Forty years ago Groupe Danone founder Antoine Riboud said: ‘The responsibility of the company does not stop at the factory gate.’ General Manager for Nature Myriam Cohen-Welgryn speaks with The New Economy about measuring the company’s impact on society, its employees and the environment, and reporting on CO2 emissions in the same way the company reports profit.

The New Economy: Danone’s green vision isn’t a recent development, how far back does it go in the company’s history?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: Danone started to work on those subjects about 40 years ago under the vision of one man Anton Tabut he is the founder of the group. Basically he was saying that the responsibility of the company does not stop at the factory gate. A company has to go for growth and profit obviously but it also has to be aware of it’s impact on the society, meaning the life of it’s employees but also it’s impact on nature. Today the philosophy is that the company needs to work on the areas where it has a significant impact which of course means working on C02, but it also means working on water, packaging, sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.

The New Economy: How have you woven environmental responsibility into the heart of Danone’s corporate culture?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: Danone’s mission is to bring health through food to the largest number of people. The vision here is that you can not deliver that mission if you do not take care of nature. Just because we sell food which is just transformation of nature, if you do not have a healthy planet you can not have healthy food to sell to the people. It is in the gene of our mission and the gene of our culture; to be able to sell healthy food we need a healthy nature.

The New Economy: Looking in more depth at your green vision, how important is reliable measurement of carbon omissions?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: We treat carbon omissions just like we treat any business project. In any business project you need to first measure to understand where you start from and to understand how you progress along the objectives that you have set yourself. This is why for us the key step has been to develop a measure. We created an internal tool, which we call the ‘Danprint’, that allows us to measure from the upstream to the delivery to stores what the real footprint is of our products. Tomorrow we will be reporting the carbon just like today we report the profit, so we have been working intensively on how you integrate that into the system of the company. We have started our first pilot in Spain and are confident that within 2/3 years we will be able to achieve that goal.

The New Economy: You have an ambitious plan to slash your carbon footprint by 30% per kilo by 2012, how is that progressing?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: We are on track to achieve that objective. Roughly speaking, we started around 2008 and we are now around -17% so far. We will reach about 7% this year so happy to have achieved that. Obviously achieving the 30% means maintaining that trade for the 2 coming years and the easiest things has been done, so to achieve that we need to generate breakthrough ideas. So to answer your question, for 2011 the plans are there and we have breakthrough things to achieve that. For 2012 we are still working on it to make sure we deliver that objective.

The New Economy: So a lot of hard work ahead in the next 2 year?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: A lot of hard work ahead and that requires the mobilisation of all. That is also why we have put the carbon reduction in the bonuses of the 1,400 Managers and Directors and General Managers of Danone to make sure that it is really achieved and that further confirms it is treated as any other business project.

The New Economy: So how do you then reduce emissions in a company of your size and worldwide scope?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: The first thing I have to say to answer your question is that there is not one single project that allows us to do that. It is a full pipeline of many projects, all along the chain, that allows us to achieve that very big reduction. So we work, in the plant for instance, we mainly on the reduction of energy use. To give you a perspective from 2000 – 2009 we reduced the energy by 45%. While, since we started that project in 2008, we have managed to really significantly increase the rate. In 2010 we did only -11%, 2009 we did only -11%. We also work on the packaging and there we have a lot of ideas where we can take out unnecessary packaging. We also invented, for instance on a dairy pack, you add air into the plastic which reduces the density which significantly reduced the plastic. We have also developed recycling. On our PT bottlewe have organised a whole chain, how you collect the packs, how your transport them, that also requires helping the upstream to be developed. Also in transportation, switching from truck to train has a very significant impact on carbon.

The New Economy: Offsetting the carbon is the final part of your plan. What is the rational for that?

Myriam Cohen-Welgryn: Most of the experts say that reducing carbon won’t be enough to maintain the level of C02 at the range that is needed to prevent climate change to happen. So we also need to help nature to absorb more carbon that what nature currently does. We want to do our share of that work and we want to do it in a way that is as strategic as possible, working on projects that are more or less linked to our activity. I will give you one example because it is the first pilot that we have developed, it is on our Evian brand. Basically we have decided that Evian brand would be neutral in 2011, so of course we reduce and that is the prerequisite for carbon offset. We considered that we first need to reduce before starting to say we offset. So Evian must reduce it’s C02 by 40%, even more than the other objectives. Then the remaining carbon we can offset by investing in programmes that allow nature to absorb more. For example last year we invested together with a local NGO in planting trees, we planted 35million [type of tree 00:07:25] and those trees while they grow will absorb carbon. So for instance within 2011 we will have the equivalent of 150 kilotons of C02 to ensure that the whole brand of Evian is completely neutral.