Supply chain scan to expand a sustainability program

Midwestern convenience store chain Kum & Go requested a full supply chain scan to analyse their environmental impacts. This reinforces their sustainability focus areas of Efficient, Renewable, Safe, Restorative, and Responsible.

Challenge

Kum & Go, a convenience store retailer based in the Midwestern United States, has a strong sustainability program focused on improving the efficiency and environmental impacts of its organizations. Kum & Go also recognizes the importance of addressing the total life cycle and supply chain impacts of the products that it sells. Kum & Go needed a systematic way to identify and prioritize opportunities to expand the existing sustainability program throughout their supply chain. By using financial data coupled with environmental data, Kum & Go launched a program to extend their own successful sustainability program throughout its value chains, based on their existing sustainability focus areas: Efficient, Renewable, Safe, Restorative, and Responsible.

Solution

PRé worked with Kum & Go to conduct a screening of potential life cycle impacts of the products sold at Kum & Go stores, including fuel, merchandise, food, and tobacco products. By using Kum & Go sales data and the Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive (CEDA), PRé identified opportunities to improve environmental impacts within Kum & Go’s supply chain. The analysis was mapped to the five sustainability areas of Kum & Go listed above.

The supply chain scan provided Kum & Go with a quantitative backbone for identifying and addressing environmental impacts associated with the manufacture and sale of goods throughout the entire supply chain. The scan identifies the sectors responsible for the largest environmental impacts, even when they occur two or three tiers removed from Kum & Go. In addition to identifying impacts, this type of analysis has the added benefit of minimizing time and cost resources by allowing targeted investment into projects with the most potential for improvement. The power of this approach lies in the use of two different types of data: financial and environmental. By utilizing data that is already gathered (financial) and linking it to a comprehensive environmental database (CEDA), Kum & Go and PRé identified and prioritized opportunities to understand and address environmental impacts occurring upstream in its supply chain.

Benefits

The sale of petroleum-based fuels was the dominant contributor to supply chain environmental impacts, reinforcing Kum & Go’s commitment to offer biofuels to its customers. In addition to the petroleum sector sales, the results of the study indicated additional opportunities to encourage energy efficiency in the packaged beverage category and sustainable agriculture in the prepared food and tobacco sectors. Kum & Go currently promotes the use of Rainforest Alliance and Forest Stewardship Council certified products, and the analysis indicates opportunities for expanding the presence of these two certifications within its supply chain.

Because the supply chain scan encompasses the total purchases of a retail store, the analysis can identify the largest contributors to impacts, even if they are not direct purchases from the retail store. This information allows Kum & Go to address issues not immediately evident based on expenditure data alone. By performing this screening, Kum & Go was able to extend its existing sustainability program to its supply chain, identify relevant supply chain impacts and hotspots, and prioritize the opportunities for improvement in a cost effective way.

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