One speaker at this conference spoke of how the culture for a sustainable brand must begin with the company employees. He already offers many of the same benefits that I do: full medical benefits, encouraging personal development of employees, subsidizing education. But one of his comments really resonated. He said that in order to be successful, one must look at the issue of sustainability systemically. There are always tradeoffs, but one must accept those. Also, one must understand that there is a much larger picture involved with every action and decision that is made, and you have to appreciate the interconnectivity of everything.

I agree completely, and it is one reason that I have been concerned about publicizing any of our activities that are sustainable. However, the common theme of this conference is that it is better to act and at least try to effect incremental change than not to act at all. So when I return to the office I will begin having conversations with the Mont Blanc staff about all of the things that we are currently doing, as well as where I want to go to operate more sustainably and more transparently.

I am at the Sustainable Brands Conference, a fairly intimate gathering of about 300 people who are wholly dedicated to the proposition that sustainability is the wave of the future and how we must move forward to save the planet.

There are varying reasons for everyone’s belief, from practical (if we don’t do anything we won’t have anywhere to live), to economic (it is good business and me and/or my company can benefit from the green trends) to moral (it’s the right thing to do). Talk of carbon offsets, life-cycle assessments, eco-innovation, responsibility and innovation abound.

I am interested in ideas around innovation. For example, people are talking about game changing ideas. I was impressed with one speaker who talked about how his company, a leading marketer of green and environmentally friendly household cleaning supplies, needed to reassess what they sold. It takes guts, he said, to look at your best-selling product and then plan on eliminating it from your line in five years because, fundamentally, it is not the right thing to sell for the world.

His approach is not to focus on what his products do well, but rather to look at where they fall short. I like that idea. It isn’t easy to acknowledge both your own and your products’ shortcomings, but it is something everyone should do. We at Mont Blanc Gourmet can do that. I know that we can do a better job of packaging our products. We just need to figure out what that packaging will be.