How $20 billion food giant General Mills turned its climate goals into action

Committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is easy; figuring out how to meet your commitment is a good deal harder. That’s what General Mills learned after it decided to create a Climate Transition Action Plan (CTAP), a formal list of the actions the company will take to meet its promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent (from 2020 levels) by 2030.

To begin with, the plan took two years to complete, far longer than expected. And the result, published in April, only accounts for about two-thirds of the emissions savings the company will need. 

Still, creating the CTAP launched dozens of new climate initiatives and created an ongoing process to manage greenhouse gas emissions throughout its organization. 

“Our team was able to build a really comprehensive and fantastic plan,” said Jessica Jubara, who became the General Mills senior climate manager spearheading the plan in 2022, after spending 12 years in strategy and sales roles. “We still have work to do, but we understand much more about what we need so we can make progress faster.”

The Plan

General Mills, a $20 billion food conglomerate, was hardly starting from scratch. It was one of the first companies to publish a commitment through the Science Based Targets Initiative in 2015. And it has long worked with its grain suppliers to encourage sustainable agricultural practices. 

By 2022, the company realized all this work wasn’t enough. It had increased its commitment in 2020 to align with the global goal of 1.5-degree temperature increase. Yet its emissions had started to creep up, propelled by the extraordinary actions it took to keep supplying food during the pandemic.

“We needed to get more precise in our estimates and more accurate in our timelines so we could be on the glide path to achieve our objectives for 2030,” Jubara said. “We are largely an oat- and wheat-based company, and we’ve invested heavily in regenerative agriculture for those crops. We had to expand to include our full value chain, asking where transportation and packaging fit in and rethinking our sourcing strategy for tropical commodities and dairy.”

How General Mills plans to reduce its GHG emissions

The Process

Work on the transition plan began in spring 2022, when the company formed cross-functional teams to address each of the company’s greenhouse gas hotspots, such as dairy, row crops and transportation. At first, they were told to find ideas for emissions reductions without considering the cost.

“We wanted them to see what was possible from a greenhouse gas reduction perspective, looking across the industry and technological landscape,” Jubara said.

By spring 2023, management had reviewed the initial work and selected the most promising “levers” the company could push to reduce emissions. New teams were created to create plans to implement the selected interventions, and other groups started work on translating the initiative into the required regulatory disclosures.

At the end of that  year, it was time to make hard decisions. The teams estimated each idea’s carbon impact and cost over 10 years. Projects were selected by asking three questions (based on the Real-Win-Worth framework): 

• Can it be done effectively today? If the technology needed to be proven or the cost was likely to fall significantly in the future, it was put on hold. 
• Is it right for General Mills? “We’re going to be better at something related to row crops, where we have a lot of experience,” Jubara explained. “We’re not the best company to decarbonize data centers.”
• Is the impact significant? “We don’t have unlimited resources, so we wanted to work on the biggest opportunities,” she said. 

The Challenges

Engaging the organization

The planning was done mainly by people in operating units with little previous involvement in climate issues. Most groups warmly embraced the project, Jubara said,  encouraged by an endorsement from the company’s new global impact committee, a group of senior executives chaired by Jeffrey L. Harmening, its CEO.

“A lot of companies have been challenged to get people on board,” she said. “We were fortunate that everyone saw they had clear responsibility and ownership for this work down the line from senior management. That let us be nimble because we didn’t have to sell the project as we were doing it.”

Getting the numbers right

Jubara wanted to get precise measures of the impact of the company and its suppliers to replace the industry-wide estimates it had been using in its climate reporting, which she suspected were often too conservative. In some cases, the company conducted its own measurements. A team of General Mills scientists was dispatched to Quebec to build a climate model for dairy farms.

“We were looking at everything from manure management to herd health to regenerative agriculture for the cattle feed,” Jubara said. “Usually, one of our biggest challenges is using proxy data that makes big assumptions, so it was fantastic to have real data from on the ground.” 

Working with suppliers

Once it had the numbers, General Mills set out to convince vendors to adopt the climate-friendly practices it had identified. The larger agribusiness vendors, such as its palm oil suppliers, were already working on sustainability initiatives. But for other ingredients, such as dairy products, the company had to engage individual farmers.

“Our suppliers are in very different areas of maturity than we are, so we start with a lot of education without being prescriptive,” Jubara said. “Our whole farm model gives our dairy partners a variety of interventions they can take. It lets them find the approach to regenerative agriculture that works for them and find ways to improve their resiliency and profitability as well.”

Dealing with uncertainty

At the end of the process, the company came to what some might find an embarrassing conclusion: All the initiatives in the transition plan accounted for only 68 percent of the greenhouse gas reductions promised for 2030. 

“Some of my peers are choosing not to disclose their plans because they want everything to be figured out before they publish anything,” Jubara said. “We decided there is more benefit from being transparent with our partners and stakeholders.”

The Results

The initial report lists dozens of initiatives and tallies how they contribute to the company’s 2030 targets. The largest contribution, accounting for 23% of the greenhouse gas reduction needed, is from transportation. The company is starting two electric vehicle trials with its trucking vendors. Most of the reductions for now are coming from shifting its freight from trucks to rail.

The second largest contribution —16 percent of the goal— stems from a new commitment to reduce deforestation. By 2025, the company pledges not to buy palm oil, cocoa or fiber (for packaging) from suppliers contributing to deforestation. The dairy farming initiative will cover 7 percent of the needed reductions. 

The report wasn’t able to identify steps to meet the full goal. It counts on meeting 9 percent of the objective by convincing more suppliers to adopt conservation strategies. That leaves a gap of 23 percent to be determined over the next six years. Jubara highlighted three sources of progress:

• Extending existing initiatives. The dairy farm improvements from Quebec can be introduced in the U.S, for example, and the EV pilots can be expanded. 
• Capitalizing on new technology. Some projects that were too expensive this year should become cost-effective in coming years.
• Improved data modeling. Some initiatives may turn out to have a more significant impact than the company is currently taking credit for.

Perhaps the biggest change to come from the process is that climate issues will be woven into the company’s planning process. Every year, operating groups will review their greenhouse gas targets alongside their financial targets.

“By having a climate transition plan, we are not just picking specific actions to take,” Jubara said, “We are integrating this effort into the entire enterprise, and that will help us manage all the things we have to do to reach net zero by 2050.”