Life Cycle Management as a Way to Operationalize the Creating Shared Value Concept in the Food and Beverage Industry: A Case Study
Angela Adams, Urs Schenker, and Yves Loerincik
Abstract Nestlé is using life cycle management approaches to operationalize the Creating Shared Value concept that is strongly promoted by the company. Following the success of the implementation of PIQET, an LCA software for packaging designers to integrate environmental criteria in their decision-making, Nestlé has decided to develop a specific tool moving from packaging to product ecodesign tool. This tool, EcodEX, is linked to the recipe system of the company to facilitate the realization and improve the quality of LCA. The number of users has increased to reach 700 people today. However, there have been many challenges to overcome, such as: the availability and the management of inventory data, following-up the latest methodology, as well as the training and education of users.
Keywords Creating Shared Value • Data development • Data management • Ecodesign • EcodEX • Education • Life cycle assessment • Life cycle management
• Nestlé • PIQET • Training
Introduction
Systematically applying Creating Shared Value principles in practice and integrating them into the way a company is doing business is a huge challenge, and in some cases, even a paradigm change. Life cycle management is an important and powerful approach that Nestlé uses to operationalize creating shared value.
Nestlé adopted a simplified ecodesign approach early in the design phase since many years through the implementation of PIQET (Karli et al. 2010), a tool that optimizes the environmental performance of packaging. Since then, packaging designers using life cycle assessment to support their design choices is significantly increased.
Several studies (Humbert et al. 2009; Kim et al. 2013) have shown that in the food and beverage industry the product itself generally dominates the impacts of any life cycle assessment (LCA) and that, comparatively, packaging has a limited impact on the environment. The resolution to expand the ecodesign approach to the products was therefore an obvious decision for Nestlé. To do so, a new simplified ecodesign tool, EcodEX (Schenker et al. 2014), has been adopted to evaluate the current and new products, taking into account the whole life cycle, including consumer behavior.
