Greetings world! I feel like a million bucks—finally cleaned my office and organized all the information I gathered the last several weeks traveling. I will now resume my diligent blogging!
Soooo, where did I leave off? That’s right, I still need to fill you all in on the Walmart Expo in Arkansas.
Well, first of all, Arkansas is really nice! The drive from the airport to Bentonville was beautiful—very lush and it smelled so good! It appears as though the entire town of Rogers-Bentonville has been created to sustain the Walmart community, which is crazy! All the main buyers and movers and shakers for and to Walmart live around the headquarters, which must make company outings easy and enjoyable! Everyone we met was super duper nice and the whole “dry county” thing didn’t really apply because every restaurant we went to suggested you “sign in” thereby giving the establishment the status of a “club” and consequentially allowing them to serve us booze!
The Expo itself was really exciting! It being my first time “working the booth” I was thrilled to get in front of the packaging community and talk about Dordan and all our exciting new happenings! All the passerbyers were, again, super awesome and polite and all in all it was a good show! I got to see some old packaging buddies from the SPC and meet more people within the industry. Because I have only been to one or two other conferences, I was surprised to run into people that I had met previously—I didn’t realize what a small community the sustainable packaging realm was!
Check out our beaut of a booth:
AND all the Walmarters are really, really nice. Some of the top guys came by our booth and asked how the show went and thanked us for coming. We couldn’t believe the hospitality of the entire event and look forward to participating next year! If any of you Walmarters are reading, thanks again, we had a blast!
It was really cool too because our engineers had JUST finished running our samples that we designed for the Expo literally hours before we flew out of Chicago, which gave us the ammo we needed to initiate conversations with anyone. They looked great and showcased our thermoforming capabilities; and, demonstrated the different materials we were now offering! Basically it is a fancy business card holder with cool engravings and what not and the tray is made out of a bio-based, certified compostable resin and the lid is made from supplier-certified 100% PCR PET, which derives its feedstock entirely out of bottles post-consumer. We found that having something tangible to give to passerbyers really helped initiate discussion and we got a lot of attention because of the clarity of the PCR PET. For those of you not familiar, high concentrations of post-consumer content in PET often times give the resin a sort of orangy-brown tint; our source for 100% PCR PET, however, ensures a level of clarity that we have not been able to find elsewhere. In a nut shell: Good times all around.
This is a sort of poopy picture of our sample offer; but you get the idea:
During the Expo there were education sessions, too. I found the content of these sessions very interesting and compiled my notes to debrief our sales and marketing departments upon my return. I have included these notes below, FYI.
Walmart Expo Summary:
- Scorecard seminar, misc.
- ECRM created the software for the Walmart Scorecard
- “Efficient collaborative retail marketing”
- Direct suppliers are REQUIRED to enter packages into scorecard
- Via “retail link” i.e. per vendor number and item number
- Allows you to compare with packages in same product category i.e. dairy. ECRM is working to narrow the categories down so you are only compared with direct competitors.
- Indirect suppliers do not have access to retail link.
- Focus of Score: Material type, material weight, material distance, packaging efficiency
- Distance: the point the package travels from point of conversion to point of fulfillment.
- Completion rate of Scores:
- Each item sold in Walmart has its own number. Suppliers are required to fill out a Score for each item number. Currently, COMPLETION of scores is the easiest way to influence purchasing decisions. In other words, suppliers that have more than 85% of their Scores completed receive an “A” in the Walmart world; suppliers that have 55% complete receive a “B;” everything below comes up as a “red flag” in Walmart-internal.?
- Package modeling software: Different than the Score card but formatted the same way; this is what we subscribe to.
- Intended for indirect suppliers to utilize the modeling software in such a way that they can approach their customers (direct suppliers to Walmart) and explain how by doing X you can improve your score and here is the proof.
- “Reversed engineering;” encouraged doing this on competitor’s packages, too.
- Paperboard Packaging Council seminar, misc:
- Fiber-based packaging is a by-product of the lumber industry? I need to look into this…
- I asked why the recovery rates for corrugated were higher than paperboard…
- Answer: Difference is attributed to post-industrial collection (corrugate) vs. post-consumer (paperboard). I need to examine this further.
- Fibers can be recycled 6-8 times before the fibers become too small to reprocess
- China currently buys most of our post-consumer mixed paper and reprocesses it; we need to find a domestic source for recycled fibers.
- All corrugated has 46% post-industrial content in the U.S.
- SBS is almost ALWAYS virgin fiber, with the omission of MWV’s Natralock.
- I asked what the difference in energy demands are for virgin vs. recycled paper; I received a very ambiguous answer?apparently a controversial topic.
- Plastic fundamentals seminar:
- Discussed the benefits of plastic such as:
- Keeps food fresher for longer;
- Didn’t address fossil fuel consumption;
- Didn’t discuss MSW rates;
- Did say that recycling for non bottle-PET has grown from 7.5% to 11% in the last year;
- ACC supports re-writing the Toxics Control Act, which we referenced in our first Newsletter.
- The ACC released LCI data on RPET and recycled HDPE. HURRAY!
- SVN meeting:
- There are a ton of different organizations that Walmart has its involvement in; I will try to explain the various relationships as follows:
- ISTA—transit assessment; I don’t know what this is.
- Global Packaging Project: Walmart funds this but is not the only CPG company on the board; this looks for a GLOBAL metric for assessing the sustainability of packages and product; this is bigger than the Scorecard, as the Scorecard will be a component of these metrics; the metrics used will be country-specific. This grew out of the CONSUMER GOODS FORUM, which was originally called the GLOBAL CEO FORUM. The GPP metrics look to take into account the Scorecard metrics, COMPASS, and other existing and legitimate metrics. If one wants the inclusion of another metric, it must be reviewed for application prior to being incorporated into the GPP metrics.
- ISO project for Sustainable Packaging: I don’t know.
- Scorecard: For packaging only; scores based on ITEM level.
- Supplier Sustainability Assessment: Consists of 15 questions, which are asked of all product suppliers to Walmart; “scores” based on CORPORATE level.
- Sustainability Index: the Assessment is part of the Sustainability Index, which is a project of the Sustainability Consortium. Again, Walmart funds this organization but is not the only CPGs company that participates.
- Points of discussion:
- “Sustainable material” metric: What does this mean? What are the limitations?
- Should everyone get the same “score” until clarified?
- Should we remove the metric?
- Is Recovery taken into consideration?
- Does it consider conversion or primary production?
- Determined that it would be helpful to have a health and safety metric AND a sustainable sourcing metric.
- Should inks/adhesives be included in GPP and Scorecard?
- Not until proof that it has an impact?I have proof and will see that it gets into the right person’s hands.
Sorry if the format of my notes are a little confusing. Please let me know if you would like me to expand on any of these points or provide clarification.
AND I met a gentleman that gave me a PLETHORA of information about non-bottle plastic recycling and I am forever indebted to him. Seriously, good stuff and AMAZING feedback in regard to the various approaches I was considering for our clamshell recycling initiative. Once I get through recapping my recent travels, I will resume my clamshell recycling narrative. I think we are getting somewhere
Stay tuned!