Ep. 16: A new ‘KIND’ of sustainability communication strategy

While food isn’t always the flashiest sustainability topic, with agriculture being a significant driver of the climate crisis, strong sustainability communication is needed to educate and engage consumers to act. KIND is leading some cutting-edge work around regenerative agriculture – which comes with its own set of sustainability communication challenges. In this episode, Mike speaks with Lindsay Philpott, Sustainability Communication Manager at KIND to learn more about how the company navigates communicating complex sustainability topics to consumers.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mike Hower: Food isn't the flashiest of sustainability topics. But with ag being a major driver of the climate crisis. We'll need to learn to tell better stories that educate and engage folks to act. One might say we need a new “KIND” of communication strategy.   

Hey everybody, I'm here today with Lindsay Philpott, Sustainability Communication Manager at KIND. Thanks for being here today, Lindsay. 

Lindsay Philpott: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. You've had some really powerhouse guests on here, so I'm very honored to be in this cohort. 

Mike: Well, KIND is definitely a powerhouse, so you belong here. Great, so the first question I want to ask today is: why is communicating sustainability important for KIND? 

Lindsay: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, sustainability is really foundational to the work we do at KIND. It's not only important for us as a brand, but we know it's important for our consumers too according to our KIND insights team. Actually, and I found this really interesting – climate change is a primary concern for most of our consumers and 86 percent of KIND consumers care about sustainability. 

So, our consumers really expect us to be acting in a way that aligns with our mission and vision because we are called KIND. So, we need to act like it right. So, communicating our sustainability story in a way that genuinely lives up to the expectations of our consumers and is transparent is really important.

And what I kind of ground our sustainability comms in, especially focusing on consumer education, because I really do think that we have a long way to go in our industry with consumer education.  

Mike: I’m actually wondering… why are you called KIND? 

Lindsay: That's a great question. It's not an acronym actually, it's from our founder Daniel, who named us KIND because the word KIND was really important to him and his family's story. And I can share more information about that actually if you're interested. But it's really interesting, the founding of KIND and how kindness plays into it.

But it was really grounded in how are we showing up in a way that's kind to the world and how are we bringing kindness to people in a way that impacts their bodies, impacts our communities and ultimately the planet.  

Mike: That makes sense. I assume it wasn't because you didn't call yourself the MEAN bar.

Lindsay: [laughs] No, that doesn't have the same branding. 

Mike: Actually, I'm going to see if I can trademark that. I feel like people would buy the MEAN bar if I made that a thing.

Lindsay: Honestly, I feel like with the current climate today, people  like, I'm just going to buy my MEAN bar. That's really about transparency and honesty.

Mike: My partner is actually a dietitian. So, I could probably use her to help me formulate something. 

Lindsay: [laughs] Okay. Okay. Don't, don't say that I was involved in the idea. 

Mike: Awesome. Great. So, you touched on this a little bit already, but who are your main audiences that you're trying to reach with your sustainability communication?

Lindsay: I think there's two main audiences when we think about sustainability comms. First, as I mentioned, is our consumers. And the second is the broader industry. So, for our consumers — because I mentioned they index pretty high when it comes to caring about sustainability — we really want to meet them where they are.

But the reality is that this is a really confusing space. It can be a very confusing space for our consumers. There's different labels. There's a lot of different claims out there. So, that's why we do try to approach it from an educational first perspective or lens to make sure that we're really arming them, arming our consumers with the knowledge they need to empower them to make a better choice, a kinder choice at the shelf. And that's really what we think our role is when it comes to our consumers. And that's the responsibility that we think we have as KIND for our consumers. 

And then when I talk about the industry, KIND is a top global buyer of almonds. So, our purchasing power and our voice carries a lot of weight. So, really leading by putting our money where our mouth is is really important when it comes to sustainable sourcing, because — for lack of a better word — that putting our money where our mouth is really helps the industry move forward in terms of progress because it gives suppliers an incentive to adopt more sustainable practices.

So, we are hoping that by talking about regenerative agriculture, by talking about our sustainable sourcing strategy, by doing projects and pilots that kind of help advance the industry and by being bold with our storytelling, we can help move the industry forward as well. 

Mike: It's a great segue into my next question. So, like any consumer facing brand, having consumers being your main audience for your sustainability communication — that's probably the hardest audience to crack. Can you tell us a little bit more about KIND’s approach to communicating sustainability? What's your strategy and, you know, maybe what are some learnings that you've encountered recently that you want to talk about?

Lindsay: Yeah, our whole value proposition as KIND as a brand is really bringing more whole nutrient-dense ingredients to consumers' diets. That's kind of where we started. That's where we are now. We're really focusing on how you're nourishing your body, how you're nourishing yourself through delicious whole foods.

And I think that's a great way to also communicate our sustainability strategy, right? Like if we want to nourish the body with whole ingredients, we need to be nourishing the soil to make sure we're getting those high quality whole ingredients. And if we're really talking about providing nourishment, we have to think of the big picture because we want to make sure that our ingredients are as sustainable and as nourishing as they are delicious. 

I think it's interesting though, this question, and I was thinking about it a little bit. I think where brands get in trouble or are met with consumer skepticism is because it doesn't feel like their sustainability communications or the sustainability strategy is well aligned to their brand — or they're not addressing  key clear problems so it can feel a little bit insincere.

So for us, having a strong foundation that's grounded in science in sustainability and then leveraging our well-established brand voice and talking in our brand voice with a compelling story that's compliant, compelling and grounded in the science and the actual work and — and putting our money where our mouth is. All that kind of is key in telling our sustainability story and how we approach  our comms framework when it comes to sustainability storytelling. 

Mike: So, what strategies does KIND put into place to ensure that it's avoiding greenwashing without resorting to greenhushing? 

Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, this is the million dollar question. I think Mike, right? I do think setting the foundation has been what's really key for us, making sure we're doing the work we need to across all three pillars of our strategy from sustainable sourcing, rethinking packaging and reducing our emissions, showing we're really investing in these strategies and working closer with our NGO partners and our higher ed partners who are really leaders in the space, to give us credibility and validity to our strategy — but also our support are really supportive, helpful experts that we're leveraging.

I think bringing them in early has been key. And making sure we're supporting external research and funding. Our own has been great. I think I don't want to sound like a middle school math teacher when I say this, but show your work. I think showing your work is so important. Like we're all trying to do work when it comes to sustainability, but I think showing it and having  those receipts are important to building a foundation of credibility when it comes to telling your story and can help avoid greenwashing because you have that foundation. I think, for example, I know we'll talk about the KIND Almond Acres a little bit later, which is our regenerative agriculture pilot, but we felt really well equipped to take on this story and tackle it as an issue for a couple of key reasons.

I think KIND has a long history of being an advocacy brand, so it wasn't unlike us to kind of take on some of these more complex, hard topics — it's one of our higher impact ingredients. We know we're a top global buyer and we also know that almonds are grown in California, which is a region that is experiencing firsthand some of the impacts of a changing climate.

So, because of all of that, we knew that we are telling a story that's  genuine and sincere because we're also investing in it — the money and time and space. We need to make sure that the pilot was grounded in science. So, I think making sure that we felt really confident because of those key things in telling our story helped us avoid greenwashing and helped us not resort to green hushing.

If there were push backs because  when there are push backs, I think understanding your audience and also having a firm grasp of what the risks are when communicating your sustainability strategy can help you come up with more reactive messaging and bringing in legal early I think is also key here. So having that confidence to tell the story, is ultimately what can help move against the green hushing phenomenon that's been happening in the industry. 

Mike: Yeah, I like that idea of showing your work and that also is a kind of foundational element of good storytelling is show don't tell Yeah, it's pretty basic, but so many companies, their marketing teams, they don't want to show their work. They want to just say, oh, look how perfect we are all the time and not talk about all the struggles that got them there, which is actually what people are probably most interested in. 

Lindsay: Anyway, yes, it's a journey. It's a journey for all of us. And I think bringing the consumers in on that journey is really powerful.I think that's a really powerful storytelling technique.   

Mike: So, your title is sustainability communication manager. A lot of companies don't have that role. There's more of those roles kind of forming. Curious, so you sit between the sustainability folks and the comms marketing folks at KIND — how do you operate in that space? Like, do you have counterparts on both ends that you interface with, or how do you serve as that bridge?  

Lindsay: I love this question because I often say this in my intro when I'm Introducing myself on calls to internal and external parties. I often say that I think of my job as a facilitator. I have conversations and have a technical understanding of what our technical experts are doing really to make sure that we're getting the work done. But then also I'm not coming from an educational background of sustainability. I'm not a technical expert, and I know that. So I can also help, but because I understand the language they're using and the world in which the technical experts are operating in, I can use that to facilitate conversations with our marketing team and our comms team, and really ground them in the story that we need to be telling because I can see it from both angles, right?

I see it as somebody who has one foot in the technical space and one foot in the comms space. I can more easily facilitate those discussions because I think that's where a lot of tensions rise when talking about sustainability. When you're talking to folks who just want to talk about the numbers and the analytics of it — and here's a pie chart. But the comms folks are like — how can we bring this in a fun, playful way to consumers? How can we do an activation or a big experiential event? And having someone that understands both worlds and can kind of talk to both worlds and grounding everybody in what's possible, the work that we're actually doing, how we're being genuine and transparent and also has their heart and thinking about the consumer and what the consumer wants to hear.

I think that that's really how I pose my role to people and it's been really key and making sure that kind is communicating our sustainability strategy in a way that does feel genuine and a way that is transparent. I think because we have built that bridge between the technical expertise in the comms and the comms folks that are also doing really great work. 

Mike: I feel so seen because that's essentially the role that I play as a fractional sustainability comms person. You don't have to be a deep technical expert to understand sustainability subject matter from a high enough level to translate it for general audiences. But meanwhile, most comms generalists don't have the nuance because they're not — you can't blame them because they're not focused on this stuff all the time to really understand it. So, having those folks that kind of can be the bridge and the facilitator. I like the term facilitator. That's great between both. And increasingly, this is important because with  companies getting sued or being fined for saying the wrong thing — you got to have people that can understand both. 

Lindsay: Yes, and hold and holding space for both. I think it is really important because like you said, there's so much nuance in the sustainability landscape and being able to hold that nuance while understanding what all of your stakeholders want. Because the key of stakeholder management and sustainability comes from being able to hold that nuance and hold space for that nuance and not putting things in black and white or binary terms is really important for everyone when we're talking about sustainability. And I think it's something that sustainability comes folks have to do all the time.

Mike: So, speaking of communicating highly technical and confusing and maybe boring topics to general audiences. When I was looking at your website, there's a lot of talk about this concept of mass balance sourcing around agriculture. I think that'd be a great example of a term that just sounds incredibly complex. What is it and how do you generally go about communicating that to consumers? 

Lindsay: Yeah, I think this is one of the biggest challenges with communicating sustainability around ag topics in general because it's complicated. Like our food systems are very confusing and most people are really disconnected to where our food comes from, and I think there are terms that we need to use like “mass balance” that we need to use for compliance purposes. That might not translate well to the consumer because they just don't know, and they don't know because we haven't historically been transparent as an industry as the food industry in the past.

So, in any kind of consumer-centered language that we're using, I think we also need to make sure that we're thinking about it from an educational perspective because we need to say mass balance for compliance, but we also want to make sure that our consumers understand what we mean by that because it's in a lot of our goals.

I do actually have to lean on my notes for this because there is so much complexity here. And the legal kind of language that we need to use here to make sure that we are communicating in the right way. So, when KIND says mass balance, we mean that we are sourcing our almonds from a mass balance approach. So, the volume of our almonds we source for our bee-friendly almonds or our regenerative programs has to correspond with the volume of almonds needed for our products. Because what happens with mass balance is raw materials from a number of different farms are commingled in the supply chain. So, mass balance is a really common method for manufacturers or brands like KIND to source sustainable ingredients because it's an effective way by kind of, you know, buying the volume bee-friendly and regenerative.

We can kind of encourage the production of more bee-friendly or more regenerative practices. And so that is what we have to say every time we say mass balance because our almonds are sourced mass balance. So, when we say our almonds are sourced from bee-friendly farmland by 2025, when we say 100 percent of our almonds are sourced from farms, leveraging regen ag by 2030, all of that is on a mass balance basis. And we need to make sure that the consumer understands that. So, we're not misleading them. And we don't want to be intentionally misleading with that. So, we want to also make sure we're creating space for the question of what will inevitably come. What is mass balance? Then I've been having space for that on all of our comms materials to make sure the consumer really understands.

So it's a challenging concept. I think we don't want to beat around the bush of what it means. And we really clearly want to state what we mean, like for our claims, which is really important, which is why you see it on our website and in more consumer facing materials because it's a legal compliance issue at the end of the day, and we don't want that to feel like it's misleading to our customers.

So, we want to be really transparent about what we mean when we say mass balance and also understand and acknowledge that it's complicated. 

Mike: Well, first, thanks for not making another acronym, MBS or something like that.  Another acronym in this industry. No, but also I like this example because it is increasingly coming up with many of my clients and just in conversations I'm having where companies are forced to adjust their communications to be compliant, but often that either leads to green hushing or just kind of dumbing down their communications.

And I think that does a disservice to everybody and anybody trying to advance sustainability. But I like this idea of just having respect for your audience and being like, they can learn this. If we present this in the right way, let's just communicate in a way where they can learn and grow with us and not just assume that  they're dumb or unable to understand us.

Lindsay: No, they're way smarter than many give them credit for. What we found is that consumers really want to learn and want to engage in this topic. It's so important for so many people. So, by saying what we mean really clearly, I think that just helps the consumer understand.

And, and of course, we don't want to mislead or come across as misleading. So, that has been really important for us. 

Mike: Right. So, I know you already, you touched a little bit on KIND's Almond Acres Initiative earlier. And actually this is where I think I first met you at GreenBiz earlier this year, you were speaking on a panel talking about this and there was a really great video that made me almost shed a tear. That was talking about it.

Can you tell us a little bit about the kind Almond Acres Initiative and your approach to communicating it. I know we've been talking mostly about external, but what about internal as well? So kind of your approach across the board, how to communicate this?

Lindsay: Totally. Well, I'll tackle external first. And we just talked about mass balance. So I want to lay the foundation that our ultimate goal here at kind is to source 100 percent of our almonds from farms leveraging regen ag for almonds on a mass balance basis. What does that look like in practice? That's really the essence of the Kind Almond Acres initiative.

So, we're testing five practices. Some of them are regenerative agriculture, some of them modern technology on 500 acres of land with one of our supplier partners, OFI. To get the data we need to really engage our suppliers as they transition to more sustainable practices. A key part of this strategy too is we're partnering with local stakeholders.

We're partnering with the California Water Action Collaborative, UC Merced and UC Davis.  With UC Merced, we're supporting the next generation of sustainable change agents through the kind to the planet scholarship, which we're really excited about. So, that was the first year was last year we're continuing to support that this year.

We're also partnering with California Water Action Collaborative and UC Davis, because we want to make sure that we're investing in local communities where our work is being done and also. Building the relationships with the experts on the ground who know the landscape better than we do, and can help facilitate some of the conversations we need to advance the industry when it comes to sustainable agriculture for almonds.

When we talk about the external comm strategy for kind almond acres, I want to start with this project I mentioned is a learning journey for us. It's literally a living learning laboratory. So we want the consumers to really feel like they're learning alongside us. And we know that consumers really care about sustainability, but we also know that they don't understand what regenerative agriculture means yet.

I think there was a Food Insights study, which was really interesting, that only 19 percent of consumers know what regenerative agriculture means. Honestly, I think that's kind of high. Communication around regenerative agriculture is still really nascent. And I don't think that we've done a good job as an industry yet of really explaining what this means and why it's important to the consumer.

So, with that in mind, we really wanted to arm our consumers with the knowledge they needed to understand what we mean when we say regenerative. So, we really leaned in as our comms approach to innovative educational opportunities to show up to our consumers and in a way that met them where they were and where they wanted to kind of see us. So, one of the things that we did, which was really exciting was we launched the first ever augmented reality Snapchat lens dedicated to regenerative agriculture and almonds. Consumers were literally transported to the KIND Almond Acres Initiative. They could scan a QR code, come to that KIND Almond Acres Initiative through augmented reality experience and learn a little bit more about what regenerative is and why it's important for almonds and why it's important for KIND.

We also kind of took that experience from Snapchat and put it into a VR lens. So, we had a VR experience. We partnered with Meta. We had some Meta headsets available for our key stakeholders. But then we also had an interactive version on our website. KIND snacks dot com slash almonds, where we also kind of help transport the consumer right into the orchard.

And they could kind of move their mouse around if they were doing the online experience or if they had the headset could turn and click on hotspots that explain exactly the practices we were testing, how we were testing it, what our KPIs were and why it was important. And I think that that was really key and kind of telling the story through a consumer centric lens that focused on education, because we did want to make sure that consumers understood what we meant when we said we're regen ag. And what it meant to say that we were testing practices on our orchard through the kind almond acres initiative. So what? Another thing I think that we did was interesting was we also wanted to meet consumers where they were shopping. So, we had some retail partnerships where we had a shipper, at select retail stores locations across the country.

That had that Snapchat lens. So as consumers were shopping, they could just scan if they wanted the QR code, and can be transported to the orchard, but then could also just learn  on the ship for a little bit more about how we were tackling regenerative agriculture and what it meant. And we actually got really great results for that.

The KIND Almond Acres Snapchat achieved a 50 percent higher swipe up rate versus the CPG category as a whole. So, we know our consumers want it. We know consumers want to hear about this. Like they were interested in learning. They wanted to swipe up to learn more about what kind was doing. And that's been a really grounding metric for us that we want to continue to use and leverage that the consumers are in the spaces that we want to communicate to them and also are really interested and engaged in what we have to say. And we've gotten some external recognition, which has been great for the KIND ALmond Acres Initiative in that kind of consumer education piece.

So, we were actually named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2023, which was really awesome. And it's because of that consumer education piece around regenerative agriculture. So, that has been really great. And I think the second part of your question from the internal comms perspective, I think just making sure that our employees are our employees are our biggest advocates and  engaging our employees and making sure that they are also educated on what we're doing and what regen ag is has been really key for us — whether it's through lunch and learns or through like presenting to different teams, making sure that they are engaged on a broader level and then also on on a smaller level like to this project specifically I think making sure that we're bringing in legal we're bringing in our comms folks We're bringing in our partners people.

We're bringing in the sales team, we're we're bringing in all of the teams everybody that has to be at the table, we're bringing them in really early and making sure they're bought into this project so they can either the sales team can leverage it for retail conversations or our internal comps team can kind of make events and engagement opportunities around this.
Our comms team can think about how we're reporting on this, how this is coming through on our website. Our marketing team can think about  digital spend and what we're doing to come up with on social media and then our legal team can make sure across the board. We're compliant with how we need to be Showing up in this space and I think making sure that we are having those internal conversations early and often Has been really key in leveraging this project for use across Kind, in many different avenues.

So, that's been, I think, really important is educating our internal audience, as well as our external audience about what this is and what this could mean for them. 

Mike: Wow. That was all very interesting stuff. And I think I'm going to need time to process it all. I think everyone's benefiting a lot. I need to go back and take notes on this. 

And I also am happy to hear about the partnership with UC Davis. I know the listeners can't see, but I've got a bunch of my UC Davis paraphernalia behind me. Go Ags! I am an alumni of Davis. Awesome. 

So, kind of moving on to the broader food industry and how it’s communicating sustainability. I know there's a lot of companies out there that are trying either, maybe they're, you know, food startups or maybe further along, what's some general advice you would give sustainability communicators at a company that's maybe not as far along as KIND is — where to start?

Lindsay: Yeah, it's tough because I know how that feels, and it's really tough to start. I think first understanding technically what you can do and what you can say is really important. Making sure you build those relationships with the technical experts — whether it's sustainability experts or or “not yet” sustainability experts, right?

And whether it's people on your procurement team that are sourcing if you're a CPG food company, I think figuring out who your main stakeholders are is really important. So, you can start having conversations to start moving and then kind of ground it in what's actually happening because I do think that's the most important.

But I think for sustainability comms folks, the advice that I would give is just keep going. Having those conversations can be challenging and it can feel like a rollercoaster with start and stop projects or different focus areas as focus areas change and come and go and as kind of the external pressures come and go dictate what we do and how we have to talk about and what we have to say I think trusting your gut having a perspective having a POV and how you want the story brand to come to life as far as sustainability and then making sure you are talking with the key stakeholder partners.

It's really important because we can't as sustainability communicators — we're not doing the work alone, we're just a small part in the huge puzzle of sustainability at organizations and making sure that you're making the folks that you're working with feel empowered as well to move and do the work. I think it is really, really important. 

Mike: Right. So, I always like to wrap these interviews up with a question about how you got to where you are. In particular — as you mentioned earlier — there aren't a lot of people with corporate sustainability communicator in their title. I've been trying to actually track how many there are, and there's probably less than 20 that I found so far out there that actually have that specifically in their title because oftentimes communications is either thrown onto a sustainability person or sustainability is thrown onto a comms person.

I know you mentioned that you don't have a technical background, like many sustainability communicators. But maybe can you just tell us briefly, like your career journey so far, you know, what got you to your role at kind and, what advice would you give budding sustainability communicators who might want to follow in your footsteps?

Lindsay: Yeah, I love this question because I think there are so many different ways into this career path. Because, as you said, my educational background is not in sustainability or environmental science or ecology, but I've always been very passionate about it. So, I've really followed that passion and leveraged my strengths, which has always been communications or English and.

I wanted to leverage the strengths that I knew I had to further a cause that I was passionate about, which is sustainability. So, my first foray into the field started at The Nature Conservancy. I worked with some really killer comms and marketing folks there, learned a ton, and then also learned that I didn't feel like I needed to feel held back by my background, because there's so much more that goes into sustainability comms than just the sustainability part of it, although having an understanding is extremely helpful.

I mentioned this before, but I think stakeholder management is really a key skill that goes into sustainability comms, making sure that you're talking to all the stakeholders you need to be and identifying who needs to be at the table. I think being action-oriented and proactive is also really beneficial when it comes to sustainability comms folks.

And then also steadfast. And I have a funny story about this word that I want to share. So, I don't know if you've heard of LIFO?

Mike: Oh, no. What is that? 

Lindsay: It's like a personality type of like what your strengths are at work and how they show up and how you work. 

Mike: Oh yeah. It's kind of like Myers Briggs.

Lindsay: Yes. KIND did something like that. And we had a sheet on the wall for all of us that had our names on it. And our team members had to go and mark the strengths and weakness, strengths and somewhat weaknesses — although it's very strengths focused — how you show up at work. And every single person on my team marked down the adjective steadfast for me. 

And that was a shock to me because I just never thought of myself as a very steadfast person. Although my partner would disagree and say that that just means stubborn, but I think that we really do need to be steadfast in our view of the world to be a sustainability comms person because we all have the same goal and that's to make sure we're caring for our people, our communities and our planet. And we have to know that there are going to be challenges, we have to be ready to face those challenges, but we can't give up, we can't ever lose hope. We just have to keep going sometimes, and I think that's really a key personality trait for sustainability comms, so that's also the advice I would give.

For people who wanna break into the industry, I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. And I think it's really hard and it can be really challenging, but just keep following your passion. If you're really passionate about it, if you really have a unique perspective, if you have the soft skills and you have the hard skills, just keep trying because we all need to keep trying because it's so important. And now more than ever, I think that's so important. 

Mike: And I love the word steadfast. I'm definitely going to use that next time. My partner calls me stubborn. I'm going to say, no, I'm being steadfast. Sorry. That's a virtue.  And I agree with that completely, you know, a lot of folks that listen to this, they're aware of my career path as well. And there is no linear way into, well, any role in sustainability, but particularly in sustainability comms. And, yeah, I think being steadfast is incredibly important even once you've landed a job, because it's not going to ever be perfect.

There's going to be kind of a pendulum effect if you're going to move forward and move backward. So yeah, remain steadfast and that's awesome. Word of 2024. I love it. I love it. We're going to make it happen. All right. All right, Lindsay. Thank you so much for your time today. This was a very in depth and insightful conversation and I know our audience definitely gained a lot out of it, just like I did. 

Lindsay: Good. Oh, awesome. It was so nice to talk to you today, Mike. Thank you.