This week we sat down with Simon Bonnet, Global Milk Upstream & Sustainability Director at Bel Group. Steering global milk procurement at Bel Group, Simon grapples with an almighty sustainability challenge - dairy, accounting for ⅔ of Bel’s emissions. With a dual responsibility of ensuring quality milk procurement while driving farmers toward lower carbon production, Simon sits at the crossroads of procurement and CSR. In our conversation, we break down how Simon shapes procurement decisions to cut emissions across a portfolio of household cheese favourites, including The Laughing Cow, Babybel and Boursin.

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Team Set up: Independent and distributed function At Bel, an 8-member CSR core team shapes the company's mission, formulating global commitments and translating them into actionable local strategies. A pivotal merger in 2021 saw the finance and CSR teams join forces, prioritising a holistic approach to profitability and sustainability.

Alongside the core CSR team, there is a distributed team to implement these commitments, operating across different regions (North America, Europe and Canada) and problem types (e.g., milk, packaging and transport).

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The underpinnings of Bel’s methane reduction strategy:

Bel Group has a global SBTi 1.5-degree target to cut CO2 intensity, a net reduction of ¼ of GHG’s throughout Bel’s entire value chain by 2035.  in their product portfolio by 2035. With around 4m tC02e emissions and 1/3rd of these emissions coming from methane, methane was highlighted as a critical intervention area.

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Simon’s recipe for reduction:

• Nurture long-term relationships with farmers: As well as long off-take agreements (5-10 years) Bel invests heavily in up-skilling farmers with new solutions and techniques. Bel follows a local engagement approach, tailoring communication and up-skilling programs to each farm. This forms the cornerstone of building an effective relationship.
• Be transparent with mutual data sharing: Bel conducts carbon diagnostics on 80% of its farms, the results aren’t kept in isolation but shared with the farmers to collaboratively explore solutions. Bel reciprocates the data exchange, by sharing their strategy, ambitions, market position and profitability data. This transparent exchange has been instrumental in fostering a strong foundation of trust.
• Open source findings: Bel's recent commitment to the Dairy, Methane, Action Alliance involves sharing methodologies and scaling practices in collaboration with industry peers like Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, and Danone, centralising knowledge for widespread adoption.

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Simon’s advice for securing buy-in:

• Build an internal carbon price: Assigning a cost to each tonne of carbon enables informed decision-making on viable initiatives. For instance, the rollout of Boaver, a methane-reducing feed supplement across all Slovakian farms, proved financially feasible as the initiative cost was less than what the equivalent carbon would cost against their baseline.
• Milking Bel’s methane initiatives for all they are worth: Strategically share sustainability initiatives with customers and/or consumers for commercial advantage. For instance, whilst Bel wasn’t able to promote the Boaver methane reduction initiative to consumers (given it wasn’t implemented across 100% of Bel farms), Simon was able to position it to major retailers like Tesco, Lidl and Carrefour to bolster their market position against competitors.
• Merge financial and CSR functions: Unifying these core teams helps to streamline decision-making and remove the hassle of internal buy-in, given every decision has to be both sustainable and financially viable by virtue.

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Simon’s insights offer a robust blueprint for companies looking to engage at the farm level. Get in touch if you want to pick his brains any further!

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