Mary Jane Melendez Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer,  General Mills

Our Director Erin Callahan caught up with Mary Jane Melendez from General Mills about their regenerative agriculture work and their plans for the future! Read their conversation below.

Nutiva was one of the first companies to join the Climate Collaborative in 2017 and has made five climate action commitments, to: Regenerative Agriculture, Energy Efficiency, Food Waste, Packaging, and Transportation. They are also a champion-level donor, helping catalyze action and resource provision to our network of 660 companies. We sat down with them to check in on their climate action, detailed in their new 2019 Impact Report.

Nothing has given me more hope this year than seeing how this community has continued to push forward on climate action. Amid an incredibly eventful and challenging year, hundreds of companies from this network still showed up for the largest ever business climate advocacy day, advocacy trainings, webinars, and more.

Below, you’ll find links to resources we've developed to help businesses in our community advocate for a climate-smart recovery to the COVID economic crisis. You can watch our August 6 Advocacy Training and Briefing here.

We are at a turning point in our country’s history, where circumstances are forcing us to redefine what we stand for—and to get involved in advocating for those changes. It has never been more important to make sure climate is part of that picture, and we are asking this industry to play a vital role in making that case to Congress this fall.

The Climate Collaborative is excited to announce we're teaming up with Flexport.org to offer an opportunity for committed companies to engage in an international logistics emissions reduction analysis project!

Up to 1/3 of global greenhouse gas emissions stems from the food system, an estimated 80% of which comes from agriculture.[1] Nearly 200 companies in our community are working to reduce their agricultural footprint through carbon farming practices. Among them, CC committee company General Mills is going one step further to create an open-source self-assessment tool for any farmer to use to identify and boost their regenerative agricultural practices.

The Climate Collaborative is thrilled to release a new 10-step Food Waste Reduction Toolkit and self-assessment tool, both geared at supporting retailers in reducing their food waste impacts.

This month’s Climate Collaborative webinar welcomed BSR’s Nico De Golia for a dive into how companies can work to decarbonize their transportation supply chains. We wanted to share some of his takeaways below. To learn more visit here.

If the United States went shopping in your store, it would leave with five bags, drop two in the parking lot, and leave them there. This may seem crazy, but as a country, we leave a full 40 percent of our food uneaten. And it’s not just food going in the trash: Up to about one-fifth of U.S. cropland, fertilizers, and agricultural water go towards growing food that’s ultimately wasted. Food waste is responsible for at least 2.6 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to more than that of 37 million cars), and wasting less food was ranked third of 100 solutions to climate change by Project Drawdown.