Business as Unusual: Forging a New Model While Protecting the Earth

Enviro-Stewards Helps Companies Operate at Top Efficiency

Southbrook Winery owner Bill Redelmeier cuts the ribbon on a half-acre of vineyard that would have been covered by solar panels without an integrated resource assessment by Enviro-Stewards.

Enviro-Stewards is built on being different. The Canadian engineering company, and Best For The World Certified B Corporation, has a mission to cultivate resilient business and to improve lives. It acts on those values through its integrated energy, water and product efficiency projects for clients and its safe water projects in war-torn countries.

But it took awhile to find a business model that sustains the Earth and Enviro-Stewards’ bottom line. Bruce Taylor founded Enviro-Stewards in 2000 using a business model similar to that at the conventional engineering firms where he had worked at over the past decade. Although Enviro-Stewards created more value for customers than its peers, it also secured less revenue and internalized additional overhead. Not a recipe for a thriving business — but a common challenge among B Corps as they create businesses with a focus on people, planet and profit.

Engineers like to build large shiny stuff (such as wastewater treatment systems), and they are typically paid about 10 percent of the cost of that large shiny stuff to design it. By preventing financial losses in the first place (by reducing long-term energy and ingredient costs), Enviro-Stewards increased client revenue but also reduced its fee for future design work.

For example:

• In 2004, Enviro-Stewards helped Canadian restaurant chain Tim Hortons save $490,000 per year of ingredients and utilities, but in doing so eliminated the need for a treatment system.
• In 2008, Enviro-Stewards built a high rate anaerobic wastewater treatment system for Jackson-Triggs’ winery in British Columbia. However, by first reducing the volume of wastewater requiring treatment by half and wine losses by two-thirds, Enviro-Stewards built a system at half the original capital cost (and hence the 10 percent fee to design the system was also half as large).

Enviro-Stewards designed and commissioned a wastewater treatment system for the Jackson-Triggs winery in British Columbia. The capital cost and subsequent design fee were half the conventional amount.

And while these purpose-driven projects helped Enviro-Stewards protect planet and people, it needed a new business model so it could make a profit while providing this higher-value service.

In 2012, Enviro-Stewards developed a shared-savings service to be compensated if and when the facility saved money on its energy costs. This model worked well for privately owned clients such as Global Vintners, Dextran and Southbrook, whose facilities each won national awards.

Enviro-Stewards is part of the community of businesses that have used a third-party verification of their impact. Use the free B Impact Assessment to evaluate your company’s impact on all stakeholders, including the environment, your workers, your community and your customers.

But that setup didn’t work for larger and publicly traded companies because the amount owed to Enviro-Stewards could not be determined as projects began. For example, in 2016 Enviro-Stewards helped Campbell Company of Canada save $706,000 per year of food waste. However, a corporate decision was made to close the Toronto facility, which made it difficult to receive payment based on savings realized.

Based on this and other experiences, in 2017 Enviro-Stewards developed a new business model based on guaranteed savings for clients. Through this model Enviro-Stewards:

• Charges more up front based on the greater savings Enviro-Stewards creates compared to low-cost audits,
• Provides 100 percent money-back guarantee that the quantity of annual savings identified (that the client’s team considers to be practical and economically viable) will exceed the one-time upfront fee, and
• Proceeds directly from assessment through to implementation and verification.

Using this model, Enviro-Stewards performed a utility and waste prevention assessment for client Maple Lodge Farms that identified 10 times more savings than its guaranteed minimum amount. The assessments were completed in December 2017, and the following month Enviro-Stewards and Maple Lodge’s combined project team started the first half of the recommendations with the second half to be implemented in 2019 and 2020. Based on the innovative project approach and rapid results achieved, this project won a national award as a contributor to “clean capitalism” — and Enviro-Stewards found a sustainable business model.

Trimming Waste in Several Ways

Reflecting its resiliency-driven mission and B Corp status since 2011, Enviro-Stewards helps businesses determine the resources needed for optimal production. By reducing water and energy needs or food waste, the B Corp also lessens its clients’ environmental impact while trimming costs for production or operation.

Southbrook Vineyards is a LEED gold certified organic biodynamic winery. A conventional firm found that launching practices to save 5 percent of electricity would have a 20-year payback period. Therefore, the winery chose to install solar panels instead, which would have a seven-year payback.

An integrated assessment by Enviro-Stewards found that the winery could reduce its energy use by 37 percent with a payback of four months. The B Corp helped Southbrook implement the measures, which are presently saving 40 percent of electricity and 40 percent of natural gas consumption (with a payback of two months). By reducing the amount of needed power, the winery could use some of the land it had devoted to solar panels instead for vineyards — and could produce $20,000 more wine. As featured in Grower Magazine, a key takeaway is not to use solar panels to “waste your energy more efficiently.”

One third of all the food grown on Earth is wasted. If food loss were a country, it would rank third for greenhouse gas emissions (behind the U.S. and China). Most engineers and vendors are focused on managing food waste so that it does not end up in the landfill. If they succeed, one third of all food will still be wasted and it would still be equivalent to the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter. Enviro-Stewards works to find root causes of this waste and prevent a portion of this loss.

Beau’s Brewing Co. is Canada’s largest organic craft brewer, and an employee-owned B Corp. Due to growing demand for the brewery’s beers, its wastewater treatment facilities were overloaded. A local university and a conventional engineering firm were busy redesigning the existing treatment works.

A food loss prevention assessment by Enviro-Stewards found opportunities to avoid the loss of 445,000 liters per year of beer (valued at $733,000), with a payback of nine months. This 7 percent increase in product yield could satisfy Beau’s anticipated growth for 2019 without having to purchase any additional grain, hops, labour, water or energy. It also would reduce the volume and strength of wastewater requiring treatment.

“We are very privileged to have been part of this program,” says Steve Beauchesne, CEO and co-founder of Beau’s Brewing. “Preventing food loss furthers our goal of being a force for good while also improving our financial performance, which will allow us to continue to grow and thrive.

“We put so much effort into brewing world-class beer that to think of how much of it was going down the drain makes me shudder. Thanks to Bruce and his team, more of that delicious beer will go into people’s mouths, which is really what it’s all about.”

So What’s With the Safe Water?

Enviro-Stewards reinvests a portion of its profit in the safe water project that it founded to train, equip and mentor social ventures in developing countries. Many of the B Corp’s clients choose to partner with Enviro-Stewards by reinvesting a portion of their resource cost savings to offset their water consumption. The safe water project also helps Enviro-Stewards build trust with clients — a crucial step in many operational projects.

Maple Leaf Foods (MLF), the largest protein company in Canada, made a bold commitment to cut its energy, water and waste in half by 2025. To assist in these efforts, MLF retained Enviro-Stewards to identify opportunities at 33 production facilities across Canada.

St. Paul’s Nursery in Yei, South Sudan, received a water purifier sponsored by Maple Leaf Foods of Canada.

If the vice president in charge of the project had selected a multinational consulting firm and things went sideways, it would be viewed as the multinational’s fault. However, if a small specialty firm like Enviro-Stewards was selected and things went poorly, it may be viewed as the vice president’s fault.

So why did Tim Faveri, MLF vice president of sustainability and shared value, place his personal reputation on the line and select to work with Enviro-Stewards? Part of the reason would be from the company’s due diligence assessing expertise and past results. Also, an intangible component could be the trustworthiness demonstrated by the values that the firm demonstrates.

“Our goal is 50 percent in 10 years, and we are making great progress. The value that Enviro-Stewards provided is evident in that performance,” Faveri says.

Similarly, when Helmi Ansari was the director of sustainability and productivity for PepsiCo Foods Canada, any consultant would be excited to gain even a 15-minute meeting. And yet, Ansari chose to invite Enviro-Stewards to participate in PepsiCo Foods’ corporate engineering design summits alongside PepsiCo’s engineers.

Helmi Ansari, fourth from left, and Bruce Taylor, fourth from right, traveled to South Sudan to teach community health sales agent trainers.

Ansari and his wife went on to launch a social venture of their own, GROSCHE International Inc., which has become a Best For The World B Corp. On behalf of GROSCHE he traveled with Enviro-Stewards to South Sudan to teach community health sales agent trainers and support locally owned safe water social ventures.

Ask yourself if you trust your consultant enough to travel to a war-ravaged country with them. The Safe Water Project was recently featured in a TEDx talk demonstrating the case for social venture based development projects.

What’s Next

Enviro-Stewards is staged for impact growth. After demonstrating that development-based social ventures can thrive under challenging circumstances (war-ravaged South Sudan and the Kiambiu slum of Nairobi), the B Corp had an opportunity to provide a day of training at the African Biofilter Implementers Network (ABINET) that hosted projects from 10 countries during February 2018. Based on the level of interest, Enviro-Stewards is developing technical, business and sales training materials for others wanting to increase their impact. The B Corp also is increasing its offerings of water offsets wherein the potable water consumed by North American facilities can be “replaced” by providing an equivalent amount of safe drinking water where it is desperately needed.

After serving on North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s Food Loss expert group, Enviro-Stewards is taking on resource conservation projects in the United States and Mexico. And with the move into seamless assessment, implementation and verification, it has an opportunity to implement measures faster and improve the competitiveness of North American manufacturers.

Social ventures such as B Corps tend to have more innovative business models, enjoy deeper levels of trust and create greater beneficial impact than their peers. Enviro-Stewards demonstrates that it is possible to be top of field technically (with more national clean capital awards than any other firm) as well as organizationally (Best For The World, U.N. Sustainable Development Goal award).

B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.