And even as Unilever rushes headlong into this brave new world, a big question remains: What is sustainability, anyway? Despite its righteous timbre, it’s a fuzzy term that means different things to different people. When applied to the ingredients and processes in the 1,000 different mass-market brands Unilever makes, the complications multiply endlessly. Scores of issues arise in just one jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, starting with the soybean oil. Dig into the specifics of that one ingredient, and it becomes clear that what Unilever calls sustainable sometimes doesn’t mean all that much.
Seeds of Promise
On a humid day in late September, as the skies unleashed an occasional downpour, Kenny Sutter navigated his red Ford F-350 along gravel roads near Pleasantville, Iowa, assessing the coming harvest. His soybean fields were golden, almost ready for the combines.
Mr. Sutter, who grows soy, corn and alfalfa on 4,000 acres spread across an area homesteaded by his family in the mid-1800s, is not a Unilever employee. Yet Mr. Polman is counting on him, and other farmers around the globe, to help carry out the sustainable living plan.
Unilever buys more soy in the United States than any other crop, and among Mr. Polman’s many goals is ensuring that all its soy oil — used in Hellmann’s mayonnaise and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spread — is sourced from sustainable farms by 2017. But when Unilever began looking into the matter in 2012, it hit a roadblock: No one was really certifying sustainable soybeans in the United States.