Case available in text form below the video.
You are a manager at Turnip Tornado, a fictional global food producer.
Your boss, the CFO, wants to meet you to discuss a new sustainability initiative that the CEO is interested in launching. The CEO attended an executive education module at a prestigious business school and learned about Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan. Now our CEO is interested in launching a similar initiative at Turnip Tornado.
The Unilever initiative was built on three key pillars:
Improving health and well-being: We will help more than a billion people take action to improve their health and wellbeing. This involves efforts at improving health and hygiene, as well as addressing the nutrition available in diets.
Reducing environmental impact: We will halve the environmental footprint of the making and use of our products as we grow our business. Unilever is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its products and operations by focusing on areas such as greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, waste reduction, and sustainable sourcing of raw materials.
Enhancing livelihoods: Unilever aims to enhance the livelihoods of people across its value chain by promoting fair labor practices, supporting smallholder farmers, and improving access to education and training.
To achieve these goals, Unilever has set a number of ambitious targets, such as sourcing 100% of its agricultural raw materials sustainably, halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and improving the health and hygiene of 1 billion people by 2020.
Our company is not entirely unlike Unilever in the sense that we serve markets in four continents and source a wide range of raw materials from all over the world. All our products are in the food category, but unfortunately, they are not very healthy. In fact, almost all our most profitable products are full of sugar and the worst kinds of fats. Well, that part we never say aloud and I never said it.
The CFO would like you to provide a strategic analysis of developing this kind of sustainability initiative at Turnip Tornado. What are the key benefits of pursuing this strategy? What are the biggest disadvantages or costs involved? Finally, if we pursue this strategy, what are the two most important success factors we need to get right?
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If you did not get all of the points on your first try, please do revise your answer and submit again!