Soy Toolkit Interview with Mike Barry

In this interview we speak to Mike Barry, former Head of Sustainable Business at UK retailer Marks and Spencer.

Mike shares his experience, learnings and recommendations in relation to establishing sustainable supply chains – with a particular focus on soy.

As a member of the Global Resource Initiative taskforce, what are your priorities for reducing the climate and environment impacts of UK supply chains?

It’s very simple; stop deforestation in the global supply chain. The Global Resource Initiative (GRI) has been really important for the coming together of policymakers, NGO’s and big businesses to co-create the system that we need for the next decade to eradicate deforestation from the supply chains. Whether that’s soy, palm oil, cocoa or cattle global supply chains - which many UK citizens, and also UK retailers and businesses, are quite invisible and opaque to as it’s happening several thousand miles away across the world.

The GRI has stepped into the vacuum and said something has to happen; the world’s forests are burning. We are partly responsible for that as UK consumers, and we have to stop it, but we can’t stop it on our own. We have to work in partnership, not just within the UK, but globally as well. So, for me the GRI is really important but it’s all about stopping deforestation.

What role does the sourcing of responsible soy play?

Through the good work of organisations like WWF, we have identified that there are seven key commodities that are driving deforestation around the world, of which soy is critically important.

There has been a lot of scrutiny, rightly, of palm oil and its implications for deforestation in South East Asia. The soya issue has been a little less well understood as it’s quite an invisible ingredient to people. The vast majority has gone into animal feed but when people eat meat, they don’t realise that soy is often behind it.

It’s been a complex issue to drive change for, but soy is right at the heart of the deforestation challenge that we’ve got globally, including UK consumption -- and that’s what the GRI wants to solve.

What key challenges do you think the industry must overcome before sustainable soy becomes mainstream?

The GRI’s work has identified several different things that we have got to do in partnership to drive the change we need. Some of this is about due diligence - making sure that all British businesses that put products on the market have a clear responsibility for understanding deforestation risk in the supply chain and are working to eradicate it.

Second is transparency - understanding where your raw materials come from and understand where you need to make interventions to drive change. That’s still a rarity for many of these commodities.

Third is capacity building - making sure we are working across the supply chains to ensure that people are not just doing it because there is a policy or a rule (although those are necessary), but because this is vital to understanding why keeping forests standing is so important and the steps that we can take to keep them standing.

Fourth is jurisdiction – the British government has to work with other national governments round the world to make sure they have the right policy systems to keep forests standing, the right enforcement and regulation to protect the forests as well.

So, this is not about the UK trying to solve the world’s problems on its own, it’s about partnership within Britain and partnership on a global basis as well.

What are some of the practical lessons learnt by your sustainability and sourcing teams at M&S along the responsible soy sourcing journey?

First and foremost is actually understanding where you are using these raw materials. I remember starting on timber initially before we moved into palm oil, then soy, as M&S was putting thousands of products on the marketplace made of timber.

Some of that was very obvious; it was furniture, but even clothing as around 10% can contain cellulosic fibres made from wood. Then you had the wood constructing the buildings, in marketing literature and paper letters that were sent to consumers in packaging. So, wherever you look, M&S had this very large, and often invisible timber footprint around the world.

Once we knew where we're using it in the business, we could then start to track and trace it back through several stages of the supply chain; from the company making the product, the raw material source, the grower, down to the producer back in the field. Tracing back from what you put on to the market all the way back to the source was a huge challenge. Just 10 to 15 years ago that was just an incredibly complex mix of spreadsheets in Excel. As we've moved to a world of artificial intelligence and big data, you can now start to automate these tracking and tracing systems.

However, first and foremost it was a challenge of asking ‘what is my footprint’? And then the second great challenge is once you know your footprint, how does tiny little Marks and Spencer, just turning over £10 billion pounds a year, a speck in the UK economy (let alone the global economy) drive the change that needs to happen on the other side of the world? It’s only by working together with other good businesses like Tesco, Sainsbury's, Walmart, Carrefour, Metro, Nestle and Unilever could you possibly drive the leverage that you needed to drive change in those supply chains. So, footprint first and then building the scale to actually drive change.

In many companies there can be a significant ‘disconnect’ between the decision-makers in headquarters and the views of staff in the rest of the organisation. The Soy Toolkit has identified capacity building as a key activity to bridge this gap. How can we overcome capacity building challenges?

It’s a brilliant point, and it is all about capacity building. First, you have to start with the right institutional rules on a government level. Then, at business level you have to have your sourcing policy, standards, audits and checks to make sure that things happen.

But that only takes you so far – if people don't understand why there is a rule, they’ll either ignore it, just partially implement it, or do it in the wrong way. When people are truly invested in this as a necessity for protecting forests, by thinking ‘this is what I need to do to protect forests’, then things get better - so that capacity building element is incredibly important.

Across these complex, multiple different supply chains, when very few different players in the supply chain actually know who each other are, it's very difficult to build a common approach to capacity building. The Soy Toolkit enables you to have one conversation that goes down consistently through multiple levels of supply chain, and it means that whenever somebody else starts that conversation - not just Marks & Spencer but Tesco or Sainsbury’s, or other big businesses - the same consistent messaging and capacity building goes back as well. Everybody wins together. So, capacity building is critical for this.

Once capacity is built, what would be the next steps you would recommend companies take to make sure implementation is robust?

Again, it’s all about consistency across the marketplace. I've seen so many times when one or two businesses step forward, but not 10 or 20. It's very difficult to move things.

The first thing you have to do as a business once you've got your own house in order with supply chain due diligence and capacity building in place, is to encourage the rest of the marketplace. Often, you’re asking your competitors to come on the journey with you.

The second thing is starting to work to encourage change on a political level. A lot businesses try and avoid getting involved with politics for the right reason, but actually no business can create a stable supply chain around the world without institutional capacity and in the producing company countries. We have to be very humble in terms of how we ask for change from national governments.

The second thing is to have a political voice, a very humble voice, that explains to government why it's important to put products on the marketplace that are produced to high standards in the producing countries as well.

Those are the two big things I think businesses need to do; overcome competition concerns and overcome political concern. And that's again, what the Global Resource Initiative did by bringing together business, policymakers and NGOs together to co-create the solution.

In summary, what would you say to any business listening to this?

• Forests are burning now, contributing significantly to a rapidly accelerating climate crisis. Citizens expect business to offer them deforestation free products.

• But tackling deforestation in complex, global supply chains is tough. Only concerted, systemic partnership across sectors will deliver the scale and pace of change we need.

• And the 4th industrial revolution is giving us the tools (AI, big data, remote sensing, product traceability etc) to finally tackle a problem defined by a staggering number of geographical, corporate and production datapoints.

For companies interested in furthering their responsible soy sourcing commitments, we are offering free training from the expert team behind the Soy Toolkit.

Please email us at soytoolkit@proforest.net and we’ll be in touch.