The initials “ESG” are cropping up everywhere– in board rooms, in the media, and among consumers who want to support companies and brands that share their values and commitments to build and ensure a more equitable and sustainable future for all.
The importance of engaging stakeholders in an organization’s vision and values – and promoting that commitment – has always been an important part of our work. For decades, we’ve worked closely with mission-driven organizations, and with companies that share our long-held mantra of “doing well by doing good.”
In 2011, long before ESG entered the corporate vocabulary, MacKenzie launched a Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability(CSR) communications practice, which has given us a long lens on the imperative for accurate, relevant, and compelling communications around what is now known as “Environmental, Social and Governance.”
As communicators, we see great opportunity and, pardon our pun, responsibility in this ESG space. The dividends are many: employee recruitment, retention and engagement; customer trust; community-building; brand reputation and differentiation; and ultimately a competitive advantage. We value and respect working with organizations where we can help “pay it forward” through compelling and powerful communications that address solutions to the complex issues of climate change, equity and social justice, and food insecurity, to name but a few.
In 2021, the MacKenzie team was honored to collaborate with long-time client Grimmway Farms, the world’s largest grower of carrots and the largest producer of USA-grown organic produce, to develop Grimmway’s inaugural ESG report, “Responsible Growth for a Healthier World.” The report catalogued the company’s overarching commitment to its mission of bringing fresh, healthy and safe produce to communities around the world, and to do so in ways that support the three Ps–people, products, and the planet.
Working closely with senior leadership, MacKenzie coordinated with representatives from across the company’s operations to identify content focus areas and to build a framework for capturing information over the long-term.
We communicated Grimmway’s ESG story not just through numbers and graphs, but through the voices of Grimmway’s employees, customers, and community partners, the people who are integral to progress and success. We sought to strike a balance between spotlighting current ESG metrics, while also providing an opportunity to demonstrate the need for progress in the future – including the aspiration to become a Net Zero company by 2035.
The result was a thoughtful, visually appealing report that is transparent, data-driven, and easy to read. It signals a company-wide commitment to continuously improving how to measure and quantify environmental, social and governance progress year-over-year and across multi-state operations. It is a tangible representation of leadership’s commitment to the long-term needs of the company, and the company’s role as part of a much larger ecosystem of partners in ESG progress.
It’s very satisfying to work on projects like these, and we look forward to many more.
