Collaboration Is Reshaping Sustainability with Ahold Delhaize & Mondelēz | CGF 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I am Chris Walton, and we are coming to you live from the Consumer Goods Forums Global Summit in Vienna, Austria.

And we are, of course, once again in the CGF Leadership Studio, which is sponsored by Vuzion.

Now, joining me to kick off today are two fabulous executives.

First, to my far left we have Chris McGrath.

Chris is the SVP and Chief Impact and Sustainability Officer at Mondelez International.

And.

And also Alex Holt.

And Alex is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Ajo Delez.

Welcome, both of you.

Alex, it's great to see you again.

Yeah, fabulous to be here.

Lovely to see you, Chris.

Yeah.

And, Chris, it's our first time interviewing you as well.

Great to meet you, Chris.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, no, it's great.

Well, let's learn about each of you, too.

And Chris, let's start with you.

Talk about your background and your roles.

Sure.

I've been with Kraft Mondelez and before that Kraft Foods for several years and started in finance, spent most of my career in marketing and managing brands, and then parlay that into innovation and eventually sustainability.

So the thread has been, what do we need to help grow businesses and innovation?

Today, I lead sustainability for our company globally.

Just setting the strategy and helping to bring up the capabilities and embed it across our business and for perspective for.

Our audience back home.

How long have you been in the role in overseeing sustainability?

Since the start of our company in 2012.

Okay.

Wow.

Okay.

So very long time.

Wow.

Okay.

All right.

Same question to you, Alex.

Yeah, so I.

Retail background, always been in retail and started in the UK companies like Tesco, then Woolworths in Australia.

Now@ajo da.

Most of my time in commercial, though.

So kind of slightly different to you, but also similar in the sense of I took the commercial buying path and then moved into sustainability about eight years ago now.

Eight years.

Wow.

Both of you guys, you guys are veterans in the sustainability space for sure.

A lot of times I talk to people that have been doing it for like one or two years, but you guys are really steeped in the concept.

All right, so the reason.

One of the reasons we asked you guys, you both to join us today is your two CEOs used to be the CO chairs of CGF, and as part of that, they created the CSO Forum and they did a lot of collaboration together.

So I'm curious, Alex, can you explain what the CSO Forum actually is and what it does?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So as you say, R2 chair CEOs were the CO chairs, and last year at CGF we actually heard from a number of different other companies that it would be really good to get together.

And Chris and I had both spoken about, you know what, there's a lot going on.

I'm on the retailer side, you're on the CPG side.

There's lots of common challenges and opportunities and we thought actually why don't we just get a group of people together, CSOs across different companies and just have a conversation and a chat.

A lot of the issues are the same, opportunities are the same.

So we started it last year.

We've now met four times in a year.

Today, this morning was our in virtual one and we really coolly agreed this morning that we will continue this.

And this is now a thing that is staying because it's been so valuable to all the members.

It's really informal.

We've got retailers, CPG companies there.

Maybe Chris, a little bit about what we cover.

Yeah, we really have the group guide, like what are the hot topics of the moment that are challenging sustainability officers?

And there's, there's such a wealth of experience in the room and we really can learn from each other.

I think it parlays off of a lot of the work we do at cgf.

It's pre competitive.

It's about trying to accelerate the progress that we're making on various topics.

This is sort of a strategic sort of step back to say above plastic or whatever, climate, social, human rights, above that fray.

What are some of the challenges and opportunities that we're all, you know, grappling with?

It's been super, super helpful.

Yeah, I could tell, I could tell that you all liked getting together this morning too because you guys were racing over here for the interview.

So I imagine the conversation was going pretty strong.

How many people are in the room?

You know, you know, in this discussion.

This morning, Alex, we've got just over 20 people were here this morning.

Good mix of retailers, CPG companies, a good mix across American, European and Asian companies as well.

It's also, it's Chatham House rules.

So anything that we, we discuss within that is kept within really.

You can talk about the themes but you can't talk about what one company said.

We're sharing best practice and learnings.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

Chatham House rules.

That's a new word.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know that every day's a school day.

It is, right?

It is, right.

That's so funny.

All right, so Chris, what.

How would you, in maybe one or two sentences, how would you sum up the goal or aims of the.

Of the CSO forum.

I think it's to be a resource to help each other be able to learn and accelerate progress and go to.

For sort of a sounding board on strategic issues.

Anything to add?

No, I think covered it perfectly.

Got it.

Okay.

That's a good frame, though.

That's a good frame to continue the conversation.

All right.

Since both of you are veterans in sustainability, I'm curious, Chris, how has sustainability evolved particularly over.

As an effort, particularly over the last decade or so?

Yeah, I think in a few ways, I think one for sure is it's gone from being sort of voluntary.

Do you want to have a sustainability program because you think it's good for your business, et cetera, to now with a lot of the regulation coming in in different parts of the world becoming something that's more mandated that companies need to do and to report on?

I think there's a lot more formality in terms of.

In a good way, in terms of real definition so that we can get more consistent data across companies and be able to compare, etc.

Got it.

Alex, any color you'd add there?

The only other thing that I would add or to build on.

On there is that the.

Particularly when you're looking at companies that are across different regions, it's actually really how you're making sure that it is business focused and it is relevant for your business on the longer term.

And that's been really incredibly important.

Got it.

You know, to that point, Chris, I was thinking too, like something I was hearing a lot yesterday too, is sustainability feels like it's more woven into the fabric of how the business needs to get done too.

Like the discussions previously maybe happened in isolation, but now they're having to be woven in for the good of the economics of the business too.

Is that true?

Absolutely.

So we're focusing a lot on resilience.

I think we've seen the impacts of things like climate change and availability, scarcity of ingredients as a result of that.

So really, what do we need to do to make sure that we have resilient supply chains?

Really?

I would say more profitable businesses, because a lot of the work that we do in sustainability saves money.

We talked about that a lot this morning in our forum about how can we better capture and measure the value that sustainability creates.

Right, right.

And also the ideas around regenerative agriculture play into that as well.

So, Alex, I'm curious.

Let's take it now the next level deeper.

So we talked about sustainability, sustainability overall, broadly from a 30,000 foot view in terms of how it's changed over the past decade.

How has your role changed?

First with you, and then we'll go to Chris.

How has your role changed?

How is what you're doing different today than say, what it was five years ago?

So I think the first piece is actually what we're doing isn't different, it's how we go about doing it.

And the building on that is firstly around how it's integrated into business strategy.

Okay.

So really being clear around what is the role for your company and then what's the point of, of difference it can make?

Second piece is it's really interwoven into finance, into metrics, into data.

So really clearly you were talking about how it's much more intrinsic a part of business.

And then this last piece, and building on the discussion that point Chris just mentioned this morning, we were talking about how sustainability, what is the value creation that it can make to a business?

So we were going through and having a conversation around it's not just around cost reduction or cost avoidance.

What's the revenue growth that you can get from it?

What's the resilience and the risk mitigation as well?

And how do you quantify that?

So those are some of the big changes, I'd say.

Yeah.

And I bet that helps you sell what you need to accomplish internally too, because I bet the other thing too, I don't know.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm guessing you don't have to bang on doors as loudly now as you did five years ago.

Is that true?

Very true, Very true.

Also in a really good way comes with the business angle to it.

Right.

So you know, the.

Why are we doing this?

How, how do you quantify it?

What's the impact you're going to be having as well?

Right.

Chris, is there any.

How do you view that question?

How do you think your role has changed?

And I'm curious from a manager perspective too, as an executive managing a team, any angles there that you're doing differently now?

I think one of the things that has continued to grow is this need for business management skills.

This is very much, you know, I look for people who have managed businesses before who have a financial acumen.

Right.

We have folks now who have audit backgrounds because in parts of our team, because that's a big part of just understanding data.

How do you manage it?

What's good data and how do we.

And that's really been a new part of the team in the last couple of Years.

Right.

So to that point, Chris, we haven't talked about it.

Amazingly, we've gotten through a 10 or 15 minute interview.

We haven't brought up the two initials that get discussed in almost every interview I do, which is AI.

So I'm curious, how is AI changing your role?

It sounds like that might be a part of what you just said and particularly the other angle we haven't really talked about is climate.

So I'm curious, like how is AI changing the role in terms of how you approach your job and how do you think it's going to impact the climate initiatives too?

Well, I think AI is for sustainability is similar to what we see in other parts of the business, is that it's not like a separate thing over there, but it's going to be a wonderful tool for us to be able to take a lot of data and be able to analyze it and get results faster.

Being able to measure value, which is one of the things that we talked about, faster be able to.

I also think one of the things that we're working on is predictive capabilities.

So rather than looking in the rearview mirror, what did we do but like where could we go to?

And some of the cost trade offs like the roi, if we go this climate measure, this packaging initiative, what are the better ways to be able to get it and being able to predict what's going to be able to, what's going to happen as a result of some of the externalities that we face.

Chris, I'm curious, are you having to change the way you manage the process by which you decide what you're going to do?

Because what I heard yesterday in some of the interviews too was AI is great because it enables us to understand where there are more opportunities for us to go after, more opportunities to impact the business.

But by that token, we have to be very careful and thoughtful about where we actually start deploying the resources.

And so therefore you have to be tighter on the funnel in terms of what you decide to greenlight.

Would you say that that's true?

Yes, I think that just having really clear criteria for the business investments that are being made and having those, we call it freedom within a framework for a company.

And it fits our business model.

Our business model is local first, but not local only.

So we have a global sustainability strategy and framework and we let the local business units interpret that.

But having the same set of criteria of what makes a good investment I think is a way that helps them be able to make the decisions locally.

Okay, awesome, awesome.

Alex, same question to you on AI, How's AI impacting your job?

I think I would just build on what Chris has said just with two things.

Okay.

Punctuate two things.

Okay.

So on the, on the predictive piece, I think this is super cool about what this is going to be able to do for us.

And there's a couple of AI tools out there already.

So if we look back we can see the impact that climate change has had on extreme weather events that have then impacted crops.

What if we, what we haven't been able to do though is to forward predict well actually what is coming next.

Yes.

So it's very much in the now and the here there are some really good tools that are just small startup companies that are out there that are using AI to be able to start to say, well if you take all of these indicators, this is what's going to happen with a crop there.

How do you potentially then move forward earlier so you get competitive advantage.

So there's some really cool things I think that are happening in that space.

The other piece though is in our next.

Either our next group forum is the CSA forum or the one after.

We will be having a very conversation on AI and how's it going to be enabler and how can we really capitalize on it.

Yeah.

And where can you deploy it the most efficiently and most productively too?

Well, well done.

Well said too.

As the robot is dancing next to you like you didn't even, you didn't even break, you just kept on going.

It was great.

It caught me 20 minutes.

Perfect.

Yeah, it was amazing.

Yeah.

For those watching, there's a dancing robot over here that dances to Despacito every 10 or 15min minutes.

But anyway, well, thank you Alex and Chris, thank you for joining me.

It was a great conversation to start off day two of the CGF Global Summit in Vienna.

Thanks to them.

Thanks to VUSION for making all of our coverage and all of our interviews with executives like Chris and Alex possible throughout the conference.

And as always, be careful out there.