Resources

• P&G Water Positive Future Strategy
• Cascade Platinum Plus
• Dawn Powerwash
• 50L Home Coalition
• Bonneville Environmental Foundation / Change the Course
• Sustainable Brands Conference
• Trellis (formerly GreenBiz)
• Cradle to Cradle book

Host and Guest

Host: Mike Toffel, Professor, Harvard Business School (LinkedIn)

Guest: Ashley Fill, Global Director of Sustainability, P&G Home Care (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:

Ashley, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Ashley Fill:

Thank you, Mike. I'm so excited to be here.

Mike Toffel:

Well, we are here to talk about P&G Home Care, the organization that you work for as the Global Director of Sustainability. Tell us a little bit about how you got into that role, a little bit about your background.

Ashley Fill:

Yeah, of course. So, I have definitely a nonlinear path into this role. I always start with that because I start in a very different place than where I am now. So, I studied engineering back in my undergraduate and at the time I really became interested in this group called Engineers Without Borders. And if you haven't heard of them, they're a group that designs and implements sustainable engineering for global development purposes. And that was really my first exposure to this concept of sustainability of global development to that extent. And so, while that was my undergrad, I started my career at Proctor & Gamble in a sales function, which is very different than what I studied, but is what I felt drawn to at the time. And throughout that role, I also wanted to continue to bring that pursuit of designing for a better world.

And so, while initially my full-time role was business, I started taking on the sustainability responsibilities of our sustainability network. And that was in Canada. And that is really a group that was focused on upskilling employees, doing employee engagement events like Earth Day, and learning how to drive partnerships so that sustainability could be not just a force for good, but also be a force for growth and integrated into our business. And as I was doing that, it started to gain a lot of traction. Both the macro environment was talking more about sustainability. Our business partners were talking more about it. And as it became a big part of my role, I felt like I needed to upskill myself. So, I went back to school part-time, and I did my master's in sustainability leadership at Cambridge, which was a tremendous program that helped broaden my expertise and I got to take all of that knowledge back into P&G. So, with that, I moved into a North America sustainability role and just last year I moved into the global sustainability role, which has been a fantastic way to see all of the varying behaviors, different technical challenges we face based on consumer behaviors around the world. So that's my non-linear path that got me here.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. That doesn't sound more non-linear than most other folks I've talked to. You start with a function, decide they get a little bit interested in sustainability or climate, and then take the steps to learn more. In fact, yours, the fact that it happened all within P&G is more linear than most. A lot of people hop between companies as their interests evolve. So, tell us a little bit about P&G Home Care. So, people of course know Procter & Gamble is a global company akin to Unilever and other huge brands of consumer-packaged goods and other products. What is the home care suffix in P&G home care? What does that mean in terms of product range and geography?

Ashley Fill:

Yeah, absolutely. So yes, like you said, P&G, global CPG, consumer packaged goods company, very similar to Nestle, Unilever, L'Oreal, et cetera. But home care is specifically everything that you might use in your home to take care of your surfaces, your dishes, and the air. So that means brands like Cascade, Dawn, Febreze, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, if you're based in the East. So it's really all about the brands you use to do your household chores. And hopefully Mike, some that you are familiar with or have in your home right now.

Mike Toffel:

I'm sure we do. So how you mentioned in your setup about how you got to where you are, that sustainability was playing an increasing role in the conversation at P&G. And I'm going to focus on the climate change portion of that, because sustainability, of course, means a lot more than that. But how did climate change enter the conversation? Where does it fit within the organization? Is it viewed as integral to the product design, to the use phase? I know that there's some life cycle assessments that your organization's been engaging in. So, tell us a little bit about how these fits into the conversation.

Ashley Fill:

So, it's a bit of a twist into the conversation. Yes, so at Procter & Gamble and specifically P&G Home Care, we take the approach that sustainability is an integrated part of our business. So, you'll often hear us talk about superiority and sustainability. They go hand in hand. Our belief is that when you design something, it can't just be sustainable or can't just be better at performance. It must go hand in hand.

For example, especially as we start to talk about washing our dishes, nobody wants to use soap that makes them have to spend an hour or longer washing their dishes, even if it's the most eco-friendly, environmentally friendly item they've ever used. There are trade-offs that consumers just aren't willing to make. And on the flip side, when we can design products that help us get dishes clean faster, we reduce the amount of water and energy that consumers must use to get those dishes clean. So, performance and sustainability go hand in hand.

So, for me, my role is about driving that integrated approach to sustainability. It sits in within our business units and it is a task that we're all focused on delivering against. We do have a broader sustainability strategy at P&G focused on climate, water, waste, nature, with targets within each of those. But for home care, 87 % of our impact based on our internal LCAs comes from the use portion.

So, if you're not familiar with the life cycle assessment, we're talking cradle to grave impact. So, what is the emissions that are generated from the raw material being sourced to manufactured to transported to use by consumers and then discarded? And when we look at that full life cycle, what really happens is that when you as a consumer are washing your dishes or using water or energy in your household, that's what contributes to majority of our emissions. And so, we're so focused on driving and doing what we can as a consumer product company to reduce those emissions by enabling innovation, enabling with communications to help consumers reduce that usage.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. And when you talk about the 87 % in the use phase, for example, with dishes or dishwashing, that's primarily, I imagine, from energy use for heating water and water use itself. Are those the key areas that we're talking about?

Ashley Fill:

Exactly correct. Within our home care portfolio, it is all about the water we use while washing dishes.

Mike Toffel:

Now, you mentioned the other domains. I want to dive more into that, but first I just want to understand the context here. You mentioned the other domains of home care beyond dishes are surfaces and air. And so, can you talk about a product example in each of those categories just to give a sense? Then, is the 87 % idea or the majority of impact, is it also the case in the surface and air products?

Ashley Fill:

Great question. So, for air care, our primary brand is Febreze. So that comes in many different forms, whether it be a plug-in to drive scent or a car scent piece. Our vision there is to drive freshness in every space you live in. And then on the surface care side, that's Mr. Clean and Swiffer. So, the idea there is being able to keep your home clean, free of pesky bacteria and dirt, dust, etc. So, our total home care portfolio emissions is 87are in use, predominantly driven by our dish care portfolio. If we were to specifically focus on air care and surface care, that life cycle assessment would look very different and we would have larger emissions generated in other spaces of our life cycle. But when we step back and look at our total home care portfolio, we're able to identify dish care, water usage, being the key area to focus on.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. Okay, terrific. That makes a lot of sense. It was my intuition, but it's good you validated it. So, let's dive more into the dish cleaning domain. Again, water and energy are confirmed the key areas. And I can imagine that there are some innovations that both improve water use and reduce energy use. For example, products that allow you to wash in cold water for shorter cycles, or even warm water for shorter cycles, because in either case you're using less water, and if you have to heat less water or heat water less or not at all, those are both kind of win-wins on the energy and water front.

So, for example, I know there's a classic question about is it more efficient to wash dishes in the sink versus in a dishwasher? And I think if we asked our listeners in a poll, you might get 50-50 answers to that question because you can imagine there's trade-offs there. But I think your take, if I read your LCAs correctly and your website, is that it's more energy efficient and even more water efficient to do dishes in your dishwasher rather than in your sink. First, is that right?

Ashley Fill:

That is correct. And I'm glad that, some of the content and educational campaigns we have out there, Mike, have made it its way to you because you're preaching to the choir here. So, one thing I like to do before we dive in is, Mike, I want to know a little bit more about your dishwashing habits. So, tell me, imagine you've just cleared the table. You had a lovely Sunday night dinner. What do you do next? What do you do to wash your dishes?

Mike Toffel:

We load them in our highly energy and water efficient Bosch dishwasher.

Ashley Fill:

Excellent. And how do you get the food off?

Mike Toffel:

We scrape into our compost or trash and then throw them right in the dishwasher. We've never been a rinsing household. I know there's a lot of people who swear by the rinsing process.

Ashley Fill:

I give you an A plus for your dishwashing habits. Excellent. That, what you just described, is the least energy intensive way to get your dishes clean.

So let me walk you through the two paths. We have consumers that are dishwasher users, and we have consumers that are hand dishwasher users. So that's our two categories, Dawn serving the hand dishwasher, Cascade serving the auto dishwasher. If we take a step back, we know that most consumers in North America have access to a dishwasher, but many of them continue to wash their dishes by hand. And so, our first step on our journey of really understanding how we drive less water and energy usage at home was by understanding what was driving the consumer to choose Dawn or Cascade. And so, part of it being yes, some consumers don't have access to dishwashers, and we'll get to that later because we've got solutions within Dawn to help with that. But a lot of consumers looked at their dishwasher and said, “I don’t understand what goes on in there. I think it's just a black box. Consumers thought the dishwasher would just fill up all the way and then fill the way down.

Unlike a laundry machine, you don't see it. You have no idea what's going on there. You know, it's not throwing your dishes around because they don't come out broken. But beyond that, you don't know a lot. So, one of our first things that we did was help consumers understand that dishwashers save water. Don't waste water. Your average tap flow rate is about four gallons every two minutes. But your dishwasher uses four gallons per cycle. So, on average you save a ton of water when you flip to your dishwasher. So, we started our campaign that focuses very much focused on consumer behavior to talk about dishwashers save water. And you can see that message on the back of our cascade packaging on any of our e-content, which is if you go on Walmart or an Amazon and you look at the pictures, we really communicate dishwashers save water, and we put it into our commercials. One of my favorite campaigns was the do it every night campaign. And we were talking about running your dishwasher every night because even if you have half load, it's often using less water to put it through the dishwasher than to wash it by hand. And we found that it helps consumers understand the amount of water being used by the dishwasher has been a huge unlock for us to drive more dishwasher usage versus hand dishwasher usage.

But I’ll go on a little bit of a tangent here to say within those hands, within those auto dishwasher users, we also have an opportunity to improve their behaviors too. About 50 % of consumers pre-wash their dishes and that takes up a lot of water as well. Some consumers are cleaning, pre-washing their dishes so well that by the time they go in the dishwasher, they're already clean. So, part of the innovation and the work we've done, both technically and through marketing, is to try to reduce the number of failures that you would get from a dishwasher. So, imagine, Mike, you didn't pre-rinse your dishes. You open up your dishwasher and there's a bunch of baked on food, everything's spotty and didn't dry, that's what we call a failure. It's when a consumer goes into their dishwasher and isn't satisfied with the results and as a result they compensate for their behaviors. They'll either re-wash their dishes or the next time they'll pre-rinse them so that they don't get the same impact. And with our chemistry we can really change how those dishes come out and so we've been working on formulas enzymes, different cleaning surfactants that go into the dishwasher detergent to help get those dishes to come out sparkling clean every time so that you as a consumer can scrape, load, done and completely skip the sink. So that is why your process of cleaning the dishes is so energy efficient because you're not wasting any water hand washing or using your tap and you're getting hopefully dishes that come out sparkling clean every time.

Mike Toffel:

So let me ask a few follow-up questions. It's interesting already to think about how you can look into your clothes washer, but for those who have front loaders, and you can't look into your dishwasher. I've never really thought about that. They seem like the same process. I don't know why we can look into one and not the other. But it does lead to more of a mystery as to what's going on in that dishwasher. You close it up and magically an hour or two and a half hours later, your dishes come out sparklingly clean and you have no idea how much water or how much energy was just used in that process.

So, I could see how consumers would legitimately have no way of knowing the answer to that question that we posed earlier, which one is more energy or water efficient. In clothes washers, which I know is the other portion of P&G, not the home care area, there's been a lot of movement from liquid detergents to powder to avoid shipping water around the world. And the powder will do just as well. And to encourage people to wash in the cold as opposed to hot water because the new powders are now effective in cold water.

In dishwashers, it seems like they're a little bit behind in that trend because there's no, at least for my dishwasher, there's no eco label or eco button where you could say wash in cold water like you can in clothing. Is that a movement that P&G is trying to promote to further reduce the impact of dishwasher? Of course, you'd have to be partnered with home goods producers like Bosch as I mentioned, but many other brands. Is that an area of interest at P&G as well?

Ashley Fill:

That's it. It's a great question. And it sounds like I need to get my fabric care folks over here. They're the makers of Tide to talk a little bit about their strategy next time. So, to talk about dishwashers, we actually do have multiple partnerships with our dishwasher manufacturers, and we are absolutely partnering with them to drive energy and water consumption down. And that's been something that's been going on for years and years. In fact, if you open your dishwasher, you will probably see a cascade sign that says wash with cascade because some of the dishwashers are engineered more effectively to work with our detergents. Now washing in colds when it comes to food is quite challenging the way chemistry works. It can be hard to get those greasy, grimy, especially when they're baked on burnt on goods to come off without hot water.

However, we are taking incredible steps forward with energy efficiencies in dishwasher. And if you have an ENERGY STAR certified dishwasher, as you likely do, since it's from Bosch, you will already see a massive reduction in how much water that dishwasher uses. So, if you were to look at a dishwasher from like say 20 to 30 years ago, and you were to put it in a bunch of dirty dishes without any detergent, those would probably come out a lot cleaner than they would if you did the same thing today. And that's because already our dishwashers are using less water and energy. And because of that, we need to rely more on chemistry to get the dishes clean. So that's the trade-off. When you use less water and energy, you need something else to be the driver of reducing those food soils. So, washing cold in dishwashers is more about actually just using less water and energy overall. It won't be the same trend of washing and cold, but it will be that trend of using less in general. And how little water can we get but still get the same effects of a clean dishwasher.

The other trend is on short cycles, and that is more of a trend we see in the European market where we're really helping consumers understand that even in a short cycle, you can get those dishes clean with fairy, which is our cascade equivalent. And that functionality can use less water and energy than even your auto load, which takes two and a half hours.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, I've never seen a product that is specifically touting the idea that its efficacy is so great that you can run your dishwasher on the short cycle, which at least in my dishwasher, short is certainly relevant, but it's like an hour and a half instead of two and a half hours. It's not like 20 minutes or something. It's still taking quite a long time to do its work. Is that an area where you're seeing any growth to say you can run us with a short cycle and save money?

Ashley Fill:

You know, what's fascinating Mike is that depending on your dishwasher, sometimes the short cycle uses less energy and water. Sometimes it uses more. So, as we get in partnerships with dishwashers, manufacturers, one of the things we're trying to standardize is how much energy and water is used per cycle because you might have a short cycle, you might have an eco-cycle, and you might have your auto cycle. I mean, it's heavy and full load, et cetera. And what we're working on is really understanding what the best load is to reduce energy efficiency the most. And it's not always the short load. It depends on the region and the dishwasher. So, it's an area we continue to explore and investigate into. But what we're more focused on right now is just driving the consumer behavior into the dishwasher in general and skipping that pre-rinse and pre-drying treatment because if we can do that we have a way bigger impact than the actual load of dishwashers because if you look at our hand dishwash impact versus our auto dishwash impact the bigger bet for us is to get people from up here in HDW down into the ADW so yes but also our focus right now is where can we have the biggest impact.

Mike Toffel:

And just to be clear, when we're talking about the benefits of shifting from hand wash to dishwasher, that includes the energy requirements of the dishwasher, which of course sinks don't.

Ashley Fill:

Yes, in our life cycle assessment, this was an internal life cycle assessment. Mind you, we haven't published it yet, but that includes the full life cycle of the dishwasher as well. even its production, it's end of life, making some assumptions obviously on how many times that dishwasher will get used through its lifetime.

Mike Toffel:

Right, great. So, you mentioned a moment ago some differences in the branding and even the messaging between the EU and the US. Can you give us an example, since you have a global role, of some best practices from around the world, maybe some that are working better in some regions than others? Because I imagine there's some messaging that would just work everywhere and other messages that are a little more context specific.

Ashley Fill:

Yeah, for sure. Well, it is fascinating that the way our behaviors change around the world. And maybe like just to take a step back for a second, when we look at the average North American consumer, we use between 80 to 100 gallons per day in gallons of water. And when we look at the average European consumer, they're using about half that 40-ish gallons of water per day. And I think we've talked about it before, probably here before, but water is a local problem, not a global challenge. Water scarcity really changes consumer behaviors. What you and I do day to day would be extremely different than what a consumer in Phoenix or Arizona does. And that's kind of the same way we think about even macro between North America and Europe. There are habits that are already established in parts of the world, not just Europe, but also perhaps in California or Arizona, where they're already doing some of the actions that we've indicated. So, using your dishwasher, skipping the pre-rinse, scrape load done. And then we can take it a step further to say, if you do hand wash something, like say you have something that doesn't fit into your dishwasher, can we think about washing by hand in cool water? And that is something that we're looking at within Europe with our fairy brands. And that's a harder consumer behavior to crack because it doesn't really create that feeling, nobody wants to stick their hands under cold water of course. So, demonstrating that we have the technology is just the first half of the battle. But those are some of the different ways we think about the regions and as I mentioned before, the types of cycles we select also depend on the types of dishwashers that are widely available in those regions. So, we cater our messaging to the dishwashers that are there, the behaviors that already exist, and then folks where we can have the biggest impact based on the behaviors that are already being used.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. So, I'm sure P&G, like other companies, are sometimes accused of the idea of greenwashing, which is to say either exaggerating some attributes while not talking about less favorable ones or in some extreme versions not even really being honest or transparent with consumers. How does P&G safeguard itself and its messaging for authenticity and to not be vulnerable to such charges?

Ashley Fill:

Absolutely. Environmental social governance, ESG, is a massive part of our strategy and it's integrated. And I think there's many things I could talk about here about safeguarding and making sure what we talk about is authentic. I'll start by firstly saying we talked about life cycle assessment. That is one of the biggest tools in our arsenal of when we make sustainable claims externally is to make sure that we have a third-party certified life cycle assessment so that when we are making claims, accurately representing the fact that there is an environmental benefit not just for climate change but also for water for all the other different levers you can get within a life cycle assessment. So that's number one and we make sure that when we make environmental claims, we're getting approvals at the highest levels. So, we don't make broad sweeping claims like this is greener or this is more environmentally friendly. We're very specific when we talk about a product having a benefit for a specific area.

And what I think is interesting is in my time is I've learned a lot about how to drive these changes we need; we want to accomplish. Oftentimes a sustainability claim is not what's going to motivate a consumer to make the change. And I think that's a fascinating area of interest. Like you have your intention to be more sustainable, but then when it comes into action, there's a big gap. So, what we find is that talking more about the performance, the superiority, the outcomes of our products is a much more effective way of driving the actions we hope to deliver, hope to see.

So, for instance, with Cascade, we will talk a lot about our scrape load done. That is our, our tagline, if you haven't seen it before, but it is exactly what you described. You scrape off your food into your compost or your garbage. You load it into the dishwasher, and you're done. Meaning that you can fully delegate this job of dishwashing, I know I can talk about it for hours and hours, but most people don't enjoy doing their dishes. So, by talking about that scrape-load-done, the delegation, cabinet ready dishes, we have some amazing visuals of a burnt on baked on teriyaki pan going in and coming out freshly clean. Those are the ways we drive the behaviors and it's less about just communicating the sustainability aspect of it.

And so everything we communicate is backed by data, backed by science, and goes through a rigorous process of reviewing the claims and getting approvals before we talk about it externally. And our goal is to make sure consumers understand the benefits of switching from one product to another. But the power of reducing their in-home emissions is massive. And I think that's why it's so great that we're on today so that we can talk a little bit more deeply about the drivers behind some of those product performance claims that we make.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah. So, let's talk a little bit more about this water issue because in the geographic or I should say regional variation in water stress. So, with companies that I've talked to that are making a big play into water conservation, for example, in their production processes or bottling operations, they may have global goals, but this issue is much more salient in, for example, manufacturing or bottling locations where water stress is a much bigger deal because in some places there's severe water stress, other places it's just not really a big issue. Very different, as you mentioned, from climate change, which is a global issue. And so, are you targeting messages any differently in areas that are water stressed versus those that are not? Because maybe people are a little more conscious of these issues.

Ashley Fill:

So great question. I'd say if we take the scope of North America, I'll say no. Most of our messaging is nationally focused and that's because of the water energy nexus. No matter what, if we convince more consumers to believe that they can get their dishes clean with less water, then it is a benefit both from a water scarcity perspective, but also in reducing energy, which is something that more directly tied to climate change will benefit all. And so, to put that into perspective, if we look at the US about 31 % more or less, I think according to the EPA of our emission greenhouse gas emissions come from homes and businesses. indirect and direct emissions. And then if we kind of narrow down into what's going on in homes, 20 to 25 % of that energy is being used to heat water.

So, by tackling that chore of water, which is predominantly hot water, we both get to solve for in general using less resources, which is still a great thing, whether your water is scarce or not, as well as tackling that energy problem and getting that energy consumption down. So, we have very national messages. However, when we talk a little bit more about the impact beyond just our consumer use, we do have more targeted focused efforts in partnership with NGOs in water stressed areas.

So, to maybe going there a little bit and talking about that is that P&G more broadly speaking has our water positive future strategy. That's about protecting, conserving and restoring water, especially in water stressed areas. There's 18 that we've identified, but then for Cascade specifically for us, we've partnered with the Bonneville Foundation, changed the course to invest into some of their efforts and restore 2.6 billion gallons of water into rivers and wetlands across the United States and we're continuing to work towards more water stewardship education with them. So, in addition to the work we're doing within our operations, which is to reduce how much water we use in our manufacturing by 35%, which we're on track to do by 2030 and probably ahead of them. So, I know that was, so just to kind of summarize, national campaigns. But when we're talking about conservation or protection efforts, that's when we get more specifically into the water scarce areas.

Mike Toffel:

So, water positive. The idea there is how can we restore and enable more freshwater resources than are consumed by our customers or by your operations? Like what's the positive relative to what?

Ashley Fill:

So, we’re one of the first companies to go beyond just the scope of our operations and talk about water conservation, especially in water-restricted areas on a whole. Now what we're really focused on is there's 18 priority basins that have been established and this is a broader PNG strategy, not just a home care one. So, it's incredible work and to learn more, there's so much more information on our website, but that is correct. It's all about how we look at the water that is being consumed by our operations more broadly by consumers and think about how we might protect, conserve, restore in those areas.

Mike Toffel:

So, let's continue this conversation about collaborations that you unpacked a little bit just now talking about working with NGOs. We've also talked about coordination with white goods where they have even a sticker that says use Cascade because they're designing their products to sort of interact with the chemistry of your products. What other types of collaborations are you engaged with?

Ashley Fill:

Yes, one partnership that I find especially interesting is called our 50L Home Coalition. So that's about 13 gallons. And this is a partnership that we have with IKEA, Kohler, Electrolux, which is a dishwasher manufacturer, well as the specifically we have a pilot in LA where we also have some government engagement as well with the US Green Building Council in California. So that's a great partnership. And what it does is its idea is what if we could develop innovations, whether it on the product side or the manufacturer side or some of your home goods that take you from a place where today you're using a hundred gallons of water today per household, per person. And what if we could make it feel like you still had a hundred gallons of water every day? But you’re only using 13 gallons of water a day. And its different strategies to get there, whether it be using your dishwasher with Cascade and the most energy efficient dishwasher you've ever seen. Or with IKEA, what if your waterspouts had a lower tax rate and higher pressure so that they still got what you needed to feel like you had a more luxurious shower or got the pressure you needed to get those dishes clean, but with less water a bunch of different examples where we've looked at what are the interventions of really high water consumption, or how do we connect your shower drain into your toilet so that when you flush, you're not using virgin fresh water. And been exploring how we can drive both the consumer behavior change, but also on a technical focus, how do we drive that reduction in water? So that's a big partnership and we continue to study it through what we call our connected homes is basically a capability of being almost like you're in the home looking at these behaviors. But the connected home helps us measure how much water a consumer is using, how much product they are using, how often they are doing chores, and how long they are doing them. And we take all this data, and it helps inform our next wave of innovation that can enable lower habit, lower use of resources in habits.

Mike Toffel:

What about on the policy making front? I mean, one of the reasons why water is stressed is because public policy is not assigning appropriate prices to the water, so it's overused, or there's leaking pipes that the incentives aren't there to fix them.

Ashley Fill:

We have an amazing government relations team that does manage a lot of our relationships with government and push for better practices in homes. But what I can say is that when it comes to work that I do, there are different ways that we believe we can also still drive some of those behaviors.

For instance, in LA as well, we had a partnership to reduce the number of leaky taps. And we had a campaign that was focused on education and awareness to bring awareness as part of that conserve pillar of our water positive strategy. So, all of these things work together. In my role specifically, we're working through education and awareness, technical innovations and partnerships, whether that be NGO or with other companies. And then we have a full troop of P&G-ers dedicated to understanding how we drive the right policy that encourages our innovation to be accepted more broadly and right sizes the impact and so that we're getting the right value for the resources we use.

Mike Toffel:

Great. So, we've been talking about the past and the present. Let's look forward and look ahead a bit. Looking ahead, what are some of the key challenges and opportunities that you're particularly energized?

Ashley Fill:

Yes, as I think about the dish care portfolio specifically, I think there's two streams. We haven't talked as much about those consumers who will never touch the dishwasher, whether they don't have one or don't believe in them. So, I think there's going to be continued focus on skipping the sink with our dishwashers all together. How do we enable consumers to skip the pre-rinse altogether? Cascade Platinum Plus was a product we launched a couple of years ago. And if you go to any shelf or online anywhere, you'll see this purple and silver Cascade. And I know you're probably thinking, it's just another box of cascade, but it is not. It is an exciting new Cascade. And it's because we put years and years of research into that formula so that we really could enable those dishes to come out clean and without failure.

We created a new enzyme, which is again, I mentioned a cleaning agent within Cascade so that it could remove those greasy, stuck-on soils and especially studying what are consumers cooking with? What are the things that are going to become more prevalent? How are food and trends changing the way the plates get soiled? And I hope that as we our single-use consumption, we now have more thermoses going in there. We have more reusable cutlery getting in there, collapsible plates, you name it. So, watching the trends of how food and plateware is changing so that we can effectively clean them and get into all those nitty-gritty areas. So, I think that will be one thing that continues and something we've already accomplished with our launch of Cascade Platinum Plus.

And then on the other side of the coin, when we think about consumers who are not in the dishwasher today and won't be, I think there's a lot of exciting, interesting innovations happening there to reduce overall time spent at sync. So, on average, a consumer spends about 30 minutes washing their dishes per day hand washing. It's a lot of time. You can save 200 hours a year if you stop doing that. So, one of the questions we ask ourselves is what can we do to get that time to be less?

One of the biggest ways is by reducing the amount of water you need before you apply your chemistry. So, if you're like at the sink, you're thinking about washing your dishes. Usually what happens is you turn on the tap, you get your dish wet, and then you put the soap on, you clean it, the tap is running the whole time, and then you rinse it, and you put it to dry. That's what we call open tap behavior. The tap is open the whole time, the water is flowing, things are, and that flow rate is four gallons every two minutes.

So, our goal is to get consumers to grab their dirty dishes, apply chemistry, Dawn Power Wash specifically is something we launched a few years ago. And the beauty of this product is that it doesn't require water to create suds. Suds are the soapy bubbles you get when washing dishes. So, it's suds on contact. And when you have suds on contact, the chemistry immediately starts working to separate the grease, the oil from the plate and you can kind of just see all of that sludgy stuff slid off and then when you're done you rinse maybe a little wipe if you need it and then it's put to dry

So we can go from two minutes per plate where you have the water on down to maybe having the water on for 20 seconds and so our what we're trying to figure out is what else can we change about the way our products work and how we have consumers interact with our products so that we slice that time in half and make it a more sustainable choice even if you can't or won't use the dishwasher. So, we'll continue to explore those behaviors within the hand dishwashing area and explore how to get less pre-rinsing, adapt to new food soils and plateware on the cascade front.

Mike Toffel:

I never thought about a whole team of people thinking about how you can spend less time at the sink washing your dishes. But it's good to know there's people out there doing that.

Ashley Fill:

Yeah, and people are passionate about it like me. Yeah, fascinated by dishwashing habits.

Mike Toffel:

I love it. So the last question that I would like to ask our guests is for advice. For those who are enthusiastic about the idea of trying to work in the space of say consumer packaged goods or whether it be P&G home care or P&G more broadly or as competitors, how should they learn more about this to explore this area to become better qualified candidates for roles in this space? What are your thoughts on what advice you could give them?

Ashley Fill:

Yeah, it's an incredible space. So, I mean, firstly, when I started, I was not in a sustainability role, but I still found ways to upskill myself. If you work for a CPG company, there are incredible amounts of resources that you can learn from, whether it's internal resources about what your own company is doing to external resources online that talk about the different ways forward for CPG companies especially. You know, I find having the sales background has really helped me throughout my career because it helps me understand the realities that the business is facing and the pressures we have from our retailers, our partners, that help guide our decisions from a sustainability perspective of how we can best integrate.

I'd say if you're specifically in the CPG space, one big unlock for me was really understanding the retailer's sustainability strategies. Because at the end of the day, our biggest partners are the retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Costco, et cetera, of the world. And a lot of them have robust sustainability strategies. Oftentimes that mirrors what the manufacturers are doing with efforts in reducing transportation emissions, reducing packaging, reducing water, nature, et cetera.

So, I'd say if you haven't yet, learn about them. Go online, look at their websites, and really understand what their goals and mission statements are. Because as you start your own career within CPG, enabling the customer is a big part of what we do. And so, grasping how you can create those joint partnerships between yourself, and the retailer will unlock a lot of sustainability, both within the partnership, but also that's how consumers get their products drive the right behavior change when we can integrate sustainability into all aspects of partnership. And then the last one that I was reflecting on is some of the books I've read that have talked about sustainability from a product perspective. And one of my favorites, it's old now, is Cradle to Grave, which is something that has been talked about for ages and ages.

But one of the pieces that I always go back to is this idea that we can have a world, idyllically, obviously, that we can decouple growth of sales and prosperity of companies from the growth of plastic waste or emissions. And so that idea of decoupling is really one that's explored in Cradle to Grave. Putting my academic cap on, there are obvious opportunities to analyze and think about what could be improved about that thinking. But what I really enjoyed about it was just this premise of a world where growth and growth of emissions are not interconnected, how can we think about separating those two and driving a prosperous world and a prosperous business? So, encourage your listeners to check out that one if they haven't read it already and then check out some of their strategies for sustainability that CPG companies have already adopted and what the retailers are doing too.

Mike Toffel:

Terrific. Which conferences do you turn up at? If people wanted to see you live talking about sustainability issues. Before I became an academic, I attended a few academic conferences to see this is a community that was going to be a good fit for me. And there's lots of conferences out there on sustainability matters, both in Europe and the US, and I'm sure in Asia as well, although I haven't attended those as often. Where are the places that you tend to show up either as a speaker or as an audience member?

Ashley Fill:

Yeah, so the two that I tend to tune into will be Sustainable Brands as well as the GreenBiz conferences. They just changed their name.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, I think it's Trellis. Yes, we had them on not too long ago.

Ashley Fill:

Amazing. And Mike, thank you so much for listening tome go on and on about dish care cleaning habits.

Mike Toffel:

Great. Well, Ashley, thank you for spending time with us. It's fun to take a deep dive into an area that many of us engage with every day, but perhaps with that, we'll think about it a little bit differently now, thanks to our conversation.

Ashley Fill:

That's the hope. Scrape, load, done. If I can convince one person to do it on this podcast, then it's a success for me. Thanks, Mike.