How King Arthur Flour Has Gone ‘Green,’ Part 1 of 2

As the pressure mounts for catalog/multichannel companies to become more environmentally friendly — the charge led in particular by environmental groups such as Catalog Choice — at least one cataloger has responded to the calls. In a recent webinar from the Target Marketing and Printing Impressions Publishing groups (sister publications of Catalog Success) called Go ‘Green’ From the Inside Out: How to Develop a Corporate Environmental Sustainability Program, Allison Furbish, media relations manager of the baking flour cataloger King Arthur Flour, discussed how her company has made environmental responsibility part of its mission.

(This is the first part of a two-part series covering this webinar and in particular, the presentation from Furbish. Check back next week for the finale, where we’ll reveal Furbish’s tips to help your business develop an environmental sustainability program.)

For the Norwich, Vt.-based King Arthur Flour, this movement is actually two-plus years in the making. Two summers ago, the company created an in-house stewardship team, consisting of two groups: a green working group focused on environmentally oriented projects and a community working group focused on socially oriented projects.

“The stewardship team is the primary mechanism for all of these corporate social and environmental responsibility efforts,” Furbish said. Working with a limited budget, the environmental stewardship team identified the following areas where King Arthur Flour could green up its operations:

* a company-wide recycling program;

* food waste was sent to a local farm to feed the animals;

* replaced its water coolers and now drinks the local community well water;

* compostable packaging for its products;

* a “green your commute” challenge, where employees were challenged to come up with ways to get to work besides one person per car, such as carpooling;

* a “green clean” initiative, where all of the company’s cleaning products were replaced with nontoxic, biodegradable, environmentally responsible cleaners;

(Furbish noted that there was a small initial cost to set up the dilution stations, but in the long run, the replacement cleaners cost less than what was previously used.)

* warehouse lighting was redone to reduce energy use;

* changed its catalog paper to 85 percent postconsumer recycled paper (King Arthur Flour mails more than 6 million catalogs a year, Furbish said); and

* smart sourcing of its products, with the company’s wheat grown in the Midwest, milled near where it’s grown and distributed from there, cutting down on transportation.

Stewardship Policies Follow Suit
In addition to putting these ideas into action, the green working group created a number of stewardship policies for all of King Arthur Flour. Developed by the green group, these policies gained upper management’s approval, Furbish recalled. They included:

* a non-GMO policy, which means that King Arthur Flour never uses genetically modified wheat;

* an environmental policy; and

* an environmentally preferable purchasing policy.

“Every company needs to individually identify what its biggest [environmental] impact is and figure out what you can do about it,” Furbish said. For King Arthur Flour, she said, flour is a much bigger piece of the puzzle than recycling. It can’t manage the farms where its wheat is grown because it doesn’t own the farms. But it can use smart sourcing to manage where the wheat comes from and how it’s distributed, reducing the company’s carbon footprint.