Sustainability lessons from baking with Grandma

One of my favourite things to do as a child was to bake with my Grandmother. I did a lot of baking over the holidays and found myself reflecting on the life lessons she imparted during our time together. These lessons have achieved new meaning in light of the increased focus on Sustainability this past year. Born in 1921, Grandma came of age during the Great Depression, a time of crisis when people were faced with massive dislocation. That experience cultivated an amazing ability to do more with less and adapt to continuously shifting resource availability - practices that lie at the core of what's needed to achieve Sustainability for both society and the planet. Here are four resilience practices I learned from baking with Grandma.

Planning

Grandma did her research and observed patterns that helped her optimize. She knew when each store re-stocked to get the freshest produce, when to hold off for a sale and never missed an opportunity to use a coupon. She invested when prices were low and dug into her inventory when prices were high, minimizing trips to the store to save both gas and time. As a result, she always had everything around that she needed.

Sustainability Lesson: Establish relationships with multiple potential suppliers. Know where and how they operate and what drives their success and failure so you can anticipate factors - environmental, social and otherwise - that could cause supply disruptions. This type of planning also insulates you from pricing shocks that can result from having to source alternate suppliers at the last minute.

Reuse

Grandma's attitude was "why would you buy something new when you can reuse something you already have?" I didn't know what a Ziploc bag was until I was a teenager because in our household, empty bread bags served the same purpose. Grandma used old Quaker Oats boxes to store cookies, turned every bone into soup and sewed herself an elegant suit from the wool of my Grandpa's navy dress uniform.

Sustainability Lesson: With a bit of forethought, there are probably numerous costs that could be reduced by proactively looking for opportunities to reuse and upcycle. While things like product packaging are an obvious place to apply this thinking, it can go much further. What efficiency might be achieved if companies redeployed some of their severance costs into upskilling people?

Substitution

In Grandma's world, substitution was primarily driven by a desire to improve quality. Her rule of thumb was that you could generally cut the sugar in half or substitute honey to make any recipe healthier. White flour was generally replaced with whole wheat and why wouldn't you throw a couple of grated carrots in to add some extra vitamins? Because I am not organized like Grandma was, substitution is the life raft that saves me from poor planning: Yogurt can be replaced with sour milk, white sugar and molasses can replace brown sugar and somehow, applesauce miraculously replaces both! Substitution also applies to finding new uses for existing products. My favourite was Grandma's conviction that her pumpkin pie made an entirely appropriate breakfast - and given it was made with half the sugar and a whole wheat crust, she was probably right.

Sustainability Lesson: Continually seeking ways to enhance, simplify or improve the impact of your product is a key opportunity for innovation. Knowing your supply chain well enough to have a viable set of alternatives for raw materials and end markets is critical to survival in the event that either are ever disrupted.

Experience

Despite Grandma's baking mastery, she didn't really have any cookbooks. Instead, she was always clipping recipes from magazines, newspapers or exchanging them with neighbours. This was partly a manifestation of the Reuse principle (ie. Why buy a book when you can get the content from existing sources?) but it was also about having the curiousity to keep trying new things. Many of our favourites came from product packages - Blue Ribbon flour, Kraft cream cheese, Jello. I remember Grandma coaching me to always look for (free) recipes on packages because a) it can show you a new use for something you already have and b) the company that makes a product usually has good ideas about how to use it. It's worth noting that this made her recipe filing system utterly impossible for anyone else to follow. I remember trying to find my favourite cranberry muffin recipe under "Muffins," only to be told that it was filed under "C" for "Cranberry" because that was the key ingredient.

Sustainability Lesson: There are tremendous opportunities for firms to productize Sustainability-as-a-Service: Microsoft is doing this with tools to measure the carbon footprint of customers' data centre usage; Blackrock is building sustainability tools into its Aladdin investment platform; Ecolab is using the data it collects from water management services to help firms understand their water risk. Examine your firm's data assets to see if they might be repurposed as a tool to help your customers on their sustainability journey. While doing this, be sure to think laterally so you don't miss the cranberries because you're looking for muffins.

While Grandma figured all this out without ever using a computer, modern data infrastructure gives corporate leaders the tools to tackle sustainability at scale. We have the technology to measure every raw material, process and output, and AI to reason over that data, predict scenarios and identify optimizations. With Cloud, these insights can reach beyond the borders of individual companies and be extended across entire ecosystems. The first step though, is to think in a new way - or perhaps to rediscover the benefits of how people used to think.

I hope Grandma's baking wisdom inspires new ideas about how to make your business more sustainable.