Why KIND Is Sourcing Almonds from Bee-Friendly Farms

This is a note I shared with our KIND team yesterday, celebrating their hard work and industry leadership.

KIND Team,

The best part about what we’re building together at KIND is that it enables us to scale our positive impact on the world. We are constantly learning about new ways to use our business and platform to address societal problems. In recent years, we have been evaluating how to strategically advance our sustainability work in ways where we can meaningfully impact change.

I am incredibly excited to share we are announcing today our first two long-term sustainability goals:

• As the purchasers of 1-2% of the world’s almonds, we have the ability, and responsibility, to address an issue integral to our #1 ingredient. KIND is the first snack company to commit to exclusively source its almonds from bee-friendly farms, an endeavor we have begun implementing and plan to have executed worldwide and systemwide by 2025.
• We are also pledging to do our best to reach 100% recyclability, compostability, or reusability across all of our plastic packaging by 2025, while also reducing our use of single-use plastic overall. Alongside many leading companies, including Mars, KIND also has signed the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, which is helping pave the way for a transition towards a circular economy for plastic so that it never becomes waste or pollution.

In the meantime, I wanted to provide some background as I realize you might be wondering… what does bee-friendly mean?

• Bees are critical to the production of a variety of nutritious foods (including almonds), pollinating about a third of the food supply. However, the decline of bee populations continues at a rate unsustainable to support food crops that count on these pollinators. Research suggests a variety of factors are impacting bee health, including poor nutrition due to unvaried habitats and pesticide exposure.
• In the last several years, as we’ve learned about the seriousness of the issue, interest in protecting pollinators has gained significant momentum. However, the marketplace for bee-friendly almonds is currently in its infancy.
• A handful of our peers and partners (i.e., Whole Foods, Danone) have commendably made a variety of pollinator habitat and pesticide commitments. And yet we have not achieved large scale adoption of these practices among almond farmers. We hope to change that.

What will this commitment require?

• We are expecting our almond suppliers to reserve 3-5% of their farmland for dedicated pollinator habitat to support bees, butterflies and other pollinators.
• We have also worked with our suppliers to eliminate any use of neonicotinoids and chlorpyrifos, two pesticide treatments that are thought to be harmful to pollinators.
• The KIND Foundation is making a $150,000 investment in the Williams Lab at the University of California, Davis to help answer critical questions about bee health and track the efficacy of these farm-level initiatives.

I want to recognize the team behind both commitments for their exceptional work. Fostering bee-friendly farming practices required taking initiative, thoughtfully involving many stakeholders and finding ways to implement a solution that will hopefully become a standard and positively impact the bees and society for generations to come. Big KINDOS to Jenny Stanley, Anna Petrinec, Jon Yohannan, Chris Johnson, Miguel Egusquiza, Joana Costa, Nadia Makki and Laura Protzmann. And to Victoria Chatman-Galloway & the entire Packaging team for bringing shape to our packaging ambitions and setting us on a path to achieve them.

Both commitments are the result of a close partnership with a variety of leaders from our KIND International & Designated Categories team as well as the broader Sustainability team at Mars.

I am incredibly proud of this work and those involved in helping us get to this point.

Warmest, DL