Harbus

Issue date: 9/15/08 Section: News

Parth Raval

This past summer, I was part of PepsiCo's Leadership Development Program on the Walmart Customer Team. Shuttling between Plano, TX, and Bentonville, AR, I experienced first-hand how Walmart is accelerating its "green" agenda and what this means for key suppliers and, ultimately, for consumers.

I am hardly what you'd call a typical environmentalist. In fact, it was impossible for my LVI rep to convince me not to use a new Styrofoam cup every day for my morning coffee. Suffice it to say, at the end of my RC year, I really only had a vague understanding of the term "sustainability." What's more, it made no sense to me when I was told that my summer objectives would involve driving growth for PepsiCo by advancing the Sustainability agenda at its biggest customer: Walmart.

Equipped with only this vague deliverable and a map of the North Texas area, I arrived in Plano, TX to start my summer internship in PepsiCo's Leadership Development Program in a Sales role on the PepsiCo Walmart Customer Team. I certainly had a keen appreciation for the sheer scale of Walmart and conceptually understood the tremendous influence that it exerts on all its suppliers. But the extent to which this organization is already shaping the world's environmental fate was news to me, and has left me with a renewed sense of how impactful big business can be, particularly when driving towards new, collaborative solutions to big problems.

Walmart embarked on its Sustainability agenda less than two years ago when CEO Lee Scott gave his famous "21st Century Leadership" speech to an auditorium filled with Walmart's 60,000+ suppliers. The call to action was simple: retailers and suppliers must work together to solve the problems of environmental sustainability, not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because there is a tremendous business case for taking cost out of the holistic supply chain. It's our collective imperative to go and "light-weight" Pepsi bottles, concentrate Tide liquid laundry detergent, design energy-efficient light bulbs, create biodegradable Doritos bags, etc. Scale these impacts up by Walmart's 200 million shoppers, and we're talking about astronomical savings of fossil-fuels, landfill space, and (crucially) dollars across supplier and retailer P&Ls.

As I began to understand Walmart's aspirations with Sustainability, I came to appreciate the fact that PepsiCo, as a key supplier, would have to incorporate a new mindset in the product commercialization process. I worked broadly across the organization to help bring the right products to Walmart, involving R&D, Marketing, Consumer Affairs, Legal and, of course, Sales.

Continued...

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