Sustainabooze Recap
We’re big fans of sustainability and tasty adult beverages, so when Seattle Made offered us the opportunity to co-lead a breakout session at their Sustainabooze event we squealed with excitement. After shooting some ideas back and forth with the organizer, Nico, we settled on Holistic Sustainability as our break out topic.
Arriving at the event I of course headed straight to the samples area—also known as “the bar” in this case. I was particularly excited to try the beers from Lantern Brewing because I haven’t been to their brewery and because it’s particularly hard to find Belgian inspired beer in the Northwest. They did not disappoint, and I was tempted to pour myself a full pint from their growlers but decided it was better to share, so I moved on to the other samples.
After a brief panel discussion with representatives from Welcome Road Winery, Westland Distillery, Finnriver Farm and Cidery, Lantern Brewing, and Seattle Cider / Two Beers Brewing / Sound Craft Seltzer (one joint company), we all split up into our respective break outs.
Breakout Session
Our group started with some introductions to see what perspective everyone was bringing to the table. Then Ryan, my co-presenter from Bucha Belly, got us warmed up by asking everyone what sustainability-related problems came immediately to mind. The group listed things like problems with the system, buying organic vs buying local, scalability and ingredient sourcing issues, the cost of production, resilience, ethics, and product consistency.
Holistic Sustainability Framework
Next, I took command of the whiteboard and drew a holistic sustainability frame work with three columns (upstream, midstream, and downstream) and three rows (environment, ethics, and economy), and then asked the group to come up with some industry challenges, barriers, and opportunities in all nine cells of the grid. The group quickly came up with upstream environmental and economic issues (like package materials sourcing, and local and national policies / laws), and then slowly but surely identified issues for each of the other cells (like cost of waste disposal, compostable packaging, fair pay, and safe working conditions). Once our minds opened up to viewing the entire system more holistcally, we were primed to find a solution that solves multiple problems at once.
Packaging & Ingredients Problem Solving
The group decided to zero in on two of the problems that came up a lot during the framing session—packaging (specifically around glass bottles and reuse) and ingredients (scalable and reliable solutions for sourcing).
For the packaging problem the group decided that a good solution would likely come from the industry collaborating to design and collectively use one bottle (per beverage type) that’s specifically designed for collection and reuse so they could get the cost per piece down and create a consumer-friendly system for recovery and reuse of said bottles. Something like the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, actually, but for more than beer (think spirits, wine, cider, kombucha, etc).
For the ingredients challenge we focused on a platform that would connect farmers and manufacturers so farmers could plant based on what manufactures are planning to buy (based on manufacturer requests / purchase orders), and so manufacturers can more easily find local, sustainable sources for the ingredients they need—especially as they scale and need to source from more than one farm. A win-win for both sides of that challenge.
Summary
Similar to other times we’ve led these kinds of sessions, two major themes came out of our discussion and were very present in our solutions:
There is a ton of overlap in the high-level sustainability themes across most, if not all product companies—from raw materials, to labor, to costs of doing business, to manufacturing, to distribution, to consumer demands and behavior, to recovering materials, and so on. Therefore we shouldn’t be afraid to look outside our industry for ideas to solve problems within our industry.
And in fact, most sustainable solutions are going to involve some sort of collaborative action. Either because the problem is too big to solve alone, because you need buying power to get big innovations funded, because you need support from other companies upstream and downstream to pull off a big change, and ultimately because bringing together multiple stakeholders creates a more holistic solution that considers the challenge from everyone’s perspective and therefore has a much better chance at actually solving the problem long term, system-wide.