Tetra Pak CEO: Sustained innovation leads to success

Tetra Pak sustainable packaging solutions

Zacka shared this strategy in response to concerns that America has lost its competitive edge. As America looks for solutions amid the heightened concern for Europe's rising debt crisis, its own sluggish GDP growth and forecasted prolonged high levels of unemployment, Zacka offers up a compelling answer based on the business model in place at Tetra Pak, the world's largest and leading food processing and packaging solutions company.

"Innovation, sustainability and corporate responsibility are mission-driven and at the core of our culture at Tetra Pak. These concepts prompt us to think about our actions differently, especially as they relate to growth and profitability in the immediate future, and long-term. And the solution for us has been to embrace a number of practices that have been institutionalized and understood as Sustainable Profit Growth," explains Zacka.
"This focus alone is quite innovative. I haven't heard of any other company that looks at profit through the same lens or defines profit in the same way. It's much like cholesterol; there is the good type and bad type. The same can be said about profitable growth; there is the type that can be sustained for the long term, and the type that cannot."

The practices Zacka has identified under the aegis of Sustainable Profit Growth have been proven over time at Tetra Pak, which conducts business in 170 countries worldwide and is a pioneer in its industry, a point substantiated when it won the Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovator Award In 2011. In awarding this honor, Thomson Reuters noted, "This designation proves that companies that invest in innovation, and protect and enforce their intellectual assets, are significantly more likely to contribute to economic growth, both within their organizations and the nations in which they reside."

Zacka and Tetra Pak's corporate focus on Sustainable Profit Growth has yielded the company's successes. The concept involves five points, which can be seen as a blueprint for American business to follow.

These five points call for the following:
•A high tech product or high tech processes
•A culture of innovation
•A globally centric culture as opposed to a country centric one
•A cost competitive platform with an informed global sourcing strategy
•A bottoms-up and a top-down concern for the environment and sustainability.

In his February 6 blog on Huffington Post, Zacka gave compelling examples of these concepts to illustrate how they work, and said that sustainable profit growth companies like Tetra Pak believe in responsible industry leadership and a sustainable approach to business. For a more thorough discussion of this strategy, visit the blog here.

In order to compete and succeed in today's complex and globally interconnected economy, American companies need to practice Sustainable Profit Growth. Taken together, its five components create a 'whole' that is far more effective than each of its 'parts.'

Source: Tetra Pak
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