A burger worth choosing?

Submitted by Neil McCallum on March 25, 2012 - 5:01pm.

Illustration text: At Max Burgers you can see exactly how much carbon impact your meal has all the way from the farmers land to the guests hand directly on the menu. This has resulted in a 15 percent increase in sales of carbon efficient alternatives.

“Enabling consumers to make sustainable choices and advance responsible behaviour individually and collectively” is according to a fresh UN report something that supports a future worth choosing. In a restaurant such as Max burgers, a partner of The Natural Step, it comes down quite literally to menu options. That’s not enough however.

At Max we know that we, along with our entire industry and society as a whole, are unsustainable. But we are also, as anyone else could be, a change agent for a better future. And here clear results do matter. Since 2005 we have been recognised as the healthiest in the industry in Sweden where we have our operations. In 2008 we became the first in the world to put climate on the menu. But to further assist our guests we decided to carbon offset all of our products through reforestation in Africa through Plan Vivo certificates. Of course we are also simultaneously working at reducing the impact of our products.

That means we did back in 2005 and 2008 what Tarja Halonen and Jacob Zuma, in the above mentioned UN Report, now wants us to do more of now - to empower people to make sustainable Choices. The say:

“Every day, millions of choices are made by individuals businesses and governments. Our common future lies in all those choices. Because of the array of overlapping challenges the world faces, it is more urgent than ever that we take action to embrace the principles of the sustainable development agenda. It is time that genuine global action is taken to enable people, markets and governments to make sustainable choices.”

What we have done is just one step forward. We need much more action from the food industry and we want to support a progressive agenda in Rio +20. That’s why we are here. At this conference we want to learn and to inspire, but more importantly, we want to find sustainability leaders from other parts of the planet, with whom we can form strategic alliances for global food security. So please, don’t hesitate to contact me to share ideas on how to do that.

At this conference I will participates in two sessions:

1. Monday 26th, Presentation on how to strategically move towards sustainability, during the Bridges to the Future session. I will share our journey towards sustainability and the experiences that have strengthened customer loyalty, created a change for consumer behavior and also provide inspiration others to follow in our footstep.

(At 2 pm, Room 14)

2. Wednesday 28th, We will host an exclusive breakfast roundtable discussion on global food security together with Stockholm Environment Institute and The Natural Step.

We are honoured to be called upon as a good example at this conference and hope that other companies will see the benefits of doing well by doing good. But I am also looking forward to learn more about other good business and science examples that could help further improve our work with sustainability. We know that Max still have a long way to go to able to call ourselves a sustainable company, but that is our mission.

Max is a family owned business which means that we are not driven by quarterly capitalism and this may just be the reason why our perspective on sustainable driven business fits in at a conference that focuses on the bigger picture. We are confident that businesses and individuals need to be able to make more active choices that put less pressure on the planet as well as the people living on it. At Max we are world leading, but has just got started.

Written by: Pär Larshans, Chief Sustainability Officer at Max Burgers

Cell: +46 (0)70 206 1669

E-mail: Par.Larshans@max.se