Executive Summary
What if sustainability were not a cost of doing business but its central engine? That is exactly the transformation Juan Gabriel Aguiriano Nalda, Group Head of Sustainability at Kerry Group, has helped to architect over the past seven years. In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Juan traces Kerry’s evolution from its roots as an Irish dairy cooperative to what the company now calls an impact company, with an audacious mission to reach over two billion people with sustainable nutrition solutions by 2030.
Core insights:
- Kerry’s Beyond the Horizon strategy was born from a frank assessment of the food system’s failings: two billion people overweight, one billion going to bed hungry, one third of food produced wasted, the system responsible for one third of global emissions
- Purpose built through genuine dialogue with tens of thousands of employees worldwide produced a simple but powerful statement: “inspiring food, nourishing life”
- Sustainability became an explicit business choice, not just implicit good practice, reshaping portfolio decisions, investment criteria, and innovation priorities
- Five impact themes drive the agenda: nutrition and health, climate, circular economy, responsible sourcing, and social impact
- The Evolve programme, developed with 3,000 Irish dairy farmers and Bord Bia, produced the world’s first Stage 5 verified dairy supply chain under the SAI Platform’s Sustainable Dairy Partnership framework
- Acquiring a food preservation and protection company demonstrated how sustainability investments can generate direct commercial payback through shelf-life extension and food waste reduction
- Kerry’s approach to consumers is mediated entirely through its customers, making science-based communication, regulatory fluency, and co-creation with brands central to its value proposition
- Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute (KHNI) functions as a public scientific think tank, building sector-wide credibility for the science of sustainable nutrition
- At the midpoint of the Beyond the Horizon journey, Kerry has moved into the top 5% of companies in the global food system as rated by CDP and EcoVadis, yet Juan insists the most significant work lies ahead
From Dairy Cooperative to Impact Company
Kerry’s origin story matters. Founded in County Kerry in the west of Ireland in the early 1970s as a dairy cooperative, the company evolved over five decades into a global leader in taste and nutrition ingredients and solutions.
When a new CEO, Edmond Scanlon, came on board in 2018, the company undertook a frank assessment of its position and that of the wider food system. The picture was not comfortable. Around two billion people carried excess weight or faced obesity-related health issues. Close to one billion went to bed undernourished or famished. The food industry was wasting 30% of what it produced. The food system as a whole was responsible for roughly one third of global greenhouse gas emissions, two thirds of freshwater consumption, and significant biodiversity loss.
The response was not defensive. It was transformational.
“We don’t really want to be part of that problem. We want to be part of the solution,” Juan explains. The insight was that Kerry was already doing much of the right work implicitly. The decision was to make it explicit—to turn it into a strategy, a choice, a commitment. That distinction matters. Implicit good practice is invisible and unmeasurable. An explicit strategic choice has targets, governance, investment, and accountability.
Building Purpose from the Ground Up
Before committing to any external ambition, Kerry went inside. The company engaged in an extensive global listening exercise, bringing tens of thousands of employees together in workshops and discussions around a single question: why do we exist?
Out of that process emerged a statement both simple and rich: “inspiring food, nourishing life.”
Juan unpacks the duality. “Inspiring food is all about innovation. Nourishing life is all about sustainability, or impact—positive impact which is better for people, better for planet, and better for society.”
What is notable here is the sequence. Purpose was not handed down from a boardroom. It was co-created through genuine dialogue with the people doing the work. That process—consulting, listening, synthesising, and then committing—mirrors the kind of change management that actually sticks. Purpose built through participation creates ownership. Ownership drives behaviour. Behaviour drives results.
From purpose came mission: to contribute to a world of sustainable nutrition. From mission came the question of scale: by when, and how many people? The answer, ambitious but measurable, was two billion people by 2030—double the one billion the company was already reaching through its customer base.
Measuring What Matters: The Sustainable Nutrition Framework
A mission without measurement is a wish. Kerry understood this and invested in developing a rigorous methodology for tracking whether its ingredients were genuinely contributing to sustainable nutrition. The methodology was independently certified and published in a white paper.
The framework assessed Kerry’s portfolio—encompassing thousands of ingredients across taste, nutrition, and functional categories—against a robust nutritional classification system. The goal: to have more than 80% of the portfolio contributing to positive and balanced nutrition, adapted for the reality that ingredients work within formulated products, not in isolation.
Juan is clear about why these technical details matter. “Everything we’re trying to do with sustainability is rooted in the science of taste, the science of nutrition, the science of the environment, and the science of economics, because if it’s not affordable it won’t work.”
This insistence on scientific grounding distinguishes Kerry’s approach from sustainability as communication strategy. The framework creates a basis for genuine accountability and enables informed conversation with customers, investors, and regulators.
The Boardroom Conversation: When Sustainability Shapes Portfolio Decisions
The conversation becomes genuinely interesting at boardroom level. Sustainability was not confined to a reporting function or a CSR budget. It informed real capital allocation decisions: what to invest in, what to divest, what to build, and what to acquire.
Juan describes five impact themes presented to the board as the pillars of the Beyond the Horizon strategy:
Nutrition and health. Better products that have a lower sugar, salt, and fat profile whilst maintaining taste, structure, and function. Kerry’s expertise in taste science and nutritional science creates competitive advantage in formulation—improving products without degrading consumer experience.
Climate. With 70 to 80% of Kerry’s carbon footprint embedded in the commodities it purchases, the focus falls on the value chain. Science-based targets, a formal climate transition plan, and abatement curve analysis are the tools. This is supply chain decarbonisation at scale.
Circular economy. Committed to reducing 50% of food waste in its own operations and addressing packaging across its customer base. The logic is systemic: reducing food waste is not just an environmental good—it eliminates waste of all the resources, land, water, energy, and human effort embodied in food that never reaches consumption.
Responsible sourcing. No deforestation commitments, regenerative agriculture interventions, and systematic work on high-risk commodities. The challenge is enormous in a business purchasing tens of thousands of raw materials across complex global supply chains, but Pareto applies: a more limited set of commodities represents the majority of environmental and social risk.
Social impact. Human rights due diligence across the supply chain, ensuring that everywhere Kerry buys, people have decent work with fair pay and fundamental rights are respected. Juan is candid: easy to state, genuinely difficult to execute at the scale and geographic breadth of a global ingredients business.
The board supported the strategy—but not from altruism alone. The business case was clear. “The biggest risk,” Juan observes, “is imagine being a not sustainable company.” Insurance markets are already pricing climate risk into premiums at scale. Regulatory pressure through mechanisms such as the EU’s CSRD is increasing disclosure requirements and creating legal liability for non-compliance. Consumer and customer expectations are shifting. The risk of non-sustainability, properly assessed, dwarfs the investment required to address it.
The Evolve Programme: A Masterclass in Value Chain Collaboration
One of the most tangible illustrations of Kerry’s approach is the Evolve programme, developed in partnership with Kerry Dairy Ireland (KDI), the company’s dairy processing business unit in the west of Ireland.
Dairy sits at the heart of Kerry’s heritage and remains significant in its formulation work. It also represents significant environmental exposure: dairy production contributes substantially to emissions, water use, and land use. Addressing that exposure required working upstream, at farm level, with the people who actually produce the milk.
Kerry and KDI worked with the Irish government and approximately 3,000 dairy farmers to design Evolve—a programme grounded in better agricultural practice. The objectives spanned carbon footprint reduction, water management, soil nutrients, biodiversity, animal welfare, and farm economics. Critically, the programme aligned farmer financial interests with environmental improvement, ensuring that sustainability was not imposed as an external burden but embraced as a genuine farm management upgrade.
Impact is measured independently through the Sustainable Dairy Assurance Scheme (SDAS), managed by Bord Bia, Ireland’s food promotion and quality assurance body. The underpinning science comes from Teagasc, the Irish government’s agricultural research agency. The result is a verified, science-backed, independently audited system—not greenwash.
The outcomes speak for themselves. Kerry Dairy Ireland became the first dairy company in the world to achieve Stage 5 verification under the Sustainable Dairy Partnership (SDP) framework, developed by SAI Platform (Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform), the body whose membership encompasses the world’s largest dairy producers. Stage 5 is the highest level of verification in the SDP framework. As of the recording of this episode, KDI remains the only dairy processor to have achieved it.
Farmers in Kerry County can now discuss their individual farm’s carbon intensity—expressed as kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of fat and protein-corrected milk—with the precision and confidence of professionals managing a measurable performance metric. Kerry Dairy Ireland is now able to sell its milk not just on quality and traceability but on verified carbon content, creating a market signal that rewards sustainable production.
The business outcome was commercially sound enough that at the end of 2024, KDI was divested back to the farming community. The farmers bought back their processing business—and continue to invest in and advance the Evolve programme independently.
It is a compelling model: Kerry co-created a capability with its supply base, proved it worked, built the verified infrastructure around it, and then enabled it to stand independently. Not a slide deck. A lasting system.
Investing for Impact: Food Preservation and Shelf-Life Extension
The portfolio decisions did not stop at divestiture. Kerry also invested, acquiring a food preservation and protection ingredients company focused on natural fermentation and biotechnology solutions.
The rationale is elegantly simple. Extending the shelf life of food products is the single most cost-effective mechanism for reducing food waste. When a product is thrown away, every resource that went into producing it—land, water, energy, commodities, human labour—is wasted. A one or two cent investment in natural preservation ingredients can prevent the loss of product worth many multiples of that cost, both in financial and environmental terms.
This is sustainability as innovation-led commercial strategy. The acquisition opened new formulation possibilities, created differentiated customer value, and addressed a core sustainability challenge simultaneously. Revenue growth, market share, and shareholder value follow from the investment, not at the expense of it.
Solving the "And Equation": Taste, Nutrition, Environment, and Affordability
At the consumer interface—mediated through Kerry’s food and beverage brand customers—the challenge is what Juan calls the “and equation”: how do you make food that is healthy and tasty and sustainable and affordable, all at once?
Kerry’s customer-facing work is organised around three levers:
Reformulation. Replacing artificial or chemical ingredients with natural, nature-based alternatives. Reducing sugar, salt, and fat to levels that support health without sacrificing the sensory experience consumers expect. This is optimisation under constraints—finding formulations that satisfy all dimensions simultaneously rather than trading one off against another.
Innovation. Where reformulation cannot achieve the target, innovation opens new territory. Biotechnology, enzymes, and fermentation create ingredients that are inherently healthier and have a lower environmental footprint. Juan’s framing is memorable: “Think of how science would help your grandmother to cook better—super tasty, but at scale for billions of people.”
Proactive health. For consumers who cannot or do not maintain ideally balanced diets—which is most of the world’s population, given that more than half of all meals are now consumed outside the home—targeted nutritional support through fortified foods and functional ingredients becomes relevant. Protein, fibre, probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics, botanical extracts, vitamins, omega-3s: ingredients with validated health claims that can be incorporated into everyday food formats, not just supplements.
This third lever represents the convergence of the food and supplement industries—visible in any modern supermarket, where yoghurt aisles increasingly carry turbocharged products with protein, fibre, and probiotic claims. Communicating these benefits credibly, in compliance with regulatory frameworks and grounded in solid science, is where Kerry’s investment in the Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute pays dividends.
The Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute: Building Sector-Wide Credibility
KHNI functions as a public scientific think tank. Its purpose is not to market Kerry products but to advance the evidence base around sustainable nutrition and make that evidence accessible.
Scientists are convened for webinars and white papers are published. Research is shared openly. “Everybody can go there, listen to it, learn from it and make their own opinion based on good science,” Juan explains.
In a world saturated with health claims, many of them poorly founded, this commitment to scientific rigour is itself a competitive differentiator. Customers who use Kerry’s science to substantiate their on-pack claims are building consumer trust on solid foundations. The Kerry brand becomes associated with credibility rather than promotion.
It also reflects a deeper conviction running through the entire conversation: that the only reliable path to progress in food system sustainability is scientific. Not opinion, not activism, not greenwash—but evidence, measurement, and the willingness to be held accountable to what the data shows.
Midpoint Report: Progress and What Comes Next
At the midpoint of the Beyond the Horizon journey, Kerry has made measurable progress. The company has moved into the top 5% of food system companies as rated by CDP and EcoVadis, two of the most rigorous independent sustainability rating bodies.
Juan is encouragingly direct about what this means. “This is just the beginning.” The physical risks facing the global food system—climate volatility, biodiversity loss, water stress—have accelerated rather than eased. Political noise has not reduced the underlying trajectory of environmental change.
The next phase focuses on nature and biodiversity commitments, accelerating progress on water, and—crucially—scaling commercially. Kerry’s ambition is to become the leading influencer of sustainable nutrition in the food system, using its scale, science base, and customer relationships to pull the industry faster in the right direction.
What gives Juan cause for genuine optimism is cultural. “It used to be a very small team,” he reflects. “Now everybody in the company is doing it.” Internal councils present circular economy innovations without him in the room. Colleagues see waste streams as products in the making. The mindset has shifted from compliance to opportunity—and that shift, once embedded, is self-sustaining.
Juan characterises his outlook as “realistic optimism.” The challenges are massive. The progress is real. The urgency is genuine. And the opportunity—to build a great business precisely by addressing the world’s most pressing nutrition and environmental challenges—has never been more commercially compelling.
Why This Matters Now
The conventional wisdom has long treated sustainability as a cost centre: necessary for reputational management, compliance, and stakeholder relations, but fundamentally in tension with commercial performance. Kerry’s story, told candidly and in detail by one of its architects, demolishes that framing.
The risk of non-sustainability—regulatory, reputational, financial, operational—is larger than the cost of addressing it. The market opportunity in sustainable nutrition is growing. The customers who need science-based, verified, formulation-ready sustainability solutions are willing to pay for them. The farmers who produce more sustainably can benefit from market signals that reward sustainable production.
For leaders in the agriculture, food, and chemicals sectors navigating similar terrain, the Kerry case offers a practical framework: build purpose through genuine dialogue, set ambitious but measurable targets, ground everything in science, make sustainability the lens for real investment and divestiture decisions, collaborate deeply with your value chain, and communicate credibly with customers and consumers alike.
Above all, treat sustainability not as a constraint on the business but as a source of innovation, differentiation, and growth.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1wV15h5lTOw
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About the Guest
Juan Aguiriano is Group Head of Sustainability at Kerry Group, one of the world’s leading taste and nutrition companies. With over 30 years of experience leading sustainability, risk management, and business transformation at C-suite level across food, chemicals, and fibre companies, Juan was the lead architect of Kerry’s Beyond the Horizon sustainability strategy. He holds degrees from the University of Geneva and the University of Texas at Austin, and has completed executive programmes at IMD and IESE.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/juanaguiriano/
Connect with Kerry: kerry.com | Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute: khni.kerry.com
Mark Blackwell is the founder of Arkaro, a B2B consultancy specialising in change management, innovation, and commercial excellence for the agriculture, food, and chemicals industries. Arkaro’s collaborative “do it with you” approach works closely with clients through four steps—Understand, Co-create, Enable, Sustain—to leave behind sustainable, value-generating solutions, not just a slide deck.
Website: arkaro.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell
Related Reading from Arkaro
On Sustainability as Business Strategy
- Why Your Five-Year Plan Is Obsolete: The Case for Emergent Strategy in a Complex World | Pete Compo — When sustainability commits you to a ten-year mission, traditional annual planning cycles are inadequate. Pete Compo’s emergent strategy framework explains how to build adaptive capability into long-horizon commitments.
- The Mother Rule: Why Your Strategy Should Be Simple Enough for Mum | James Michael Lafferty — Kerry’s purpose statement, “inspiring food, nourishing life,” passes the Mother Rule test. Jim Lafferty explains why simplicity is not a dumbing down but a discipline.
- When Plans and Goals Aren’t Enough: The Strategy Implementation Crisis — Kerry’s Beyond the Horizon strategy works because it flows from purpose to implementation across the organisation. This article explains why most strategy implementations fail that connection.
On Innovation in Food, Chemicals, and Agriculture
- Why Smart Companies Miss Disruption: The 3 Ghosts Blocking Innovation | Scott Anthony — Established food companies face the same organisational ghosts that stopped Bethlehem Steel responding to the Nucor mini mill. Understanding them is the first step to overcoming them.
- Why Constraints Make You More Creative, Not Less | Dr Catrinel Tromp — Kerry’s “and equation”—healthy and tasty and sustainable and affordable—is creativity under constraint. Dr Tromp’s research explains why this is the best environment for genuine innovation.
- Jobs to Be Done: The Missing Link in B2B Innovation — Kerry’s three consumer levers—reformulation, innovation, proactive health—all depend on understanding what jobs consumers are actually hiring food products to do. Scott Burleson’s framework provides the methodology.
- Why Teams Pick the Wrong Ideas—and What Leaders Can Do About It | Dr Roni Reiter-Palmon — When innovation is an optimisation under constraints, how teams define the problem determines which ideas they generate. This article explains why problem construction is the critical step most innovation processes skip.
On Change Management and Transformation
- People-Centric Change: The End of Linear Thinking | Professor Julie Hodges — Kerry’s sustainability transformation succeeded because it was built around people—from the global purpose workshops to the 3,000 Irish farmers in the Evolve programme. Professor Hodges explains why linear change models fail and people-centric approaches work.
- From Dance Floor to Boardroom: Human-Centric Supply Chain Leadership | Karen-Marie Katholm — Kerry’s Evolve programme is a case study in human-centric supply chain transformation. Karen-Marie Katholm’s experience leading 14,000 people through transformation at Akzo Nobel provides the broader framework.
- The Neuroscience of Collaboration: Why Your Brain Still Thinks It’s on the Savannah | Hilary Scarlett — Embedding sustainability as an organisational mindset—not just a departmental function—requires understanding how collaboration and psychological safety interact. Hilary Scarlett’s SPACES model explains the science.
On Value Chain and Commercial Excellence
- Beyond Sales Intelligence: How Win-Loss Analysis Drives Cross-Functional Excellence — Kerry’s value proposition in sustainable nutrition is built on co-creation with customers. Win-loss analysis reveals what customers actually value in those partnerships versus what suppliers assume they value.
- Make Strategy Work: The Power of Integrated Business Planning — Long-horizon sustainability commitments like Kerry’s 2030 mission require planning cycles that align across functions. IBP provides the operating rhythm to make it happen.
External Resources
Kerry Group: kerry.com — annual reports, sustainability statements, and portfolio information
Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute: khni.kerry.com — scientific resources, white papers, and webinars on sustainable nutrition
Kerry Food Waste Estimator: search “Kerry food waste estimator” — interactive tool for consumers and professionals to calculate food waste impact
SAI Platform / Sustainable Dairy Partnership: saiplatform.org — the framework behind Kerry Dairy Ireland’s Stage 5 verification
Bord Bia: bordbia.ie — Ireland’s food promotion and quality assurance body, which manages the Sustainable Dairy Assurance Scheme (SDAS)
CDP: cdp.net — global environmental disclosure platform
EcoVadis: ecovadis.com — sustainability ratings for global supply chains
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