Hellmann's Mayonnaise is about as basic a product as you'll find in your average supermarket. It's made from a few simple ingredients—egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar—and it's got a pedigree that dates back to a turn-of-the-20th-century New York deli. Since 1912, it has been packed in standard glass jars bedecked with a simple blue-ribbon label; the single largest word on the jar aside from the brand name is the word "REAL." If you're the guardian of a brand with a legacy this proud, you treat it like a delicate heirloom. And if you're a brand manager at Unilever Canada—the current owner of the brand and one of the largest purveyors of packaged goods on the planet—and you need to remind yourself why, you simply mumble "New Coke" under your breath like a mantra.
Which is why the new, environmentally friendlier Hellmann's packaging that recently debuted in grocery stores across Canada, incidental as it might seem beneath the average harried shopper's momentary gaze, represents a fundamental and potentially enormous change in direction for the world of everyday consumer products. It's also why Marc Stoiber, whose new-fangled Change consulting firm helped guide Unilever's shift, finds himself riding a mounting wave of corporate interest in selling green products that may sweep over the entirety of the supermarket—every supermarket—before it crests.
First, though, to the new Hellmann's jar, which, for very practical reasons of supply-chain efficiency, is now made of plastic instead of glass. Unilever has been a keen acolyte in the cult of efficiency since the early 1990s, beginning with an ambitious water stewardship initiative that eventually morphed into a broader sustainability program. The company built its efficiency measures on the idea that going green was good for the bottom line as well as the planet—a notion that was far outside the boardroom norm until recently. From that angle, those nostalgically correct Hellmann's jars were simply too heavy. There was money to be saved all along the supply chain, and so Unilever's mayo would move, after nearly a century, to lightweight plastic. Initially, the label on the new package was supposed to remain the same. The idea that you could make such efficiency efforts part of the brand, that you could brag about it right on the supermarket shelf, was uncharted retail territory. Which is where Stoiber came in.
"They've been doing this since the '90s—leading the world in saving water, saving energy, all that stuff," says Stoiber. "But they never connected the dots between that and the brands. So the corporation, the mothership, would be doing all the good stuff, but the brands never really said, 'We come from a company that does good stuff.' "
Marc Stoiber helps sell green to big-name corporations (Gregory John Hern)
Stoiber convinced the Hellmann's brand team that the environmental benefits of a new package were not only consistent with the product's core attributes—its authenticity, its natural ingredients and its old-fashioned basicness—but that celebrating the environmental benefits on the new package was an easy way to add some brand value. And so when those plastic Hellmann's jars hit Canadian supermarket shelves in March, they bore not only the familiar blue ribbon but also a folded tag dangling from the lid that read "Environmentally Friendlier packaging." Under the fold, the tag detailed how the new plastic jars reduced Unilever's greenhouse gas emissions by one million kilograms per year, equivalent to removing 400 transport trucks from the company's supply chain.
In essence, what Stoiber talked Unilever into was a green-themed "New and Improved!" banner, and there is probably no mainstay of point-of-purchase marketing more banal than "New and Improved!" But this was no empty boast. The new package represents not a minor tweak born of some fleeting trend but a fundamental, emissions-reducing change in the way the product is manufactured and shipped. Cautious, ubiquitous Unilever has not only embraced sustainability but made it an intrinsic part of a century-old brand's identity—as clear a signal as any that the green business movement has conquered the very heart of the mainstream. Which would suggest, moreover, that the seemingly reckless gamble Marc Stoiber took on when he left the world of big business in 2005 was in fact a prescient leap ahead of the defining paradigm shift in 21st-century business.
7
