EIC GHG Co-creation with Unilever: Sustainable progress with well-thought-out moves

The European Innovation Council (EIC) means business when it comes to being at the forefront of innovative and sustainable initiatives. That’s why they introduced a ‘Co-creation’ opportunity between Europe’s largest corporates and EIC beneficiaries as a way of helping them build win-win synergies and co-create solutions with business partners. Following the EIC GHG Co-creation with Unilever online event, we met with Roy Horne, Ice-cream R&D at the company to provide us with some insights. 

The motto is simple, progress at something means moving forward together. The same applies to co-creation. Plus, it has a special significance when you put it in the GHG context and consider the fact of EIC beneficiaries working together to co-create new green solutions with business partners to address potential sustainability challenges. In this light, after the Unilever event, we had the chance to meet with Roy Horne and pose him some questions. Here’s what he had to say. 

Can you briefly describe your role within the company and explain your motivations for joining the EIC GHG initiative? 

I work in the R&D ice-cream team at Unilever where I develop new consumer products and, more importantly, the sales cabinets where we use to access the markets. The carbon footprint of our products is a combination of several components: 1) agriculture; 2) processing; 3) manufacturing; 4) distribution; 5) retail sales; and 6) retail sales that involve our ice-cream cabinets. 

We have plans in place to reduce our company’s carbon footprint in each of those areas. However, for this EIC GHG initiative we picked three of those areas – more specifically, agriculture, packaging, and refrigeration systems. We were curious to know if we could find potential solutions coming from Europe’s SMEs, given it’s a group of companies that are very difficult to quickly access. Therefore, by doing it this way we were able to efficiently save time on doing research, use our difficult challenges in those three areas and see if the EIC’s SME network would help find good solutions. 

The EIC GHG Programme is all about reducing GHG emissions and moving towards a carbon-neutral future. What is your company doing in this regard? 

A key priority for us is being net-zero across our value chain by 2039 – that’s a commitment we’ve made. Our Climate Transition Action Plan, which we published in May of 2021, sets out all the steps Unilever will take right across the company’s three divisions (Home, Personal Care, and Foods & Refreshments – where I’m based). 

In Food & Refreshments, we picked three areas that we wanted to go out and look for good innovative ideas. The first one involves Agriculture, where we try to use sustainable and regenerative practices that enable us to shift to plant-based formulations. That implies reducing dairy and meat components in our products. The second one is refrigeration, which for us is about introducing climate-friendly refrigerants and, most importantly, improving the energy efficiency and refrigeration systems to consume less energy, therefore less GHG emissions. The third, and last one, is sustainable packaging where we wish to utilise a reuse/recycle type of approach to packaging. 

So, as a business, we have plans on all of these areas and this was a valuable opportunity to get some new thoughts and fresh ideas on some of the most difficult aspects of these components. 

Unlike other flagship Business Acceleration Services programmes, this initiative is focused on co-creation as opposed to single rounds of pitching. What does co-creation mean for your company/yourself and what are the benefits compared to a ‘normal’ pitching session? 

At our company, we use the following phrase: “If you think you can do it alone, you’re not thinking big enough”. So, this opportunity has been highly efficient in that regard because the benefits coming from it have made it a successful process. Hence why, when I use the word ‘co-creation’ I think about having several partners working together on a solution, and this EIC GHG initiative opened that opportunity for us. 

What mindset and skills do you look for in companies (start-ups and scale-ups) for co-creation activities? 

We look for relevant technology and deep expertise. Plus, we need flexible partners that bring an entrepreneurial mindset and can move fast – when it comes to knowing if the technical ideas are a good fit or not within our key areas of interest. 

What are the benefits/advantages of working with the EIC and its portfolio of SMEs? 

I think it’s an efficient way of having a large group of SMEs look at our areas of business opportunity or areas of business challenge – which in this case, are all focused on GHG matters. When thinking about the alternatives of having to track companies down yourself, or using agencies to do so, doing desk research, etc, this turns out to be the best and quickest way of bringing us all together.  

What are your views on the online event and the quality of the companies pitching? 

In my opinion, everything was great. The online event was good, and the pitching sessions were straightforward and well-managed (which was good!). Out of the 10 respondents we asked 3 to pitch on the day and they came with relevant technologies, and we were able to follow up with them afterwards just fine. So again, I think it maintains that the efficient process of meeting, discussing, and agreeing that the technology has value, then the EIC drops out and we can continue with the process in a normal way. 

To conclude, what would make this EIC GHG Co-creation initiative a success for your company and what are you hoping to get out of it? 

We have shared some of the most pressing challenges in GHG emissions. Success will come if during this process the SME links we’ve made prove to be fruitful partnerships that give us new solutions in the areas we need – that being things we haven’t thought of or considered so far.