How a beauty, a wellness, and a farming company think about sustainability

What happens when you put together retail executives from a beauty brand, a menstrual care brand, and a farming company in the same room? A panel discussion, of course, on how retail can become truly circular.

Why? Well, sustainability has become a buzzword in retail, and almost every retailer has their own take on it.

When Retail Brew moderated a panel discussion on sustainability at the Porte Conference last month, we (hi, it’s Jeena!) asked each company representative for their brands’ takes on circularity, addressing greenwashing claims, and how to make sure the company is profitable.

These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Lisa Guerrera, co-founder and CEO of Experiment, a science-based beauty brand.

As a science-backed brand, one of the unique approaches that we have is that we’ve used sustainability not necessarily as an aesthetic thing or marketing thing. We view it as kind of the next wave of transparency. We’ve talked about greenwashing extensively, but just the idea of using sustainability as a branding tool, rather than having any substance behind it; just throwing products in glass packaging and calling that sustainable—that’s actually not as sustainable as you might think it is when you look at the data. So for us, the way we approach sustainability is completely through a data-backed, science backed approach. We actually verify all of our sustainability claims with a third-party partner called Bluebird that verifies both our carbon and waste outputs for every single product that we release. They do that through our ingredients supply chain or packaging supply chain. We’re verifying all of that before we make any claims around recyclability, refillability. Then, we communicate that to our customer, with how much carbon output our serum has, and comparisons to other serums on the market.

Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of August, a sustainable menstrual care brand.

Most pads out there take five to eight centuries to decompose. The average maxi pad has enough plastic for three to five plastic bags.

When I started the brand, I thought we were going to do menstrual cups—something you could buy once and you would like to have forever and never have to use another single-use plastic item. But I think a lot of what we do is also really running everything we do by the community. We actually talk to our community. The majority of them had never heard of menstrual cups. We think about sustainability as how we meet people where they’re at and be more sustainable while not sacrificing on efficacy or comfort—actually introducing products that are competitively priced, but work better and are more comfortable. We introduced pads that, in ideal conditions, take 12 months to decompose and are plastic free and they’re a lot more comfortable.

Katie Seawell, chief commercial officer at Bowery Farming, a New York-based indoor vertical farming and digital agriculture company.

By 2050, the world population will hit 10 billion people, which means we’re going to have to increase food production by 40% more than we do today with fewer resources. So how are we going to think about that?

At Bowery, we’re essentially trying to flip the paradigm on its head, which is to create a fully integrated growing system, closer to the cities we serve that grows as much healthy food as possible with fewer resources. We are refurbishing warehouses and a completely controlled environment, stacking our crops floor to ceiling using LED lights to mimic the spectrum of the sun. And then core to our operations is the battery operating system which integrates sensors, vision systems, and robotics and automation to maximize efficiency in terms of production in the farm and monitor the plants 24/7 in the farm, which means we are able to grow more precisely than traditional agriculture in terms of inputs.