Christine Kalvenes, SVP global head of innovation and marketing, McCain Foods
By Will Novosedlik
We’ve got a returning series, asking top marketers across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What are the things of marketing nightmares? This week, we catch up with McCain’s SVP global head of innovation and marketing Christine Kalvenes about the biggest problem she faces.
Kalvenes has more than 25 years of brand positioning, new product development and consumer insights experience including three years at SC Johnson as VP of global marketing and 15 years at PepsiCo Foods in various roles serving most recently as CMO of PepsiCo Foods Canada. In 2017 she was named a Marketer of the Year by strategy magazine.
What external forces are keeping you awake at night?
Everything we do is rooted in agronomy (the branch of agriculture that deals with field crop production and soil management), so the impact of climate change is a big concern. It has implications for crop yield and product supply. When you start to look at climate change and environmental impact, we used to have a crop disruption once every 10 years, and now we have one or more every year. So that is definitely stealing sleep.
How long has that frequency been the case?
I’d say it’s been escalating over the last 20 years, but has become the norm over the last 10 years.
Agriculture has always been subject to the whims of nature, but now nature is angry. How are you responding to that?
To a certain degree, it’s self-inflicted. We’ve been entirely focused on yield as opposed to taking care of the soil and the earth and the environment within which we farm. So we’ve started to work with different practices that can make crops more resilient to climate change, such as cover crops that really help protect the soil, rotating crops – things that have been done for years and years. But what we’ve started to do is integrate technology. So for example, instead of mass fertilization, which has huge nitrogen runoff, we could use satellite imaging to look at where crops need the most fertilization, do precision fertilization in those areas and precision pest control in places that need it.
We have what we call a “farm of the future” where we have invested in our own crop space and land to be able to test out some of these best practices. We’ve hired industry experts to come in and have started to put practices in place that were rolling out to some of our farmers as a mechanism for helping drive resilience to climate change. And it’s a partnership, honestly, between industry experts, the farmers and ourselves, all working toward building for long-term crop production.
We’ve heavily invested in testing at our McCain-owned farm in Florenceville, New Brunswick, in order to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and then to share that knowledge with our growers around the world. We’ve also acquired some land in in South Africa. We’re even looking for a third farm going forward.
How are you communicating McCain’s mission to consumers?
In 2022 with the campaign hashtag #SaveOurSoil, we took this messaging about regenerative farming to Roblox. We created a virtual “farm of the future” in the Metaverse and then took that work into the real world with a takeover of a cryptocurrency-themed restaurant called Bored and Hungry in Los Angeles. It’s the world’s first NFT restaurant.
We took over all of their fries for a month, used regenerative potatoes, and then took a food truck on a road trip to Toronto up from L.A. Consumers were really interested in hearing about the world’s first ‘regen’ fries. The moment you tell them what it is, they’re very interested in supporting it and engaging in it. So what’s keeping me up now is how do I make that bigger? How do I make that better? How do I continue to educate while remaining true to the fact that we’re a lighthearted, fun brand? This is my challenge.
Are your farmers keen to make those kinds of changes or is it a headache to get them to do it?
Not at all. We’re all facing the same problem, right? We’re in it together. So the challenges that I’m mentioning are also their challenges. We’ve had an open dialogue with our growers. We’ve actually created a certification program where we take our learnings to the farm community partner and work with them to put those learnings into practice. As we learn more, we’re building out more with them. So the partnership remains very strong, and some of the farmers have been leveraging regenerative practices for a very long period of time.
You’ve recently doubled the capacity at your plant in Coaldale, Alberta. What sorts of challenges is that presenting you with?
The expansion of Coaldale will create two new state-of-the-art production lines. The workforce will be doubled there, and that expansion is going to start a little bit later this year. It’s all in line with our sustainability commitments to ensure that the facility helps McCain work towards moving 100% of our farming and potato acreage to regenerative farming by the end of the decade.
How will doubling your capacity at Coaldale help you meet you goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in your global operations by 2030?
Coaldale is just a continuation of the commitments that we’ve been trying to make. We are working to provide 100% renewable electricity to the Coaldale site. We’ll continue to bring in renewable biogas generated through wastewater treatment facilities.
You’re working on sustainable potato growing in Maine and Wisconsin. Can you talk about that project?
It’s all about moving toward regenerative practices. If only McCain employs regenerative practices we’re going to go far because we’re a pretty big consumer of potatoes, but we need other partners to join in. We’re partnering with farmers, but the more visibility we can create, the more we can get the industry to start moving in that direction. This movement has to be much bigger than us.
