, it’s easier with your big suppliers because a lot of them are publicly traded. They’re getting the same investor and stakeholder interests that we are, and they have the capital. They have the access to capital that they would need to potentially invest because there’s CAPEX involved and OPEX as well. So it feels like by category, our top suppliers are there. A lot of them have science based targets and commitments, but there’s a long tail in that supplier base. And they need different things. Some folks don’t know where to start and they need knowledge and they need coaching. Some of them need access to capital at a reasonable cost and everything in between. So we’re getting those folks together through our procurement teams and having dialogue with them to figure out where are they on their journey? What are they worried about? And is there co-investment, is there knowledge, or how can we remove roadblocks for them and also work in coalition because one of the things we believe is that climate change is a non-competitive topic.

Stacey Tank:
So if we have technology, if we have best practices that we can share to help others get there, we are an open book. We are for the most incredibly open source. And it’s a matter of being in dialogue. We had last year, something we call the cool conference where our cooling suppliers came together and we spent a lot of time talking about how to tackle climate change and get to net zero. And we asked them, would you step up? Would you make a commitment that marries our commitment to full value chain and net zero by 2040 and the vast majority with very few exceptions stepped up and said, we’re in, let’s do this.

Simon Mainwaring:
And give us a sense of this moment in time that we’re at. Because as you say, you’re an open book from a technology point of view, because you want to level up the whole industry. And the point is really important because Heineken can’t do it on its own. No one company in any industry can do it on its own. So is the brewing industry more broadly or beverage category? Are they waking up together? Are we moving fast enough?

Stacey Tank:
I went to COP26 in Glasgow last year and I had never been to a COP before. I didn’t know what to expect. You watched it on TV and you think you get a sense for it in the governmental part, in the famous blue zone. And being there was incredibly moving to me. I’ll never forget it because first of all, if you’re going to COP, you really want to be there because there’s nothing to eat, it’s freezing cold, it’s not a posh, it’s not

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s self qualifying. Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Tank:
It’s really base conditions. And the people that are there have in many cases dedicated their entire life or a good portion of their life to making an impact on a positive impact on the environment and climate change specifically and also water and biodiversity and nature-based solutions and other related topics. And I was really encouraged to see that businesses and NGOs and governments, but really businesses were stepping up and making big commitments, they were not just talking but doing and they were being creative about how they could help their suppliers and help others, particularly the topic of financing was big at COP26. How can you help people get access to capital if they can’t get all the way there and finance it themselves.

Stacey Tank:
So we have a lot to do and it’s dire. There’s no question in my mind that we don’t have a single second to waste. On the other hand, I think things are changing. I think things are shifting. If I see the number of vegan low carbon restaurants that are springing up, if I just look in my family’s refrigerator and the fact that I’ve convinced a lot more people in my family to eat tofu because it’s got a lower carbon footprint once a week, things are changing. It’s not enough. We have to do more, but I’m still optimistic that we’re going to continue to gain momentum.

Simon Mainwaring:
I’m optimistic as well, but it is sobering. That third update on the most recent, the sixth assessment, the IPCC report says that we’ve got three years to reach peak emissions beyond which they’ve got to start to drop if we’re to avoid some very serious consequences. How did you find a COP26 or Heineken with the industry more broadly? Is business being welcome to the table to drive this change? Or is it being regarded with suspicion because the modes of all business for so long have been bottom line first for all the obvious reasons. And now we’re all showing up differently and there’s concerns about greenwashing or cause washing and so on. How is business being received?

Stacey Tank:
First, I think it’s hard to figure out who’s doing what. There’s an ocean of acronyms out there and disclosures that are frankly, very time intensive and very equally confusing and hard to compare across. So I’m pleased to see, and it was announced also at COP26, the new International Sustainability Standards Board, the ISSB, that is going to be launching new required, generally accepted accounting principles disclosures for sustainability that will make it easier to compare across. We saw in the United States, the SSE just launched for comment, their new rules and different bodies across the world are doing the same. So we need a clear, easier to understand yardstick so we know where is everyone so we can compare. There’s a lot more activism in the space. There’s no question about it. It’s annual general meeting season in here and we see there are parties who are passionate on these topics asking companies to step up that they need to go further.

Stacey Tank:
And companies I find are taking them seriously. You have the public companies who are disclosing. You have the private companies who have a different set of standards and disclosures. You have the state actors, the state energy actors that actually control the majority of the fossil fuel in the world that need to play an important role. So we need to do a lot more, but I do see at least the big businesses stepping up, just for the phone calls that I receive from their companies saying, hey, we need to do more, but we’re stuck in this area. Or we need board members who have expertise in sustainability. These are all good signs. Again, it’s not enough, but it’s so much more progress than I felt even one year ago.

Simon Mainwaring:
I agree. I think even the prospect of mandatory reporting in terms of sustainability or ESG metrics for some they see that as an obligation, but it’s actually an opportunity because that innovation is only unlocked when everyone is arguably forced to put their time and attention against it. If you had to speak on behalf of the whole brewing industry, what would you say the big unlock is that needs to happen? Is there a challenge from a production point of view or raw materials and agriculture point of view? What’s the one change that would change everything?

Stacey Tank:
There are some trickier aspects of our full value chain. First, because I am an optimist, there are some real advantages. We have a lot of two-way packaging. We have kegs, we have reusable bottles, we have aluminum cans that can be recycled an infinite number of times. So let’s lean into the places where there’s momentum and do more which is great. There are parts of the value chain like logistics, trucking, that are tough. And we all have to put our heads together and figure out how are we going to bring the technology further at a price point that we can swallow. And then how do we tell this story to consumers because it can create perceived and real benefit that gives you a better choice or a better chance of getting picked on the shelf. And sometimes, and you hear companies like Tony’s Chocolonely which is based here in Amsterdam, where I am. They also talk about the fact that they need their consumers to pay more because they are so stringent with their value chain and trying to protect human rights and there’s a cost to that.

Stacey Tank:
So we’ve got to square the circle somehow and bring all that together, but I think it’s the really tough nuts to crack like logistics, like trucking, where we need to work together in particular because a lot of the other technologies in our production in terms of decarbonizing our breweries, we feel like now it’s work to be done, but there’s less mystery now when it comes to the technology.

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. I totally agree with you what you’re saying about absorbing the cost too because we’ve never factored in the cost to the natural capital out there, the environment let alone the human cost, and no one should be exempt from absorbing some of that responsibility. And so there’s onus on the consumers part now to say, hey, I am going to buy that product, the product that I want at the price that’s available for once it’s factored in those elements. Again, coming back to the storytelling side of it, it’s one thing to do to these sustainability initiatives. It’s another to go to market and tell those stories in a way that you hope it becomes a factor in people’s purchasing decision. So how do you then go about through the lens of all the different brands that you have? How do you take that story to market in a way that you capture some value for the brand?

Stacey Tank:
It’s a question so close to my heart because there is so much more that we need to do and can do. Heineken has been a company that’s been publishing it’s sustainability progress since 1994. That’s the first sustainability report we could find, but it’s also a company that doesn’t want to talk about itself all the time that does that because it’s the right thing to do, but not because you’re going to try to get credit for it. At the same time, you need to show up for who you are so that folks know what you’re up to. And you can illuminate some of that. So brand Heineken as always is leading the pack. They have commitments around renewable energy. They have commitments around pure malts and packaging, and other ways that we’re showing up to try to make a positive impact through events and circularity.

Stacey Tank:
So brand Heineken is always is our shining star to try to demonstrate what’s possible. And it creates an invitation to all of our other brands. We have a brand called Sol, for example. If you speak Spanish you know Sol means sun. So of course it made sense for this to be a beer brewed by the sun. So this is our solar energy brand and Sol. And so they have stepped into the space. We have brands like Amstel particularly I admire the work our colleagues have done in Brazil around inclusion and social sustainability with Amstel, but we have so much more to do. And I admire company these like the Unilevers and [inaudible 00:27:26] and others who have done a really fabulous job conveying the stories and the work that they’re doing to consumers.

Simon Mainwaring:
And for those who aren’t familiar with the complexity associated with enterprises like Heineken, think of it as a movement of movements where the enterprise is a platform on which all the brands in the portfolio stand. And each one of their brands had their unique commitment like Sol with solar, but they’re all like arrows in the quiver of the parent company Heineken. And then you go out to the markets in locally specific ways, but the aggregate of all of that pays off the larger promise of the enterprise which is brewing a better world. And specific to that, can you tell us about some of the initiatives specific to 2030, the Brew a Better World 2030, because one of the challenges for anybody out there large and small is what do you do first? Is it fair in living wage? Is it sustainability? Is it DNI? Because there’s so many things to solve for, how do you force rank these issues?

Stacey Tank:
Yeah. It is gut wrenching to have to make these prioritization calls. And at the same time, we went through this two years ago and had incredible debates around, does this go before this because it’s all important and it’s all critical. It all feels urgent. You also know if you try to do everything and boil the ocean, you don’t get anything done. We used to have more than 80 commitments, 80 KPIs that we tracked, which was a lot. So now we’re down to 22 commitments and we have 30 KPIs that we track. It’s still a lot, but that’s what we felt was within the realm of being able to make good progress, measurable progress. And as we get momentum and we learn how to do things and we start to go faster, we can add things.

Stacey Tank:
It’s easier to add over time than to take things away. So certainly we’re focused on carbon. Certainly we’re focused on zero waste. So we have a circularity commitment that we’re close to achieving in that regard. We are very passionate about water because if you have no water, you have no beer. And when we started as a brewer, you didn’t have water stressed regions all over the world. We do a regular assessment to see how many of our breweries are in water stress regions including in Europe and Africa and other places. And now we have more than 30 breweries that are in water stressed regions, which means we need to do work to support healthy watersheds, to make sure we’re balancing the water that’s leveraged in those watersheds. And ultimately the goal is to leave that watershed better than we found it. We want that watershed to be healthier than if we weren’t there at all. And you could call that water positive. I think we’re still all sorting out what the right terms the metrics are.

Simon Mainwaring:
What the right terms that they change every day. Yeah.

Stacey Tank:
Exactly. And then another emerging topic is around biodiversity and nature based solutions and how you can express and measure the positive impact you’re having. Our work on healthy watersheds will often tackle topics like illegal logging. You’re going to reforest areas with native species that have been deforested. Naturally, you have biodiversity benefits from that work also from our carbon work, but we haven’t really been that deliberate about expressing and measuring what exactly are those biodiversity positive impacts. So those are some of the phase two, phase three things that we’d like to think about and take on over time.

Simon Mainwaring:
All of these issues are so interrelated, water biodiversity, ocean acidification and it’s very hard to untangle them in some ways. One of the things that I’m fascinated to ask you is, you are dealing with an inherent tension between being a positive brand in that you are brewing a better world. And that having a beer is a moment of celebration and unity between people. And as you say, some very serious topics like water and biodiversity. So how does a brand internally and externally in terms of their storytelling reconcile those two tones, like how do you make it a joyful experience when you’re dealing with some very serious issues?

Stacey Tank:
No, indeed. I think it’s about the big things and the little things. And you have to put one foot in front of the other and make a little bit of progress every single day. I talk to some of the young climate change activists that we get to work with and learn from in our work. And they talk about things like climate anxiety that they wake up in the middle of the night terrified by these challenges that we’re facing because they’re that big and they are that terrifying. But if you become paralyzed by that, well, we probably don’t make as much forward progress. So I love when I’m sitting down and having a beer with my family or friends in a restaurant grabbing that two-way returnable bottle and educating my kids or my friends to say, did you know this bottle can be used over 30 times over and over again before it gets crushed and recycled, and then explaining the kegs are a very circular pack and all the things we can do to lean into that.

Stacey Tank:
People might look at that bottle and think, oh, it has some scratches on it. I want a beautiful new bottle like produce, right? We talked in the past as a society about ugly produce, but ugly produce is still as nutritious and tastes the same. We should not throw it away. If you start to look at those scratches on the bottle as a badge to say, I care about the footprint of this bottle. You’ve made a little choice that day that adds up over time. And it adds up into things that matter at scale. So I try to focus on what we can control, the positive impact we can make and trying to do better every single day.

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s really important what you’re talking about. It’s sometimes it’s called recommerce where we can go less enamored with the idea of everything being new and shiny, and actually see a badge of honor in things being used so that we’re making the most of the raw material. That points to something very important which is, I’m seeing a big, powerful shift in marketing, away from companies or brands or products talking about themselves and really shifting to educating consumers and helping consumers shift their behavior. So to your point about the reuse bottle and sun, what does Heineken or it’s brands do to help consumers understand the meaningful role they could play and to empower them to use their own agency to drive change? What’s that education piece look like?

Stacey Tank:
I think one of the things we can do is make it easy to make choices. So if we take responsible consumption of alcohol, for example, I am thrilled to see that there is I think, social, positive impact and consumer interest in low and no alcohol products. We want to make it as easy for someone to reach for a Heineken classic 5.0 as to reach for a Heineken 0.0, again, never too far away on my desk. And to make those equally refreshing, equally cool, there’s a campaign called Now You Can where before you might have had a non-alcoholic beverage and felt like you weren’t really in the occasion or you’re a little apologetic, it doesn’t feel as special. And now with the way these products are packaged and included and hopefully offered so that you can reach for one or the other equally easily, you feel like now you can have this adult refreshing beverage.

Stacey Tank:
So how can we make it easy to make choices if you don’t want to have alcohol in your beverage that evening? How can we make easy choices when it comes to a product that is two-way, that is circular, that has a significantly lower carbon impact. And then of course, social sustainability, the same, making sure that we’re communicating and standing behind our fair and living wage commitments and otherwise. But I think for us, we’re not a company that lectures and we know that consumers are smart, but probably the role we play is around easy choices to make.

Simon Mainwaring:
And back to the point I was saying about there’s only so much Heineken do on its own, in partnership with consumers, you’ve got other opportunities that are unique to the size of Heineken. What sway do you have with the public sector or with government agencies to help policies support the changes that you want to, and to what end do you actually work consciously towards that?

Stacey Tank:
Regulation is very helpful on these topics. We need to have a price on some of these parts of nature or water. We don’t have a price on water. We don’t have a price on carbon everywhere. And I also think to be practical with budget deficits post-COVID, governments have to raise revenue, carbon taxes are coming, certainly in Europe, they’re here, we have carbon budgets. So we definitely collaborate and advocate where it makes sense in their intersections with our business, whether it’s around human rights and social sustainability or environment mental topics or otherwise, because having an equal playing field and some logic to how we’re all going to move forward, getting everyone on the same page will help us make faster progress.

Simon Mainwaring:
And this progress point is huge, especially for your internal stakeholders, your employees. I’m starting to see a very unique pro where employees in the context of the great resignation or reshuffle or reimagination, whatever you like to call it, they’re increasingly impatient. They want to participate in a company that is driving the change, but they’re very concerned about their future. And there are those who are concerned that we’re not moving fast enough or we need to be doing this differently and so on. How do you share the story of your sustainability commitments internally to make sure that there’s consensus, alignment, support for what you’re trying to achieve because invariably with different people, you’ve got different levels of engagement or anxiety. How do you manage that?

Stacey Tank:
These topics really, really matter to employees. They really matter to me and I am an employee, right? If you just look at what we individually care about, we have now so many digital platforms that we can use to create, to have massive online brainstorms, to share information, even five years ago. And definitely 10 years ago, it wasn’t as easy to be in dialogue with your employees across 80 countries or more all the time zones as it is today. We use Facebook workplace as our social media site for our company. And there you can see employees all the time jumping in, sharing. We have groups that are passionate about different topics like water or circularity or packaging or Brew a Better World in general. We have here where I am in the Netherlands a group in our head office called the Young Green Stars. And they’ve been driving different action and programming in our offices just out of their own passion.

Stacey Tank:
Actually I have one on my desk. They changed all of our cups to this reusable option. We distributed these to all employees to get disposable one way packaging out of our drink stations, at our coffee stations. It’s little things. It’s big things. We also just launched something with the climate school. We call the Brew a Better World Academy. And the first topic’s all about climate change and democratizing information and scientific knowledge about climate change because employees were saying, I care about this. And yet I realized that my knowledge on the science is not that deep. Can you help educate me? So we’ve just launched that partnership with the climate school a couple of weeks ago, and the best ideas come from our employees. They’re in the field. They’re working with our farmers, with our consumers, with our customers. So the best thing we can do is listen, and then pick the best ideas and run with them.

Simon Mainwaring:
And it’s interesting, you’ve talked about capital expenditures, operational expenditures, now you’re investing in education and employees. How do you rationalize the business case for doing all of this? Because on one hand, it’s self evident that we need to show up differently in the world if we’re going to have a future and treat our planet with respect, but at the same time, you’ve got to drive your profit. You’ve got to be in that top quartile in terms of growth and so on. How do you rationalize those two because the business has to thrive at the same time that you want to empower the planet to thrive. So what’s the business case look like?

Stacey Tank:
It’s balanced growth. If it drives the top line, it drives profit, it drives efficient capital allocation, but it doesn’t drive sustainability and responsibility, we can’t do that. That’s not a sustainable business. It’s not balanced growth. I think what helps is also planning ahead. If it was 2028 right now and we said, oh, in two years, we want to be net zero in production, it would be very hard to achieve that. Luckily we have set a 10 year commitment. We can make roadmaps, we can plan out and plan for how much incremental operating expense, how much incremental capital expense.

Stacey Tank:
And we also have a big cost out program that we’ve announced €2 billion of gross savings that we are going to take out the business we’re going to use that to free up investment in topics like sustainability and responsibility so we can fund the journey. But really with Charlene Heineken as our largest shareholder and with the investor base that we have, we take a mid and long term view. So transparently when I have this conversation inside the company, we to figure out how we’re going to get there, but it’s never a discussion about whether we’re going to do it. It’s just how clever can we be to fund the journey along the way?

Simon Mainwaring:
I think the important mind shift to your point is that it’s not about building on the past, but rather backing out of the future because there’s enough research and science that shows us what the future is going to look like. And we’ve got to work back from that. And the thing that keeps me up at night, Stacey, is that I don’t know that as many industries are moving far enough, fast enough. So how does an organization with all the complexity and global footprint and all the logistics of the Heineken parent company, how does it move something that would otherwise be not inert, but it’s a big lift. How do you move more quickly? What does that take?

Stacey Tank:
It is the basic grinding work, the block and tackle in everybody’s favorite ERP system called Excel. We’re professionalizing a lot of these tools, but we have roadmaps in Excel files that tell us what are the capital projects that we’re going to do? Who gets a heat pump this year? How many metric tons of carbon does that take out? How much does that add up to? Then when does Sri Lanka get to net zero carbon? So it’s just doing the work.

Stacey Tank:
We know what we need to do, we’re these ways of working, we’re creating more consistent tollgate funnel ways of working across the whole company. We can use them for lots of topics, carbon, we could use them for some of our cost out initiatives. So building that funnel backbone that we can leverage in different ways also as a repository for all these ideas, again, so we can get the good ideas from being trapped within those silos to move across and benefit more folks. But the reality is, I think, the talking phase on these topics is past and now we’re in the doing phase and we just need to roll up our sleeves and deliver the goods.

Simon Mainwaring:
And in the spirit of the doing phase, what keeps you up at night. With your Brew a Better World 2030 ambitions and so on, what’s that thing that you grind over in terms of your wheel spinning?

Stacey Tank:
It’s the scope three, full value chain commitment on net zero because the scope one and two commitment in production in our 160 breweries, we control that. So we can make good roadmaps and it won’t be perfect and we’ll make a mistake or we’ll have a pandemic and things will get delayed. Things will happen. It’s not going to be the most straight line to the goal, but we do control it. Our full value chain, you have thousands of suppliers who are trying to figure out how to get there too, big ones, little ones, it’s going to take all of us and it’s outside of our direct control in many ways. So that’s the one we have to work on now. Even though it feels like 2040 is a long time from now, if we do not start working right now, it’s going to be hard to deliver it.

Simon Mainwaring:
And you mentioned you’re an optimist earlier on, of all the reasons I think there are to be optimistic, what would you call out? Why do you feel positive about the future?

Stacey Tank:
Humans are so incredibly creative and great at problem solving, especially when the pressure is on. We saw with the pandemic, we got this vaccine pretty quickly, pretty extraordinary. Also, the new technology that was leveraged, which was many decades coming, we all learned later. But in a crunch, I always think of Apollo 13 where they take the box and they empty out, here are all the parts on the space craft, and you have this much time and you have to come up with a solution go. Humans are pretty incredible problem solvers and we’re going to need every single person putting their best thinking into this, but we don’t give up, right? We are a species that sticks in there, that puts up a good fight that ultimately works together. And hopefully we connect for this greater cause and we’re able to, as you say, get to our peak emissions in a couple of years and start winding down.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think that’s really well put, I love the idea that it’s not about a fight for our life or our lives, it’s a fight for life itself right now. The stakes are that high. And Stacey, thank you for sharing insights into how a large and complex organization like Heineken re-engineers towards these bolder sustainability commitments and gets it done. So thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Stacey Tank:
No. Thank you, Simon. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate your hospitality.

Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead with We. And you can find out more information about today’s guest, Stacey Tank, in the show notes of this episode. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts so you never miss an episode. Plus you can now find us on all United Airlines Inflight Entertainment consoles as well. And if you like this video, hit the like button below and be sure to subscribe. Finally, if you’d like to dive even deeper into the world of purposeful business, check out my new book in Wall Street Journal best seller, Lead with We, that’s now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Books. Lead with We is produced by Goal 17 media. I’ll see you again soon. And until then, let’s all Lead with We.