Resources

• New Belgium Brewing: Climate commitments and activities
• Fat Tire carbon-neutral beer is certified via the SCS Global Services Carbon Neutral Certification
• New Belgium’s Carbon Neutral Toolkit for craft brewers and “Last Call for Climate” campaign for customers: Drinksustainably.com
• Decreases in global beer supply due to extreme drought and heat (Nature)
• Harris survey: CEOs are Ready to Fund a Sustainable Transformation

Guests

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Guest: Katie Wallace, Chief ESG Officer, New Belgium Brewing Company

Guest: Adam Fetcher, Senior Director of Communications and Public Engagement, New Belgium Brewing Company

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:
Katie and Adam, welcome to Climate Rising. Why don't we start, if we could, by just having you introduce yourself briefly and what your role is at the company. Katie?

Katie Wallace:
Thanks. Great to be with you all Mike. I'm Katie Wallace. I'm our chief ESG officer. ESG, standing for environmental, social and governance. I have been at New Belgium for 18 years now and happy to be a part of it.

Adam Fetcher:
I'm Adam Fetcher. I'm Senior Director of Communications and Public Engagement. I've been with New Belgium for just a few years. First as a consultant and then came on board full time in my role about eight months ago.

Mike Toffel:
Okay, great. So Katie, Can you describe your journey, how you began, and how you ended up where you are now?

Katie Wallace:
I got an undergrad degree in finance and economics, had my business degree, and was really passionate about green building and sustainability and met someone from New Belgium at the US Green Building Council Conference. When I came to Colorado and interviewed at the brewery, walking in the doors I just realized, this is the place I want to be. Just the way that I interacted with the folks, the way that the whole brewery felt and the people that were within it, was palpably special. And being wind powered, before that was a thing really, for other businesses, being employee owned, which was novel at the time, was something that I found really intriguing. And I could tell that folks were really passionate about that. Committed and authentic upon my first visit. It was something I really wanted to be a part of.

And so, luckily I got a job there actually helping to build systems, utilizing my business degree. I worked with finance, and accounting, and sales, and marketing, and the supply chain, to help develop systems that would allow us to communicate and work together as we grew bigger.

But my passion really, once I realized that you could do sustainability within a job and not just a nonprofit, my passion really took me in that direction. And after annoying everybody for over a year, I finally was able to get a job doing just that at New Belgium itself. And that's what I've been doing the last 15 plus years. It's been a wild journey that when we began, we had a few peer partners at other companies like Patagonia and Ben and Jerry's, we still get together a couple times a year and just help each other figure our way out and operationalize our social and environmental principles within the daily business, so that we can make some material progress to our goals. And it's been a really fun thing to be a part of.

Mike Toffel:
Great. And Adam, You more recently joined the firm. What were you doing before and what led you to join?

Adam Fetcher:
Coming out of college, I was interested in being a journalist. After a couple of years struggling with journalism, I ended up joining the 2008 Obama campaign as a field organizer in Florida. That really shifted my perspective. The Obama world is sort of the ultimate mission driven organization. And I got a taste of what it meant to work, not just for myself and my own name in print, but on behalf of something bigger and something larger, which had completely changed my perspective on work and what my career could be.

I ended up making my way through the Obama administration in the communications world, took my writing skills and applied them to being a press secretary at the Department of the Interior and a Deputy National Press secretary for the Obama reelection campaign in 2012, and then realized I was pretty burned out on politics. I ended up having an incredible opportunity to work at Patagonia as Director of Global Communications. Patagonia was really where I started to understand that politics and advocacy was not the only place that you could apply a mission driven mindset. Patagonia is obviously incredibly well known for its action on behalf of the environment. I was there during a time when we were really making activism the center part of the brand. Kind of shifting from a responsible company mindset to an activist brand mindset.

And so therefore learn the power that you can achieve when you start to leverage your communications and marketing channels to mobilize customers and the public towards the greater objectives that you're trying to seek, whether it's policy objectives or industry change. And so, the power of reaching out to customers, not telling them to buy something, but instead inviting them to come participate in saving our home planet, was just incredibly powerful and learned a ton there. And from there, I moved into the consulting world. I had an independent consultancy for several years where I helped other businesses that were interested in getting involved in advocacy take those steps. Do the work, in the right order. From putting skin in the game, starting to fund organizations without any expectation of benefit to the brand, all the way to running campaigns where they're tapping into that power of mobilizing customers towards these shared values and shared objectives.

And New Belgium was my favorite client during those years. I had the chance to come on with New Belgium at a really interesting time where the company was about to go through our sale to Lion and was looking to, I think, double down on the ways in which it used its marketing communications channels, relationship with the customer, towards these advocacy objectives. the craft brewing space is very new to me, but the mission is not. The mission is extremely recognizable and I'm just so proud of the caliber of people and our shared commitment to sustainability and human powered business that I get to work with every day.

Mike Toffel:
Can you tell us a little bit about what New Belgian Brewing Company is all about?

Adam Fetcher:
New Belgium Brewing is a craft brewing company based in Fort Collins, Colorado. We are actually now America's largest and fastest growing craft brewer. We were founded in 1991 in Fort Collins by Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch. Jeff had been a home brewer who had brought back to Fort Collins an inspiration from a trip to Belgium, where he enjoyed the Belgian style beers so much that he came home inspired to start a brewery using that style and bringing that to the United States, in many ways for the first time. And Kim was a social worker. And what I think was really unique about New Belgium from the very start is that Kim, she founded a company, the only way a social worker would, which is to put people first So, over those early years, she instituted some practices that are still very rare, frankly, in the business world: fully paid health care premiums, open book management, paying a living wage, renewable energy sourcing, and many more practices that, are now sort of on the vanguard of what we call sustainable, responsible business. We have breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Asheville, North Carolina. And we also just combined with Bell's brewery based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we have about 1300 co workers across the nation. Some of our biggest brands are Fat Tire Amber Ale, that's our flagship. It's an OG of craft brewing, and very famous. We're also the brewery behind the Voodoo Ranger IPA, which is America's number one IPA. And finally, I'll just say, you know, our business model, which we call the human powered business model, is really what propels us forward to this day.

Mike Toffel:
That's really interesting. And I want to focus our conversation today on the work that New Belgium is doing on business and climate change outside its operations and supply chain, primarily in the areas of policy making and engaging customers. But before we do that, I think it's important to just ground that conversation first in how climate is impacting New Belgium, and how New Belgium impacts the climate, and the programs that you've created in your operations supply chain, which is often the place where folks start. So Katie, I wonder if you could give us a primer on how does climate change affect New Belgium? What are the vulnerabilities in your operations and supply chains? And then on the flip side, how does New Belgium affect the environment and what is New Belgium doing? And this is again, all grounding for the broader conversation we'll have about the policy and customer engagement work that you're doing.

Katie Wallace:
Well over the last decade, we've experienced two record breaking fires within the state of Colorado right here in our watersheds. Wildfires are not novel to the Colorado area, but they are growing in intensity and frequency. And when that happens, we're not able to use the water in the river for a couple of summers during the melt off because it's full of sediment and very expensive to filter, but also leave smoky residuals in the taste of the water that would be transferred to our beer. We had, a couple of years ago, hops that were affected by the wildfires in the Pacific Northwest where all of the hops are grown, and hops are delicate flowers that also absorb the attributes of smoke, affecting the taste of the beer.

And that's just one of many issues affecting the hop industry. Drought and others that are climate related continue to increase the challenges of growing hops. And then this last year, barley farmers reported the worst barley crop within their lifetimes that they'd experienced due to the unrelenting heat that we experienced last summer. Those are just a few examples. as a Belgian brewer that's pretty creative with our beer ingredients, we use citrus peel and other ingredients in some of our beers, and hurricanes have wiped out those crops in the past years and created material challenges to procurement overall. And today our procurement team is one of our hardest working teams in trying to balance out our supplies and make sure they're at the price and the quality that we need to make excellent craft beer, which is an increasing challenge for us, but we're doing our best staying on top of it.

And, as this is expected to continue, then customers will start to see the impacts of that, for sure. But this is something that New Belgium has actually been looking at for several decades. Back in the nineties, we did an environmental assessment and became concerned about the greenhouse gas emissions related to our coal powered electricity. And we called up the utility, asked them if they were willing, or interested and able to bring renewable electricity onto the grid. They said, coincidentally, they had been asked to commit to wind power just up the road and bring it into the grid, but that they did not think that ratepayers would accept the increased cost for that wind.

We had to do a 10 year commitment up front. We had that money in the bank, but we'd promised it out to our coworkers as part of our profit sharing already at that point. And, given that environmental stewardship was a core value of ours. Jeff and Kim, our founders, wanted to leave that decision to the coworkers since that money had already been promised to them.

And so it took just under an hour, but the coworkers discussed it amongst themselves, emerged from the conversation and they let Jeff and Kim know that every single one of them was willing to give up their profit sharing that year to be able to support wind power coming to Fort Collins. And so that was the introduction of renewable energy to our grid officially here in our community. And it was really cool that New Belgium got to be a part of it. And that has generated quite a bit of momentum as a company going forward. In the years following, we were the first ones to commission a carbon footprint study on beer.

So, we built a pretty strong program in the years since where we capture over 90% of the heat within our brewing process and create a number of efficiencies throughout the operations and light weighted our bottles long before others did.

But as we started to do our own greenhouse gas modeling and what it would cost to reduce our emissions to the degree that was starting to be advised by climate scientists as the IPCC came together and the greenhouse gas protocols were released, we realized that this is not something we would be able to do on our own. And as a medium size business, we can't easily affect the entire system, but we found that our best avenue there was to go to our policy makers. And with that, we started advocating to state, federal, and local policy makers, asking them to commit to renewable electricity, providing the business case for climate action and helping to display what we understood as our business risk of inaction around climate change.

We have quite a bit of renewable electricity on our own sites, but we were also able to lobby our local city council to mandate a hundred percent renewable electricity on our grid here in Fort Collins as well, by 2030 as a part of that. It will benefit more beyond New Belgium than doing it ourselves on site. But, we still do produce quite a bit of electricity with bio-gas, from our process water treatment plant, with solar and other sources on site, We have committed to the science based targets initiative, RE100, so in addition to releasing a carbon neutral beer, we are committed to directly reducing our carbon emissions by 23 to limit warming to 1.5 degree Celsius.

Mike Toffel:
Can you just spell out what the science based target initiative targets are that you set and just explain a little about RE100?

Katie Wallace:
Our total operations that we're responsible for within a brewery are about 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions annually. About 40% comes from packaging. That's our largest source of emissions. Cans, bottles, fiber, cardboard. Barley farming is our second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and distribution trucking to deliver our beer is our third largest. So, 85% of our emissions being within our scope. Three area makes it quite difficult for us to overall reduce our emissions to the degree necessary, to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. And so, the climate scientists are saying that we need to reduce our emissions dramatically by 2030 to avoid those worst effects.

Our science based targets initiative requires that our scope one and two emissions, those are our operational emissions, are reduced by 55% from absolute levels between 2019 and 2030. That's regardless of growth. As a growing company, we are increasing our emissions year over year. And that makes that challenge quite a bit harder. So, it's actually more than 55% that we'll have to reduce our emissions from, from 2019 to 2030. In our scope three emissions, we have to reduce those by 30% from 2019 to 2030. Those are the emissions that are coming from our suppliers. Barley, packaging, distribution, primarily. RE100 is our commitment to source a hundred percent of our electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Mike Toffel:
So you've begun the pivot as I was hoping for us to do, from your operations and supply chain to the policy arena, where you described New Belgium's work to try and green the grid in Fort Collins. Can you give us some other examples of some government policy efforts you've been engaged in?

Katie Wallace:
Sure. We are members of Ceres BICEP. So that's, Businesses for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy. And as a part of that group, regularly speak to state and federal policy makers to encourage the understanding of the business case for climate action and the fact that smarter policies will reduce our cost overall as businesses. So with that, we try to focus exactly on the topics that are relevant to the brewing industry. And we have advocated for the Kigali Amendment, the Montreal Protocol to be properly mobilized. And so that is actually a policy that would help us join the rest of the world in committing to phasing out HFC refrigerants. Hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants replaced this CFCs that caused the holes in the ozone layer, however, from a greenhouse gas perspective, refrigerants are 2,000 to 9,000 times more potent than CO2 in their warming potential.

It has been identified as one of the top five ways to reduce carbon in the world is to remove those HFCs and creating those incentives at the federal level and mandating them would help us get there much faster. It is quite expensive to retrofit, but once you have retrofitted, it's a positive business case overall. Also, we work together with a sustainable Ag working group to push for policies that support farmers in making their crops more resilient and also lower impact farming through a transition to regenerative agriculture. Those technologies are available today. It's just a matter of transitioning our growers in that direction. And what we hear from our growers that have moved already to regenerative agriculture is that as their soil health grows, they actually have higher yields per acre and stronger, more resilient crops in the face of increasingly challenging weather patterns.

And then a couple of other subjects that we work on, EPR, extended producer responsibility, or container deposit laws, bottle bills as we know them, to help drive recyclability, and glass and aluminum are endlessly recyclable. We can have nearly a hundred percent recycled content if we were able to gain that recycled content from the system. However, in the United States, our collection of those materials are quite poor and most of them end up in the landfill. And so that's a lot of embodied carbon in the landfill that could be recovered and brought into a circular economy to increase our recycled content and dramatically decrease our greenhouse gas emissions. And so at the Colorado level, we are openly in support of extended producer responsibility. This is legislation that to actually put the cost on the producers and that's ourselves, to help fund systems that will ensure more collection of our materials so that they can be recycled. Right now in Colorado, where we could be recycling about five times as much as we are right now, but unfortunately we're just not collecting it.

Across the US, every county, city, state, has their own recycling regulations, which, all that red tape makes it impossible for a business to come in and profitably collect and redistribute those materials.And also, having to import those materials as they're mined from other countries is actually a bigger risk for us as well as a business. So, there's some strong business case around collecting those materials from our landfills here in the United States and sourcing that material domestically, including a number of climate benefits.

Mike Toffel:
So let me dig in a little bit to that regenerative agriculture. You mentioned that a number of farmers are actually finding this to be profitable and more stable way to farm. What's the policy need then? If it's a win-win for the farmers and the environment, what policy do we need to encourage more farmers to engage in regenerative agriculture?

Katie Wallace:
We are working through that before the next farm bill comes around. that type of farming requires a different type of equipment and process, which requires an investment on the farmer’s part to get there. It's incentivizing the transition, which does have a cost associated with it. Ag subsidies that exist today aren't necessarily always driving the farming methods that would benefit business and climate right now. So the subsidy programs broadly, for oil and gas even, for agriculture, were something that our government instituted long ago to solve different issues of our time that are not as relevant today.

And so modernizing those subsidies to address the current day issue would be something that would be a great benefit to the growers and to businesses like ours, that depend on agricultural products.

Mike Toffel:
Katie, why do you think so few companies are engaging in policy advocacy?

Katie Wallace:
I think that typically companies have engaged with lawmakers when it's directly related to their bottom line. And there's been a long tradition of companies advocating to reduce regulations and reduce incentive of programs or tax programs that help to fund projects like these if it is something that the business has to incur. And so it's just a mindset shift towards longer term thinking. And I don't think that businesses, at this point, across the board have done their work to understand the cost that climate change will have to their business. Although you're seeing that starting to happen quite rapidly, as more companies are required to study and disclose the impact of shareholders. So, I think we'll actually see more companies join in on policy advocacy in this regard, but it's just a shift in mindset and the willingness to incur some of the costs that comes from these policies on the business end and do the analysis to understand that ultimately that is the best business case available to us, but the sophistication is growing quite rapidly among businesses.

We receive calls from businesses who are wanting to do this work and are a little bit nervous about how to do it. And it's very different than the way that their government affairs teams have historically engaged policymakers, but as the business case is being studied quite a bit more, just in the last couple of years, we're seeing a rapid increase in interest among companies to do this work.

Adam Fetcher:
I also think there's rightfully a recognition that real meaningful action in a company's own operations is a bit of a precursor to speaking out on the advocacy front, whether it's for industry change or in the policy arena. And Katie's right. There's a lot more awareness among business leaders that this is not only an existential threat to their businesses, but there's also significant business benefits that come from investments in clean energy, clean tech, climate action at large. But at the same time, there's a dearth of action among a large swath of industry. Nearly two thirds of Fortune 500 businesses don't yet have a meaningful climate plan.

There was an interesting Harris poll that came out recently that said 65% of leaders from large US businesses said they wanted to make progress on sustainability efforts, but they didn't actually know how to do that. And meanwhile, 68% of these very same leaders in the same poll are admitting privately when they're asked anonymously that they're guilty of greenwashing. So, this is a really backwards world that we're living in, in terms of companies are marketing their sustainability efforts. Yet they know that they haven't actually done the work. They don't really know how to do the work in a meaningful way that's credible, and then, I think, are hesitant to put their necks out there and do advocacy in a meaningful way.

Katie Wallace:
Yeah, I just want to add too just that right now, there's a concern of shareholder perception that is changing quite rapidly. When we built our system to answer to quarterly earnings, and we're asking for policies that take a little bit of time to turn things around, but at the end of the day have very positive impacts on the business. That's a scary thing for a lot of decision makers in that position. So these disclosures you've seen proposed by the SEC, and there's the global disclosures that companies are required to produce now for their shareholders to let them understand the cost of climate change on the share value. You're seeing companies being able to better rationalize some investments in this space. And so those who are actually staffing the work and staying on top of the opportunities at hand are really starting to come around to understanding policy as a solution.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, it's really interesting to hear that transition as it is rapidly unfolding in front of our eyes. One of the things that attracted my attention to New Belgium in the first place on the climate change stage is the work you've done with your products and engaging customers. So, you've launched some beers that really are evocative of the climate change issue. And for one thing, Fat Tire Amber Ale is the first American certified carbon neutral beer. So Adam, can you tell us a little bit about that story? What is a certified carbon neutral beer and why did New Belgium engage in that through its Fat Tire product?

Adam Fetcher:
Certified carbon neutral is a certification administered in our case, by SCS Global, that proves that we are not only working to reduce emissions within our business and for the Fat Tire brand specifically, but we're also then engaging to neutralize the emissions that do remain through extremely high quality programs around regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, other types of projects that don't just offset, but actually have an outsize positive impact on the climate crisis. And so that means from a consumer perspective, when Fat Tire became the first certified carbon neutral beer in America, they could feel confident that this is a brand that's taking the climate crisis seriously, and has gone through a lot of investment in becoming certified as a mark of proof to that consumer that if they care about that issue, this is the beer for you to drink.

Mike Toffel:
And do your consumers care about this issue?

Adam Fetcher:
Our consumers do care about this issue. I think it's known as a controversial issue, but the reality is it's not nearly as controversial as it may seem. A large majority of Americans, 60% in fact, view climate change as an urgent threat to the wellbeing of the country. That's the highest level in that particular poll.

And so there are gradations of that still see climate change as a serious threat. That's going up continually and that crosses geographic, cultural, political lines. Fat Tire is a brand that has always been grounded in the pursuit of time spent outdoors, human powered activities in the outdoors specifically, riding a bicycle. And so that's been the ethos of that brand since it was launched in the early nineties. So, the consumer who drinks Fat Tire or is even aware of Fat Tire in a basic sense is definitely among the most interested in playing a role in supporting climate solutions.

Katie Wallace:
When we did our research through Nielsen, before we decided to go towards carbon neutral certification, we found that our customers, about 64% of them, thought it was important for a beer to be carbon neutral. And once they received the definition of carbon neutral, that jumped up to 86% of beer drinkers thinking that it was important for beers to be carbon neutral.

Mike Toffel:
These are beer drinkers at large or Fat Tire beer drinkers?

Katie Wallace:
Beer drinkers at large through the Nielsen data.

Mike Toffel:
And so has this sparked a revolution in carbon neutral beers? I'm not familiar with other brands following suit.

Katie Wallace:
Actually, Bud Light just announced recently that they're taking one of their smaller beers in that direction. And so, yes, there are obviously even just the bigger brewers that are paying attention to this and seeing the interest in that as well. But yeah, we have other craft breweries also that are utilizing a toolkit we put out on how to become carbon neutral as a craft brewer, and also interested in that journey themselves, and are working towards it.

Mike Toffel:
And what's this done to cost of goods sold? Is this a small investment? Is it a large investment? And what's it done to sales? Have you seen a reaction in the marketplace that bumps up the market share of Fat Tire?

Katie Wallace:
Yes. Fat Tire’s trends have improved since we launched carbon neutral certification and continuously talk about climate action as a part of the brand.

Katie Wallace:
Already, the cost of climate change is at a higher rate than what we're paying for the carbon offsets even today with the impacts we're seeing. However, we know that carbon offsets are not the end game. We have to reduce our carbon emissions overall. This is but one journey that helps us to invest in transforming towards an economy that has lower emissions overall.

Adam Fetcher:
To Katie's point about cost, when we first announced that Fat Tire had become certified carbon neutral, we did so by charging customers a hundred dollars for a six pack of Fat Tire, as a way to illustrate the future cost of beer if the climate emergency continues to go unabated. And we actually went to the lengths of working with some retailers to literally charge that much and drive awareness around that issue. That was kind of a precursor to a lot of the work that we've done since then. But, we've always been thinking about how can we use beer as a way to spark people's imagination around the impacts of the climate crisis and cost is definitely one of those.

Mike Toffel:
Did you sell any six packs at a hundred dollars a case?

Adam Fetcher:
I don't think we did. There was certainly a way for the customer at those retailers to get around that, pay the regular price. But I think the point was made.

Mike Toffel:
So that was Fat Tire. Let's talk about a very different approach. You launched a beer called Torched Earth Ale, which uses drought resistant grains and smoke tainted water, and you sold it as a limited edition. So tell us about this. That's a very different approach than certifying a beer that you're actually enjoying. This is one perhaps giving you a glimpse into the future.

Adam Fetcher:
Well, I would say it's an extension of that original announcement around carbon neutrality, where we foreshadowed that future through cost. And so we wanted to take a similar approach, but do it in the style of the beer and the ingredients that were used. Let's take one step back. Climate change often feels like such a big intractable problem. It's hard for people to understand both what it means and certainly how they can play a role. It feels slow, long term, somewhere out there in the future. And so our goal was to tap into beer, the heart of our business. It's something that so many people love. You literally hold it in your hand. It's a product that brings us together, that brings us joy, that fosters fun. There's almost no other product that I can think of that's like it in that sense.

And yet this product is directly threatened by the climate crisis, not 50 or a hundred years in the future, but it's happening right now, as Katie's illustrated. So we wanted to show how the simple things that we take for granted like a delicious Fat Tire on a summer day are being threatened by the climate crisis. So, Torched Earth was really a challenge to our brewers. Let's take what we know about where the climate crisis is heading and the impacts to agriculture that Katie described, and challenged them to use only those kinds of ingredients, shelf stable ingredients, alternative bittering agents with hops not being available, like dandelions, for example, smoke tainted water, and use only those ingredients to make a beer and let's see what it would taste like. And spoiler alert. It didn't taste very good.

Mike Toffel:
And what was the reaction among consumers, among employees, among the press?

Adam Fetcher:
I think it hit people over the head in a way that we had hoped and the reaction was, holy crap, this beer tastes bad. If this is going to be the only beer that's available in the future, I need to start thinking about this problem a little bit differently. And I think the important thing was in addition to putting out a beer that tasted bad, which is not something a brewery would normally do.

We then also gave people who tried the beer or people who read about the beer in the press an opportunity to come and take action along with us to help solve the problem. we created a really robust action center on our website where folks could join us in advocating for climate action among Fortune 500 businesses. We created a tool where anybody, still up on the website, still useful, anybody can look up which Fortune 500 businesses have a meaningful climate plan, and which do not. We know that two thirds of them still don't. Yet we know that 75 or so companies, the biggest companies, are responsible for the vast majority of global emissions. And we also know that climate policy is not moving along. So we felt like this was a place, as a business, where we could use our unique voice as a business to rally our consumers, to come and play a role in advocating for greater business adoption of climate action efforts.

Mike Toffel:
What's that website?

Adam Fetcher:
It's drinksustainably.com. Once you use that tool, share your voice with these companies, whether it's congratulating them for having a climate plan or urging them to adopt one, there's a whole raft of other actions that you can take everything from reducing your own personal carbon footprint to voting climate and making sure that you're going to the polls with climate as your top issue and so on and so forth.

Mike Toffel:
So, then this year in 2022, during the Olympics, New Belgium launched a third beer with a campaign theme on climate called Point of Snow Return. So what was that all about?

Adam Fetcher:
Well, this gets back similar to helping people understand that this thing that they love, cold beer on a summer day, is going to not exist in the future, given the climate emergency. The other big thing that Fat Tire loves and that Fat Tire drinkers love is sports, outdoor sports, specifically winter sports. And so we released this beer around the time of the Winter Games, driven by the insight, this fact that we saw that said that most cities that have hosted the winter games in the past will not be able to host again in the future. They'll be too warm to host again if the climate emergency continues as it is going. And so that shocked us. And I think we wanted to bring that to our audience along with this beer. And then again, similar to Torched Earth, use it as a way to spark a conversation about the threat to winter outdoor sports due to climate change and bring people into a participatory action that they could take, which in this case, was urging the International Olympic Committee to make strong climate leadership a requirement for Olympic sponsors going forward.

You'd think that if you want to protect your main event that happens every four years, you'd do everything in your power to make it so, and we feel like that's a natural step for the International Olympic Committee to take.

Mike Toffel:
And do you have a sense of how that was received?

Adam Fetcher:
We had thousands of people sign our petition. We are in the process of working to deliver that petition to the IOC. It resulted in a lot of media interest and business to our website. So I think from the standpoint of engaging people around this issue, things that they love that are under threat, again, it was a big step in the direction that Fat Tire is heading, which is further and further deepening its commitment around climate change and really making that the center of the brand.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. So, this has been a really interesting tour of the climate impacts on New Belgium and brewing more broadly, how you're engaging in policy, how you're engaging with customers and others. And it seems like this is made possible due to a real integration between your organization, the operations team, the product design team, the communications team. Is that something that you're seeing in your organization?

Katie Wallace:
This is typically an ESG team in one section of the company doing this work, and we've taken a very integrated approach to that. Luckily we had founders and current CEO today that are very passionate about operationalizing this within the DNA of the business overall. It's very deeply founded within our values and in our company strategy. And today, we work very closely on the governance side of our work and understanding when it comes to spending money or making decisions strategically, what will be the climate impact, what will be the social impact of that. And so we bring a very data based approach to that, that helps to share and convince the business case towards integrating more participation throughout the company.

So our team has quite a different approach to ESG than you see in a lot of areas, in that we partner very deeply with those across the organization to get the work done and really seeing our brand platform as one of our tools for impact and having the team on the branding side, that's very willing and interested and understanding of the value of mobilizing our brand to encourage action among our customers has been a real win for us. So it's an unusual approach, but I think one that more companies are looking at more seriously these days.

Mike Toffel:
Great. So let me turn to our final question. Some of our listeners are considering dedicating their careers in some manner to businesses that focus on climate change. Where do you see the biggest opportunities and what advice do you have for them? Katie, we'll start with you.

Katie Wallace:
My inbox is full of folks that want to get into the field, and understand how it's done, and find their niche. I would say more and more, there are specializations happening so you can get deep on carbon accounting and financial disclosures. There's a lot of interesting work happening right now when it comes to the international financial reporting standards and the SEC. I think that's pretty nerdy and fun. You can get deep into the policy realm, of course, which needs quite a bit more business acumen within it. And then finally, I would say in Adam’s world on the communication side, there are very few people today that really understand the issues at hand and do an excellent job of translating that into something that's really digestible from a customer perspective, a lay person's perspective. And so if you'd have a talent for communications and distilling something down to be relatable and engage-able, that's something that could bridge a really important space in the business and climate action world.

Mike Toffel:
Terrific. Adam, how about yourself? Advice?

Adam Fetcher:
Like Katie, I love talking to folks who are coming up and asking these questions and want to work in a mission driven environment, specifically around climate. And I think my answer to them is, do what you love and do what you're good at, and trust that every role is a climate action role in today's business environment and going forward. Now, certainly there are businesses that are more committed to that than others, but the way things are headed, every business is going to have to adopt strong climate action measures and get more and more vocal around advocacy and changes we need to see in our society writ large. And you have an opportunity, no matter where you sit, to make that a part of your role. Make the business case for taking strong action around climate investing in these longer term initiatives that may not pay off in the next quarterly report, but they will pay off over the long term for the business if you work for leaders who are interested in building a resilient company that lasts for decades.

We need talented people in every part of business who are interested in making climate action their business going forward.

Katie Wallace:
I would just add on to Adam's point there, if we had finance folks that understood this more, if we had procurement folks broadly that understood these issues, more engineers that understood it better, we'd be in a much better spot towards action on this issue. So there's really any job that you're interested in, there's a climate impact to it and tying those two together, I agree greatly with Adam on that point.

Adam Fetcher:
And I'd be remiss if I didn't make one more point, and this may be a little antithetical to the podcast, but I will say consider public service. Consider public service at some point in your careers, whether it's early on working in politics or the policy arena, or later after you've got some experience in the business world, we desperately need public servants who are eager to embrace and get into the details of what it will take to solve the climate crisis. And I certainly know that I learned 30 years worth of stuff from my five or so years in national politics. Couldn't recommend that enough and really that's where we need the impact to happen more than anywhere.

Mike Toffel:
Great. Well, Adam and Katie, thank you so much for spending time with us here on Climate Rising. Really appreciate it.

Katie Wallace:
Thanks for having us, Mike.

Adam Fetcher:
Thanks, Mike. Loved it.