Episode 12: Circularity talk with John Steiner, General Manager Accelerated Change at Lion

For over 100 years Lion brewed beer within a circular economy, with crate bottles being the norm. Now the company has its sights set on exploring how they might lead the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry into a circular future. Lion have been making bold moves in sustainability, social responsibility, and the circularity of their products in recent years, with a vision to be a force for good. In 2020, they became Aotearoa’s first large-scale Toitū carbon zero certified beverage company. Under the leadership of the company’s General Manager Accelerated Change, John Steiner, Lion brought a team to XLabs this year to explore how they might design out a Skytower’s equivalent of packaging waste from their products each year. In this episode, we chat with John about the paradigm shift required within the FMCG industry in how we use energy and materials, the importance of change initiatives taking an end-to-end approach, and about how the circular economy is not just a good move for the environment, but also enables businesses to lower costs and improve resilience in the face of future disruptions to supply chains, international market volatility, and carbon pricing. “If you think of the name of the industry — ‘Fast Moving Consumer Goods’ — it’s the poster child for a linear consumption based economy: Make, buy, use, throw out at high speed… which is the opposite of the circular economy. The inspiration we can take from that name in moving to a circular economy is that we just need to make change happen fast - get stuck in, learn, iterate and make progress.” — John Steiner, General Manager Accelerated Change, Lion About our guest: John Steiner has degrees in Musical Composition and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics which meant he was not obviously lined up for a career in FMCG Category & Revenue Management. But studying in Otago created a fondness for Speights that led to him to apply for Lion's graduate programme…. and he has ended up staying with the company almost twenty years. John has worked his way up through various roles spanning sales, business development, retail, category, & revenue, as well as being engaged with multiple customer groups and partner organisations. He is now applying his end-to-end knowledge, big picture thinking, technical expertise, and innate desire to make the world better in his current role as General Manager of Lion’s Accelerated Change team. Support this show . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can listen to Episode 12: Circularity talk with John Steiner, General Manager Accelerated Change at Lion online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 12: Circularity talk with John Steiner, General Manager Accelerated Change at Lion is an episode from The Redesign of Everything by Louise Nash.

This episode is 45:52 long.

This episode was published on Jul 28, 2022.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from The Redesign of Everything when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.