State of Sustainability Podcast

Guest: David Croft, Former Head of Sustainability, Reckitt

SAIF: Welcome back to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm your host Saif Hamid, founder and CEO of Altruistiq.

In this episode, we speak with David Croft. David has recently stepped down from his role at Reckitt — maker of Dettol, Nurofen, and Durex — where he led their sustainability function after a long career spanning some of the real trailblazers in this space: Diageo, Waitrose, and Cadbury's. This was a rich conversation centred on resilience — what it means for business, what it means for sustainability professionals, and what the road ahead looks like.

David, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you with us.

DAVID: Nice to speak to you, and nice to see you again.

SAIF: You have a wealth of experience across organisations that have been doing genuinely impactful work for decades. I thought the best way to bring that through would be to explore two themes. The first is what I call the triple win. The second is how the sustainability profession has evolved over the time you've been part of it.

The way I define a triple win in a sustainability context is: a win for the supplier, a win for the business, and a win for the planet. You could add a fourth — the customer — and make it a quadruple win. But the core idea is that we're increasingly recognising in sustainability that the value you bring to the broader ecosystem matters just as much as the value you bring to your own business. That's been quite central to how you've approached your role. Could you talk about how you see win-win-win playing out in practice?

DAVID: You have to find multiple value points — both for your own organisation and beyond it. It makes no sense to operate an unsustainable system, economically, environmentally, or socially, for any of the actors involved. That usually means everyone has to compromise a little so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

There's no point squeezing a supplier's price if the long-term result is that supplier becomes less effective, less resilient, less able to deliver on quality, and more likely to cut corners on environmental or social standards. We've seen an enormous amount of that over the last 30 years. Running a supply network purely for the benefit of one entity in it makes no sense to me.

If you want to build resilience, you have to accept some compromise and create multiple value opportunities for different actors along the chain. And that has to include the wider ecosystem those actors are part of — not just the environmental dimension, but the social one too. The communities that exist within the landscapes our global value chains touch are part of those ecosystems.

Water is the clearest example. If you're abstracting water from a landscape, that has an impact far beyond your own immediate use. It makes absolute sense to put consideration back into that landscape — not just for your supply chain's benefit, but for the communities and nature within it. These are all increasingly visible, interdependent elements of an ecosystem that we're all dependent upon.

From a purely economic standpoint: if a primary producer — a farmer — isn't surviving financially, then whatever you're buying from them is not resilient supply. Over 20 to 30 years, I've spent a great deal of time with farmers and farming communities, trying to understand their challenges and work together to strengthen the supply network in ways that benefit them, and in doing so, also benefit my network, my business, and ultimately the customers we serve.

Fair trade in cocoa is a good example — working with literally thousands of smallholder farmers in West Africa to improve their productivity. That meant higher incomes for them and more resilient supply for us. Our dependency on that origin made it worthwhile investing disproportionately to ensure we had the right quality and quantity at a cost that remained viable within the economics of a chocolate bar supply chain.

As we've seen in the last couple of years, when cocoa prices rise above $8,000 or $10,000 a tonne, people start buying less chocolate. That undermines the ROI on the significant capital food companies invest in production infrastructure. You need to work with farmers to support productivity — which puts more money in their pocket, creates a more resilient supply chain, and increasingly allows them to farm in ways that are better for nature. In the case of cocoa farming, it means kids going to school. It means the whole system working more effectively. But to see that, you have to see the supply chain end to end — not just your small piece of it on a spreadsheet.

SAIF: I want to go deeper into resilience as a business advantage. This may sound slightly provocative to sustainability professionals, but: if you look at commodity price volatility over the last several years — 150 to 200 high-volatility days for key commodities in a given year — and if that volatility is only going to increase as we breach more planetary boundaries, then a business faces a choice. You can pursue resilience — deeper vertical collaboration, longer-term investment with key suppliers. Or you can pursue agility — the ability to procure from whoever can meet your needs at any given moment, without deep investment in any one supplier. Are these opposing forces?

DAVID: They can work hand in hand, but it depends on the strategic nature of the material in question.

If you simply chop and change suppliers on a frequent basis, you never build up a real understanding of what's happening at the base of that supply chain. And I've seen this consistently — from manufacturing suppliers to agricultural raw materials. If your strategy is to move around the global supply network constantly, the price will go up and the span of available options will narrow. That's why, for genuinely strategic materials, it makes sense to think vertically — to invest in building resilience across two or three key origins or suppliers. Nobody wants single sourcing, because that creates risk in a different direction. But for key agricultural supplies, the right answer is focused, deep engagement with a small number of critical origins.

Agricultural supply chains are increasingly impacted by environmental pressures — biodiversity loss, nature degradation, water stress. We're all dependent on these systems. If local sourcing becomes harder and imported alternatives become more expensive or politically restricted, we either accept we can't get everything all the time, or we make different strategic choices. As a procurement organisation, you're in a position to make those choices — to invest in strategic resilience that underpins your business for the long term.

I'm not advocating a return to vertical integration. Most companies that owned farming assets sold them in the 1990s and early 2000s, and frankly don't have the organisational capability to run them anymore. Nor does it make sense in commodity supply chains built on millions of smallholder farmers. But there are new models — farmer co-ops, infrastructure investment, rewarding farmers not just for the product they deliver but for how they farm. That opens up multiple value streams: resilient supply underpinned by a resilient landscape, biodiversity benefits, and carbon sequestration opportunities.

Is it not more effective to pay the farmer of your key raw material to farm in a way that sequesters carbon you can then use? You're creating a more virtuous circle — paying once for multiple outcomes.

SAIF: You're describing two layers of the virtuous circle: investment in the broader ecosystem, and investment in the financial survivability of the individual supplier. You touched on this in the context of latex for Reckitt. Could you describe that for our listeners — what was the problem, what was the finding, what was the initiative?

[Mid-roll: Altruistiq]

DAVID: The starting point, and it isn't unique to Reckitt, is: do you have consistency of supply? Pressure on agricultural commodities is increasingly visible because land use change is continuing and accelerating. The ability of land to support productive output is getting harder — through nature impacts, climate change, water stress, soil health. And the people who own that land are making rational choices about which crop to grow: the highest-value crop. If that isn't what you want to buy, you have a threat to origins you may have relied upon for a century.

In the case of latex, by shifting sourcing strategically and investing in farming activity, we reduced land-use-change risk and helped farmers improve quality consistency. That gave us higher-quality latex more reliably. But it also meant the approach to farming delivered higher productivity, which put more money in farmers' pockets — and created the potential to add a nature resilience dimension, strengthening biodiversity at a time when frameworks like TNFD are asking companies to think about nature literally on the balance sheet.

You can also layer carbon opportunities on top. Farming practices using biochar as a soil health improver, planting around the farm, hedgerow management — all of these can generate carbon that the farmer creates and you can purchase. So instead of simply buying a kilogram of latex, you're buying a kilogram of latex farmed in a certain way that gives you confidence in nature resilience, helps tackle biodiversity risk, and potentially generates carbon credits — with the value of those credits reinvested into the farming community.

What this points to is a fundamentally different way of thinking about land. The productive value of land is not just the kilogram of something it grows. It's what that land does: it sequesters carbon, strengthens nature, preserves biodiversity, supports water catchment management, reduces downstream flooding and pollution. Those are all value streams from the same asset.

There are already emerging markets for carbon and nature credits. They're the logical first step in thinking about the landscapes our value chains depend on. The challenge is that these markets are still fragmented — but that is the direction of travel.

SAIF: When you need to make the case to finance colleagues for spending more with a part of the supply chain than the immediate economics would justify, how do you frame it? Is it a resilience argument — this investment derisks future disruption? Or is it a separate budget conversation — we have a carbon offset budget we can redirect toward existing suppliers?

DAVID: It can be both, but the resilience of key strategic supplies is almost always the most motivating starting point. Most large organisations, when you look at their risk registers, already identify sourcing of key raw materials as a strategic risk. Procurement teams spend significant time on it.

Where the economic pressures on supply are becoming increasingly visible, the case for investing in key supply networks becomes easier to make. If you can then say, "And we're also going to be buying carbon or biodiversity credits, and rather than buying them on the open market, we can focus that investment on the origins we already depend on" — I've never had pushback on that. The ROI becomes easier to support, not harder, because you're doubling down on the same investment for multiple outcomes: better supply, more sustainable farming, and returns that address your climate and nature targets simultaneously.

The problem arises when people think in separate silos. The individual ROI for each initiative in isolation may not stack up. But when you group them together — and particularly when you take the conversation to someone with strategic overview, like a CFO or a CPO — you rise above silo budgeting. And at that level, the combined ROI absolutely makes sense. You get the sign-off.

SAIF: I've noticed that senior procurement leaders have developed enormously in this direction over the last several years — the quality of engagement and insight from a Chief Procurement Officer at a major consumer goods business today is unrecognisable compared to even six or seven years ago. I'd like to move to the sustainability leader role specifically. You've seen it evolve across Cadbury's, Diageo, Waitrose, and Reckitt. What are the big shifts in what was expected of a sustainability leader when you first joined the profession, versus what's expected today?

DAVID: Your point about procurement is worth addressing first, because you're right. The reason procurement has evolved is that the avenues for mining efficiency through price pressure have run out. That wave has been surfed. To get more value now, you have to genuinely understand the supply network — the pressures suppliers face at every level. The best procurement people understand that. You could say they're applying the sustainability lens — thinking about externalities — to a procurement context. And that's part of the step change happening for sustainability professionals too.

Twenty or thirty years ago, sustainability professionals knew about things nobody else in the business knew about. Climate change, human rights, nature dependency — these were emerging topics, and sustainability professionals were making the case internally for why they mattered. What they often weren't doing was thinking clearly about business value — how to create it, how to talk about it in the language of business.

The step change is that sustainability is fundamentally about navigating externalities that have always existed but have only recently become visible and impactful on business performance. If you don't understand how those externalities affect your specific business, what levers to pull, and how to frame the conversation in terms of business or brand value — you're not going to succeed in embedding sustainability in the organisation.

I think about this through the lens of the Bradley Curve — a model developed by DuPont about 40 years ago, originally applied to workplace safety. It describes a progression from unmanaged, through compliance, to independent — where each individual manages their own safety without being told — and finally to interdependent, where you wouldn't enter a room without a hard hat and you wouldn't allow anyone else to either. Most businesses haven't reached that level on sustainability. Most are still at compliance — telling people what to do, rather than having internalised it as a reflex.

We need sustainability to embed itself in the same way. Not just the people with "sustainability" in their job title doing it — but procurement people, brand people, product innovators, and finance teams all thinking about these externalities and managing them as a natural part of how they work.

To do that, sustainability professionals don't just need deep knowledge of climate science. They need to understand how climate change affects their specific organisation, and work out how to help that organisation manage it and create opportunity from it. The shift is from the PhD in climate change to the MBA in business change. If you can't speak the language of business value, you can't embed sustainability in the business, and you can't make it stick.

SAIF: I completely agree. And it mirrors something I saw firsthand — when I was a consultant to the oil and gas industry, Shell and others had applied the same disciplined, systems-thinking approach to health and safety that they were beginning to bring to sustainability. The interdependent level of the Bradley Curve was visible in the culture: being corrected for not holding a railing in a corridor, every meeting beginning with a safety observation. It's no surprise to me that some of the most ambitious sustainability strategies in 2015 and 2016 were coming out of those organisations. There's a great deal to be learned from parallel internal transformations that actually worked.

DAVID: That parallel application is really key. And just as you were speaking, I was thinking about how non-financial reporting connects to this. Putting non-financial reporting on the same footing as financial reporting makes the key actor in the conversation the CFO and the board — because it makes non-financial risks and opportunities visible to exactly the people with the strategic authority to act on them.

So it's not about having a Chief Sustainability Officer. I think the days of the CSO as a standalone role are probably numbered. It's about how the CFO sees these impacts affecting the business, and plans alongside all the other financial pressures to address them, mitigate them, and create opportunity from them. The same is true for brand directors and supply chain leads. Ultimately, it becomes a leadership conversation about a new set of increasingly visible externalities — and if a business is going to succeed, its leaders have to understand how to manage and embrace them.

SAIF: Perfectly put, David. Thank you so much for joining us. We started with the big picture of the triple win, went deep into resilience and why it creates value, talked about how to make the internal case for investing in supply chain partnerships that benefit nature, the supply chain, and the business — and then brought it home to the sustainability profession and the shift from being a PhD in climate change to being an MBA in business change. Such a rich conversation. I'm already looking forward to the next one.

DAVID: Me too. Nice to see you again, Saif. Speak soon.

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