75 Chapter 4
4. The Tetra Pak’s case
The following section will provide an overview of Tetra Pak as an organization and the company’s mission and vision will be presented together with its corporate website.
4.1. Company Profile
Tetra Pak is part of the Tetra Laval Group, which was formed in January 1993 and includes three industry groups: Tetra Pak, DeLaval and Sidel. The company is of Swedish origin with headquarters in Lund, Sweden and Lausanne, Switzerland, and has over 23,500 employees around the world. With a company history of over 70 years, the Tetra Pak group is today the leading producer of beverage and food packaging and processing. In 2015 over 184 billion standard packages were produced and 78.2 billion liters of food and beverage products were delivered in packages from Tetra Pak in more than 170 countries (Figure 7 below).
Figure 7 Tetra Pak at a glance (Sustainability Update 2016:2)
76 For Tetra Pak, sustainability goes hand in hand with its brand promise: “Protects what’s good” and the three pillars on which that promise stands:
i) protecting food with market-leading technology and solutions to make food safe and available everywhere;
ii) protecting people by supporting and creating opportunities for employees and taking social responsibility for communities it operates in,
iii) protecting futures via insight and expertise to drive environmental excellence (Sustainability report, 2015).
Given the aim to remain greenhouse emission levels at or below 2010 figures by 2020 while simultaneously continuing to develop business, Tetra Pak has been putting significant efforts to enhance energy efficiency of district heating, natural gas, electricity, and travel and transportation, reducing the climate impact throughout the value chain. Recycling is another area of importance for Tetra Pak. While Tetra Pak’s business is not recycling, the company aims at improving recycling to turn carton into assets that can be reused. Acting as a catalyst to make recycling happen, the aim is to work closely with stakeholders along the value chain in order to reach the company’s global recycling goal. Hence, Tetra Pak incorporates environmental targets that comprise three aspects:
i) continuing to increase the use of renewable and certified raw materials to develop sustainable products with least environmental impacts;
ii) reducing the environmental impact throughout the value chain from supplier to their customers and consumers,
iii) increasing the recycling rate of all packaging from Tetra Pak to 40%
by 2020 (Sustainability report, 2015).
With integrated management systems, Tetra Pak is also continuously improving its environment and quality work. In the Nordic countries and the rest of the
77 world, all production activities of Tetra Pak were certified in accordance with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) label, ISO 14001, ISO 9001 and hygiene standard BRG/IOP in 2011. Moreover, the company and factory managers are responsible for environmental issues within their own operations.
Noteworthy, Tetra Pak publishes its sustainability reports every year in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative’s guidelines (Sustainability report, 2015).
4.2. Vision & Mission
On Tetra Pak’s corporate website, under the sub-directory “vision & mission”, CEO & President Dennis Jönnson explicitly describes the company’s goals for the business as follows:
“At Tetra Pak we commit to making food safe and available, everywhere. Our vision is the inspirational goal that drives our organization. It shapes our role and purpose in the outside world. Internally, it gives us a shared, unifying ambition. We work for and with our customers to provide preferred processing and packaging solutions for food and we apply our commitment to innovation, our understanding of consumer needs and our relationships with suppliers to deliver these solutions, wherever and whenever food is consumed. We believe in responsible industry leadership, creating profitable growth in harmony with environmental sustainability and good corporate citizenship” (Dennis Jönnson, CEO & President).
Over the years, consistently with its mission and vision, Tetra Pak has been relentlessly carrying out activities such as environmental improvements, school milk programs, environmental training and development programs for the agricultural and dairy sectors.
Furthermore, Tetra Pak is active member of the UN Global Compact initiative, which introduced a new set of goals aimed at ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all and it is currently committed to supporting and working to achieve the 17 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) (see
78 Figure 8 below) focusing on those goals that relate directly to its core business and its work to promote sustainability.
Figure 8 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (www.sustainabledevelopment.un.org)
4.3 Tetra Pak’s corporate website
Tetra Pak provides different websites for every market site the company operates in: the Italian version of the site is for example accessible, together with other 29 countries, by simply selecting the country in the top-right end scroll-down menu.
Moreover, apart from the 30 country-oriented websites, the possibility to choose a global website is given, which is the international version of Tetra Pak’s corporate website.
From a quick glance at the different countries’ websites, a striking resemblance with the global website has been detected. All the different websites, in fact, are translated into the specific target language and no modifications are made in terms of contents provided on the pages. Each and every localized version of the website is the perfect carbon-copy of the global website, apart from the sub- section “local pages”, where mention is made of particular relevant events of the specific selected country.
79 For these reasons, only the global version of Tetra Pak’s website has been taken into account for the purpose of this study.
As showed in the screenshot below, taken from Tetra Pak’s global site, the website is composed of 5 main sections: Processing, Packaging, Services, Sustainability and About Tetra Pak, with each and every section made up of further sub-sections.
Since the sections Processing, Packaging and Services provide extremely technical information on the technologies and products adopted by the company, which are irrelevant for the sake of this study, the focus has been solely put on the sections About Tetra Pak and Sustainability.
4.3.1. About Tetra Pak
The directory About Tetra Pak is composed of 4 sub-directories: The Company, Careers, News & Events, and Information Hub.
80 Particularly relevant for this investigation are the content provided in the section
“The Company” where information are given on the company’s business core values, its history and its vision & mission.
The section “Information Hub”, on the other hand, gives direct access to the company’s latest publications, providing documents and brochures as well as facts and events related to the company’s business field. This section was particularly useful for retrieving the company’s sustainability reports and the Unfold-blog articles that have been used for creating the corpora.
4.3.2. Sustainability
Embedded in its core business strategy through environmental targets, sustainability plays a key role at Tetra Pak. While the company admits that it has been silent for too long, it is now committed to making a change as environmental responsibility is not only an add-on anymore but a driver of business profitability. For this reason the company has been working hard to achieve these goals by constantly innovating new sustainable products, raising awareness of recycling and food waste through various CSR campaigns and reducing their environmental footprint.
This strong inclination towards sustainability is accurately conveyed in the
“Sustainability” website directory which is undoubtedly the most relevant for my investigation. This section of the website is, in fact, made up of 5 sub-directories:
Our approach, Food, People, Futures and Information Hub.
81 The composition of this main directory is perfectly coherent with the company’s brand promise “Protects What’s Good” which encompasses the attention addressed by the company to protecting food and making it safe and available everywhere, to protecting people by supporting and providing opportunity for employees and the community all over the world and lastly to ensuring a better future by acting responsibly towards the environment.
Reference to the 3 pillars upon which the company’s business is built is ubiquitous in the website and they also find extensive space in the sustainability reports where they are used as chapters around which the whole company’s sustainability story unfolds.
