Now in its fifth cohort and showcasing in London for the first time, the 100+ Accelerator Demo Day took place on Tuesday 29 October at the QEII Centre.
The 100+ Accelerator was established in 2018 to drive progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and rapidly advance the growth of start-ups creating essential sustainability solutions. This programme is jointly backed by Anheuser-Busch InBev, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Danone and Unilever. Through this collaboration, these five major global consumer goods companies provide access to their supply chains and mobilise their teams to partner with start-ups, amplifying their shared impact.
The day was opened by Accelerator Executive Director, Maisie Divine; Chief Sustainability Officer at AB InBev, Ingrid De Ryke; and Labour Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and Department for Business and Trade), Sarah Jones. The overall theme of the day was collaboration, teaming together sustainability technology start-ups and large corporations.
The Minister commented on the power of collaboration as the new government will require us to work with them and together to execute its plans for Britain’s future. She said: “We know as a brand-new government we’re not going to deliver anything on our own. It’s only going to happen through the private sector, NGOs, civil society and everybody working together to make sure we reach the goals that we want to see. Collaboration is key to that, but we also must innovate.”
Commenting on the current landscape of start-ups she added: “Public and private investment, education, skills, state law and federal law all come together to create fertile soil for what is now the definition of modern innovation… we want to build here in the UK, We need start-ups and SMEs to provide ingenuity, and we need government to create the right environment so that companies like those can flourish.
“In the UK we want to create a pro-investment, pro-innovation, pro-entrepreneurship economy. We want to do this for growth and jobs but also because we want the UK to lead in the technologies that won’t just shape our planet, but will save it. Sustainability, clean energy, inclusivity. These are economic goals, and in 2024, and they’re also moral imperatives.”
Sustainability and business growth through partnerships
Amongst the fast-paced, but impressive pitches from the start-ups, panels took place with sponsors to allow the start-ups to get their insights. The first panel tackled the topic of partnerships, continuing the overarching theme of collaboration.
PJ Mistry, Strategy and Operations Lead for the Unilever Foundry, a team that works on helping to solve Unilever’s biggest scientific challenges through partnerships, hosted the talk. Panellists included Pablo Costa, Global Vice President Packaging, Unilever; Ann Tracy, Chief Sustainability Officer, Colgate-Palmolive; Daniela Zahariea, SVP Technical, Innovation & Supply Chain, The Coca-Cola Company; and Brian Perkins, CEO, Budweiser Brewing Group / AB InBev.
PJ said: “Collaboration is the only way forward in resolving complex challenges like building recycling supply chains and developing innovative materials at scale and for the long-term. The panel tackled the role that partnerships play in advancing sustainability initiatives.
Daniela Zahariea, SVP Technical, Innovation & Supply Chain, The Coca-Cola Company: “Sustainability challenges are interconnected, so to address them, we need to support systemic solutions. Businesses must learn and continue to drive greater engagement and accountability to their value chains and partner with regulators to implement policy that will help execute practical solutions.
“Working with our suppliers, we have developed a very robust supply engagement programme to decarbonise our value chain. This platform involves collaboration to help encourage them to develop science-based targets for their sustainability journeys and do that with incentive. They have also set out their ambition for Net Zero 2040, and we work very closely with them to achieve that goal.”
Pablo Costa, Global Vice President Packaging, Unilever: “In my area of circular packaging, partnerships and collaborations are at the centre of the way we are trying to tackle the challenges.
“As an example, we have about 60 material scientists, working on the next generation of materials, trying to find solutions to sustainable packaging, and more than half of our spend is external in partnerships.
“A big challenge in our space is about finding solutions for what we call ‘difficult to recycle’ packaging and it’s a challenge that we have realised we cannot solve alone. We need to collaborate with our traditional partners and suppliers, but also go deep in the end-to-end value chain, to start a funding solution.
“Now we are looking into collaborating with our peers, because at the end of the day, the challenges around packaging waste and plastics are common to the whole industry. We already compete with our products; we do not need to compete on our packaging too.”
Ann Tracy, Chief Sustainability Officer, Colgate-Palmolive: “We have been partnering with the supply chain for over 20 years, but we’re trying to take that embedded partnership across other functions including packaging.
“One of the big challenges we have is to make all our packaging recyclable by the end of next year. As Colgate, a particular challenge for us is our toothpaste tube, the world uses 20 billion tubes of toothpaste each year and half comes from us!
“We started that journey in 2015 and fast-forwarding to today, we have developed the first mono material, recyclable toothpaste tube. Our focus now is to make the recycling infrastructure to make sure it gets accepted, sorted, collected and reprocessed appropriately, so we can reuse it and make it fully circular.
“Focus is key, so making sure that all our business partners around the world, all our sites, understand very clearly what the targets are and why we’re doing it, and how important this is for our business.”
Brian Perkins, CEO, Budweiser Brewing Group / AB InBev: “Beer has been around for 3,000 years, and it’s made of natural ingredients. Our main job is to run and build a great beer company, but we are also the leaders of the category, and it’s our duty to ensure beer continues for another 3,000 years. To do that, we need our business to be sustainable.
“Most good conversations happen over a beer, and beer brings people together, so partnerships and beer have the same DNA making it inherent to what we do. This is why initiatives like 100+ Accelerator and having discussions like this are important because we don’t have all the answers, and we’re not going to get there by ourselves. If we share the common problems and tackle them together, we will find the answers sooner.
“In our business, we created a platform called Eclipse, which is a supplier dedicated collaboration platform. The main goal of Eclipse is to reduce stage three emissions across our entire value chain. Eclipse brings people together by allowing companies to share data, access upskilling and training and initiate pilot projects.
“Our beer is made with renewable electricity, therefore, all our partners across our value chain can access renewable electricity at an effective cost. We used the Eclipse platform to be able to open that up to everybody and enable the collective buying of renewable electricity.”
Can sustainability and innovation power business growth?
After lunch, the second panel of the day was moderated by Molun Zhang, R&D Senior Manager Experimentation and External Technology Acquisition, The Coca-Cola Company.
The theme of the discussion was to emphasise that sustainability is not only about meeting regulatory requirements or social responsibility, but that it is truly fundamental to reshaping how companies operate and thrive in a fast-changing world.
The panellists were encouraged to share real-world examples from their companies on how they are integrating sustainability in corporate strategy and creating a future where profitability and sustainability don’t have to be mutually inclusive.
Here, the panellists explain what they have done to lead in sustainability:
Ingrid de Ryck, Chief Sustainability Officer, AB InBev: “At AB InBev we continue to focus on the things that matter most to our business. Even though we are a global company we operate on a very local level. We buy local ingredients from local farmers and turn that into beer in breweries that are ingrained at the heart of communities.
“The number one ingredient to brew beer is water. No water, no beer. For many years, we’ve been actively engaged in watershed management, trying to use nature-based solutions to improve the health of those watersheds, both in terms of quality and availability of the water. We’ve learned a lot through the process of finding nature-based solutions, but one thing we have found is that it takes a long time to show measurable impact when you work in watersheds.
“It takes a lot of stakeholders to come together to fuel the investment that is needed for shared water challenges. No single sector can do this alone, but the drinks industry has rallied together on this through several associations. We need more collaboration to drive maximum reach of these solutions.”
Willem Uijen, Chief Procurement Officer, Unilever: “At Unilever, we are focusing on the things that our consumers are focusing on which is climate change and net zero. This means investment into protecting and restoring nature and a waste-free world.
“When it comes to greenhouse gases in our supply chain, to fix our own operations would be relatively easy. But looking outside of that with our 54,000 suppliers and partners is where we need to do most of the work, as over 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions sit in the materials and the services that we buy.
“This makes it very important to have the right policies in place so that our partners are very clear what we expect of them. The Responsible Partner policy sets out very clearly what we expect in business integrity, human rights, climate and environment.
“Collaboration drives innovation in the value chain. Only with innovation from our suppliers are we able to change the products we use.”
Albe Wendt, VP, R&I Advanced Technology, Danone: “We’ve been very successful at decreasing our plastic consumption and working closely with our colleagues in procurement and farmers to decrease our methane emissions.
“We also have a very strong partnership with the French Institute of Agronomy to study probiotics and the effect on health. Today, science and technology are moving at such a speed, and doing everything ourselves would be extremely difficult, so working with partners is the better option.
Summary
The 100+ Accelerator Demo Day emphasised that partnerships are essential for tackling complex environmental challenges like circular economy, water stewardship, sustainable agriculture and climate action. The takeaway: sustainable transformation is possible when innovation and collaboration work hand in hand.
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