Purpose Alignment
Dave Bender's Story
Fusing Company and Individual Goals for Innovation
Dave Bender is Vice President of Research and Development at Griffith Foods. Throughout his 23 years with the company, he has championed sustainability-focused innovation, driven by his passion for empowering teams for positive impact.
About Griffith Foods
Griffith Foods is a global product development partner supporting food companies to meet the needs of consumers with high-quality, customized products. As a family business founded in 1919, the company is known for collaborative innovation guided by its purpose to “blend care and creativity to nourish the world.”
Sector: Food product development
Employees: 4,000
Geography: Headquartered in Illinois, USA, with operations across 40 countries globally.
Website: griffithfoods.com
Challenges
faced
Dave Bender’s 23 years at Griffith Foods have been a journey of transformation and growth. During this time, he has witnessed a remarkable shift in the company’s focus towards sustainability and the articulation of its purpose – a value that deeply resonates with him.
However, embedding ESG principles into Griffith Foods’ existing portfolio and new product development has been anything but easy.
One major hurdle Dave and his team encountered was the absence of a common global nutrition standard. Without a single, unified benchmark, they had to navigate a maze of regional and local guidelines, making it difficult to establish consistent practices and define KPIs that ensured alignment across the company.
Another challenges but also opportunity was to build internal expertise. To create impactful solutions, Dave and the entire Griffith team needed to foster a culture of sustainability and develop specialized knowledge in both nutrition and sustainability. With over 4,000 employees across the globe—speaking different languages and possessing varying levels of understanding—this was no small feat.
As a customer product development partner, Dave’s team is working on a large portfolio of projects each year, which adds to the complexity. Balancing trade-offs between taste, texture, cost, nutrition and sustainable sourcing – especially when innovating new products – posed another significant challenge. However, Dave acknowledges that managing these trade-offs is an ongoing, exciting part of the innovation process.
Actions
taken
Dave, along with the entire leadership team, recognized that sustainability needed to be a key criterion that drives Griffith Foods’ innovation agenda.
This started by setting clear sustainability goals with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that aligned with Griffith Foods’ Purpose and Aspirations. Dave and his team helped to define both financial and impact metrics in coordination with the cross functional leaders and the executive team to pin-point what would be the most meaningful and impactful.
In response to the lack of a global common standard, the team also set out to create their own nutrition standard derived from multiple external authoritative sources. They then used technology to evaluate the company’s own portfolio against the new standard, allowing them to set clear goals for both transforming the existing portfolio as well as key areas to innovate.
A pivotal step was the creation of a dedicated nutrition team, present now in every region, integrating product development with nutrition expertise.
In parallel, Dave helped to champion the ‘Nutrition IQ’ program, a comprehensive training initiative designed to elevate the entire company’s understanding of nutrition and its connection to sustainability by 2025. This program, targeting over 4,000 associates, aims to improve the overall understanding of nutrition and empower team members to engage in proactive dialogue with customers, suppliers, and other critical stakeholders.
Beyond looking at their own ingredients and products, Griffith Foods also endeavours to help customers optimise their nutrition profile and sustainability impact.
Resonance
of impact
The efforts led by Dave and his team have driven significant progress at Griffith Foods. By creating their own nutrition standards and assessing the company’s portfolio against these benchmarks, they established a clear baseline for improvement, ultimately enhancing the nutritional profiles of their products while aligning with global best practices.
The launch of the ‘Nutrition IQ’ program has further empowered employees to better understand the role they can play in driving nutrition in ingredients, products and ultimately how this can positively impact the products of Griffith Foods customers.
Looking forward, Dave and his team has set ambitious goals, including ensuring 50% of their finished products meet or exceed global nutrition standards and working toward net-zero GHG emissions by 2030 for Scope 1 and 2, and by 2040 for Scope 3 of their value chain. Additionally, they are targeting the sustainable sourcing of 80% of their raw materials while improving the nutritional profile of over 50% of customers’ portfolios. However, Dave acknowledges that the work is far from over.
To reinforce these goals, Dave and his team are integrating sustainability targets into personal and organizational objectives for many of their associates.
Dave is optimistic about the potential for building ecosystems and partnerships with suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem partners like WBCSD.