Shazi Visram, Chief Mom and Founder and Jessica Rolph, Founding Partner and former COO of Happy Family, have been deeply committed to sustainability since day one, embedding organic as a cornerstone of the company’s practices. About two years ago, however, Happy Family began to question whether they could go beyond their commitment to organic to do more to protect the planet- specifically addressing the challenge of climate change. The company created a full-time sustainability position to focus on climate change, ensuring that it could create the kind of future the company hopes to see for its customers, its staff and the planet. “As a baby food company, it’s imperative that we think about our impact on the environment, because we want our little customers to have a healthy, happy planet to grow and thrive on,” says Katie Clark, Happy Family’s Director of Sustainability.

Although Happy Family has only one full-time employee focused on sustainability, it has been able to make enormous progress by creating a Climate Action Team, with 7 impact areas and 45 employees (almost half the company!) working on addressing the company’s climate impact as part of their workplans.

At Climate Day at Expo West this spring, Happy Family announced its climate action commitments in six areas and their teams are already working hard to make these goals a reality:

• Transportation: Recently converted 30% of domestic inbound raw material transportation from truck to intermodal (rail and trucks)
• Deforestation: Developing a sustainability audit to identify and reduce risk of deforestation from the sourcing of raw materials, and to set a minimum standard of efficiency and conservation practices with their suppliers.
• Food Waste: Working with a co-manufacturing partner to reduce manufacturing and food waste
• Policy: Working with several climate groups to set up local meetings with their representatives to encourage them to join the House Climate Caucus and support a carbon fee
• Agriculture: Rolling out the Cool Farm Tool to farmers in their supply chain to help them identify opportunities to  incorporate more regenerative agriculture practices  at the farm level
• Packaging: Executing on a number of projects in the pipeline to right-size products and down-gauge materials, including recently re-launching their four-pack pouch boxes with one inch less width and 65% (up from 35%) post-consumer recycled content

“I want to be able to look my children in their eyes when they are older and tell them that I did everything possible to reverse climate change,” says Jessica. We are so grateful to Jessica for her personal passion for climate action – she’s one of the co-founders of the Climate Collaborative and she and her husband, Decker are also major donors in addition to supporting our work via Happy Family. Congratulations to the entire Happy Family team for successfully integrating a commitment to reversing climate change into the company’s daily operations and future goals.

Visit Happy Family’s mission report to learn more about their passion and practices.