Heineken Spin will have four fundamental pillars focused on renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, packaging recycling and alliances with ESG impact brands.
Heineken announced this Wednesday the creation of a new business unit in Brazil to make sustainability actions profitable, in a strategy that has partners and combined initial investments of approximately 150 million reais.
Heineken Spin will have four fundamental pillars focused on renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, packaging recycling and alliances with impact brands in ESG (an English acronym for Environmental, Social and Governance, which represents the balance of these issues in business management).
"If we want to support sustainable growth, we have to do a business that generates financial results," said the executive president of the country's second brewery, Mauricio Giamelaro, highlighting that the new division "is an ecosystem that will go beyond the production of beer".
He added that sustainability has always been on the company's agenda, and that now Heineken Spin is a way to "continue making the (business) wheel spin, but in a different way," including collaborative work with other companies.
"Heineken in Brazil is aware that it is very good at building brands, respecting the consumer and its partners and producing quality beer. But there are other things that we must do competently... Instead of verticalizing, we brought people into this ecosystem," he stated.
He added that Spin was “born to deliver results.” "This year, all companies have the goal of obtaining a positive payback," he stated, adding that the expectation for Spin is double-digit revenue growth each year.
For each of the four pillars that support Spin, there are one or more partners and companies that are already involved or are coming.
Since 2021, one of these fronts, renewable energy, has had an agreement with Ultragaz (Ultra Group) and Raízen to leverage the use of clean energy sources among consumers and establishments.
Green Energy currently has 40,000 active contracts and, according to Heineken's Vice President of Sustainability in Brazil, Mauro Homem, it should grow as the program manages to enable the availability of distributed generation.
The executive highlighted that this is the only Heineken Spin project that the company is already developing, while the other three fronts that the brewer will focus on are new.
One of them refers to regenerative agriculture, with the planting of organic lemons in an area of more than 800 hectares that the company owns near its brewery in Itu (SP). It's something that "will protect an area that is super important to us from a water resilience standpoint, but will also be able to sequester carbon."
"We see that it could be a beautiful model and that it can also be scalable to other places, showing that you can preserve, you can generate carbon and at the same time you can get a return on income," he added.
The fruits will be sold and the profits obtained will be reinvested in expanding the business model to other regions in the country.
This initiative is undertaken in alliance with Rizoma, a company that develops agroforestry systems and produces regenerative organic grains, whose founding partner is Pedro Paulo Diniz.
RECYCLING
A third pillar is the circularity of materials and packaging to reduce carbon emissions by expanding glass recycling. To this end, the company will have an alliance with Ambipar, which works in environmental management.
According to Heineken's Vice President of Sustainability in Brazil, the company is structuring a system to cover areas where there is currently no glass collection.
He said that the group will initiate this action in three states, one of them in the Southeast region and another in the Northeast, while the location of the third has not yet been "released." The group's perspective is that these three will be operational by the end of this year.
“We are going to take the areas where there is no coverage and put resources so that this glass returns to the value chain and we can remunerate the entire context, which is the collector, who transports it and even who transforms this glass," said the executive.
In statements to the market this Wednesday, Ambipar said that upon closing, the operation will become part of the strategic offers to meet other demands for environmental services of the brewery in Brazil.
The fourth axis of Heineken's strategy is to work with the so-called impact brands, in which the group seeks new brands to face challenges that involve innovation, especially in relationships with consumers.
To do this, Heineken partnered with Better Drinks, owner of the Mamba Waters and Cerveja Praya brands, which claims to have adopted ESG as a fundamental pillar since its founding.
"They are able to bring this connection closer to our consumers and at the same time they can provide a perspective of innovation that currently has no scale, with products that go beyond our traditional portfolio," said Homem. "We cannot innovate at the same pace without a model designed for it."
Another association involves the Central Única das Favelas (Cufa). "We understand that we need to be closer to the communities so that these innovations are also more effective," said the executive.
He explained that Cufa carries out curatorial work to search for entrepreneurs in the favelas so that the company contributes something to the innovation pipeline. This is not frequent to identify since it is not so close to the favelas entrepreneur.
According to the general director of Heineken in Brazil, the development of the new business unit is aligned globally, especially the reforestation part, due to the administration of carbon credits, but initially it is a platform only for Brazil.
He stressed, however, that if the country manages to do everything as planned, it will be able to deliver a good part of the global result for the Holland-based company, given the relevance of its Brazilian operation. Globally, Heineken aims to be carbon neutral across its entire value chain by 2040.
