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Most of the stuff we buy is made of raw materials and components traded back and forth all over the world. It’s a huge web of what are called supply chains, worth trillions of dollars a year.
Most of us understand that all this is happening because corporations are looking for the best prices for what they need to make and sell things.
But increasingly, they’re also looking for sustainability, which can include good environmental and labor practices.
For example, as you’ll hear in this episode, McDonald’s has committed to serving only sustainably-sourced coffee at all of its locations by next year. To achieve that it’s buying its coffee from thousands of often small coffee growers.
Walmart has an initiative called Project Gigaton, by which it aims to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by itself and its suppliers by a Gigaton — a billion tons — by 2030.
That’s like taking 211 million cars off the road for a year.
A company in Santa Cruz, California called SupplyShift makes software that helps companies like these manage their supply chains to make sure they’re sustainable. I spoke recently with SupplyShift’s CEO, Alex Gershenson, and it was really eye-opening.
Alex Gershenson
Alex received his doctorate in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz, with a focus on climate science and policy. Alex is a well-known expert in responsible sourcing, sustainability, carbon accounting, environmental policy, and economics. Alex is a published author and a frequent speaker at conferences that focus on responsible sourcing and supply chain management.
Prior to starting SupplyShift, Alex was a professor of Policy and Science at San Jose State University and a co-founder of an environmental consulting firm that focused on climate and carbon consulting for enterprise and government clients.
Speaking positions:
SCM World, GSN meeting at the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ecological Society of America, Globe 2016, Responsible Supply Chain Summit, TSC Summit, TechCrunch Disrupt Finalist, Sustainable Brands
Subject matter expertise:
Supply Chain data management, SaaS development, fundraising, product management, business development, carbon accounting, climate science, corporate social responsibility, responsible sourcing, corporate sustainability.
Episode Links
- SupplyShift
- McDonald’s McCafé Sustainability Improvement Platform (SIP)
- Walmart’s Project Gigaton
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Spencer: Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good is produced by Boots Road Group, a marketing firm for organizations that make impact. Boots Road Group creates branding, campaigns and content, including websites without limits. More on Boots Road Group at BootsRoad.com.
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good, the podcast for people who make progress. I’m Spencer Critchley. Every year, trillions of dollars of goods are traded across the globe. If that trade can be made more sustainable, it has a huge impact on the environment and the quality of people’s lives. My guest this time runs a company that helps do just that. Alex Gershenson, CEO of SupplyShift, this time on Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good.
Most of the stuff we buy is made of raw materials and components traded back and forth all over the world. It’s a huge web of what are called supply chains, worth trillions of dollars a year. Most of us understand that all this is happening because corporations air looking for the best prices for what they need to make and sell things. But increasingly, they’re also looking for sustainability that can include good environmental and labor practices. For example, as you’ll hear in this episode, McDonald’s has committed to serving only sustainably-sourced coffee at all of its locations by next year. To achieve that, it’s buying its coffee from thousands of often small coffee growers. Walmart has an initiative called Project Gigaton by which it aims to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by itself and its suppliers by a billion tons by 2030. That’s like taking 211,000,000 cars off the road for a year.
A company in Santa Cruz, California, called SupplyShift makes software that helps companies like these manage their supply chains to make sure they’re sustainable. I spoke recently with SupplyShift CEO Alex Gershenson, and it was really eye-opening. You’re about to hear that conversation now.
You can find notes, links and a transcription of this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com. If you like it, please give it a rating on iTunes or wherever you listen, it really makes a difference. Here now is my interview with Alex Gershenson of SupplyShift.
Alex, thanks so much for joining me.
[00:02:18] Alex: Glad to be here.
[00:02:19] Spencer: You know, I think what we’re going to talk about is really interesting. But I also have a feeling that a fair number of people might be wondering just what is supply chain management. So I think it would be a good idea if you could start off by just describing it to someone who’s never thought about it. Doesn’t even know what that phrase means.
[00:02:35] Alex: Sure. So everything that we buy in a store is sold by a retailer who procured it from a brand we can think of. Let’s say light bulbs, General electric cells, lightbulbs to, say a Walmart. General Electric makes the light bulbs, but they procure glass from one company and metal from another company, and that metal gets mind somewhere, uh, gets refined by probably third or fourth companies. So everything that we purchase everything that we use has typically changed hands from company to company. The different components of that thing have changed hands from company to company, you know, 456 ten 10 times. And that is called a supply chain. So within every company there is a procurement or supply chain department of some sort who is responsible for fundamentally finding suppliers that have the right things for them to buy two, then either sell or transform into their own products. So that’s a very, very, very basic part of supply chain management.
[00:04:00] Spencer: Sure, and I think that makes it really clear. And from a business point of view, just looking at it strictly in dollars and cents. That is an important cost center they need to manage, right, because it’s it’s easy to imagine how complicated that could be if you have hundreds or thousands of suppliers and they’re located all over the world,
[00:04:18] Alex: Exactly right.
[00:04:20] Spencer: But it’s also increasingly seen as having environmental and social impacts, right, because some of those firms that might be supplying your firm might not be following good environmental practices or they might be abusing their workers. And these kinds of concerns have been coming to the fore. Is that something that something that SupplyShift is is particularly concerned with?
[00:04:47] Alex: Actually, our whole business is based on a shifting reality within supply chain data management. So up until a few years ago, supply chain data management meant and supply chain management meant focusing on a handful of things that that were tracked, such as price time of delivery, defects, you know, very much material things to the product and to the supplier-buyer relationship. But in the last few years, the world has changed and it’s changed because consumers are changing. Consumers are now no longer interested in just looking at price and quality as functions of buying decisions. They are interested in looking at provenance and origins and ensuring that the things that they’re buying were made responsibly. And as a matter of fact, in the last couple of years, most major corporations have either already implemented or are in the process of implementing whole new departments and divisions within their organizational structure, called responsible sourcing. So typically they live within procurement or within supply chain. But it is a whole new function within corporate structure to ensure that the direct suppliers, as well as indirect suppliers and what are called upstream suppliers, so suppliers of suppliers, adhere to certain standards that companies have placed on their suppliers
[00:06:33] Spencer: Now, a lot of people, of course, are skeptical when they hear this sort of thing because they’re used to assuming a business just operates the way we traditionally assume businesses did, which was to maximize profit, and, if they’re publicly held, to maximize return to their shareholders. Why should people believe it’s realist time as opposed to just kind of a PR, sort of window dressing kind of move?
[00:06:55] Alex: Great question. First, it’s been, to the large surprise, I think, of a lot of businesses, it’s been shown that it actually makes money to businesses to reduce environmental and social issues in their supply chains. Walmart, very famously publishes their dollar savings from their initiatives within their supply chain in terms of energy and transportation. So savings in emissions and savings in energy consumption have translated into billions of dollars of profit for Walmart. One of our customers, Wrangler, we did a webinar with Roian Atwood, who leads these efforts at Wrangler, and somebody asked, “How do you how do you, Roian, justify spending money on responsible sourcing initiatives? And he said, “As far as we’re concerned, we don’t have an option not to focus on this because otherwise our customers will go somewhere else.” So there is a rapidly shifting view within corporate structures that if this is not, if they don’t pay attention to this, then they’re not going to be competitive. And increasingly, the pressure is also coming from investors. Last year, about a year ago, the CEO of BlackRock, which is one of the biggest global investment firms, sent a letter to Fortune 500 CEOs saying that BlackRock is going to start focusing their investment decisions not just based on financials but also based on impact. And that was a major, major, piece of news in the business world, because BlackRock is not an activist investor, they are a very traditional investor. And if they are focusing on this, then this is real.
[00:09:07] Spencer: Yeah, I would say so, ’cause traditionally socially responsible investing, it was a growing niche, but it was a niche in the investment world, but if you have a major investment firm like Black Rock, issuing what you might call an edict like that, that causes all the big corporations to sit up and take notice. And of course, as you say also, if their customers are demanding it, then however any of them may feel about these issues, those issues, in terms of social issues and whatever their personal opinions on the might be, those issues have now moved on to their balance sheet and their income statement,
[00:09:49] Alex: And when you consider that the vast majority of at least environmental impact and social impact as well of a large company is not within their direct financial control, so not within their figurative four walls, but rather in their supply chain, in most cases, over 80%. Focusing on supply chain as a means of improving overall impact is a no brainer.
[00:10:16] Spencer: Fascinating. That hadn’t quite occurred to me that way before. We’re used to thinking of big companies is being so powerful. But as you say, a lot of this is stuff that traditionally, well, they had power over the choice they made whether to work with this supplier or that supplier, but beyond that, they might not have had that much control about what happened.
[00:10:32] Alex: If you think about it, think of goods that you buy. You know, Apple doesn’t actually make a single iPhone — Apple the company, right. It’s their subcontractors, such as Foxconn. So the vast majority of that impact is going to be not in Apple’s direct control.
[00:10:59] Spencer: It’s not like Apple can promise to just, you know, walk over to the Apple factory in Cupertino, which doesn’t exist, and direct and change the way they’re doing things. And this is of course, is part of the overall evolution of advanced economies that become more oriented towards the design end of things. And they’re outsourcing the manufacturing to other locations. So this is where SupplyShift comes in, right? You provide a tool to allow corporations to get more visibility into all these suppliers that might be located all over the world and just have more of a sense of what’s going on and more control over what’s going on?
[00:11:38] Alex: Precisely right. When companies started looking into this, the way to assess their supply chain and to assess their suppliers was very simple, which is email and Excel. So anybody that has been in touch with any part of corporate America has either sent out an Excel questionnaire or received and had to fill out an Excel questionnaire and, ah, with supply chain. It’s very much the same. The challenge with that is large companies have tens of thousands of suppliers sending out and receiving and processing, and somehow cleaning the data on hundreds of or thousands of questionnaires is a monumental task and the system fully breaks down when you need to figure out not just answers from your suppliers but the suppliers of your suppliers and so on down the chain. So what companies started doing was to select just a few handfuls of suppliers for a pilot project. You know, a dozen or 20 or 30. And it works, sort of, and it’s a lot of work. And then when they need to scale those programs to encompass whole sectors or their whole supply chain, of course they need a system. It’s kind of like, you know, you can’t really do sales without a CRM, properly —
[00:13:16] Spencer: You mean a customer relationship management database.
[00:13:19] Alex: Yes, yes, thank you. Same same goes with supply chain data management. You need a system that is purpose built to understand the relationships between entities and understand the hierarchical nature and understand the different tiers of suppliers and manage the information connect entities. So that’s number one, and number two is that with the Excel and email model, suppliers don’t get any value from the process, and they get overwhelmed and over-burdened with continuous requests for information that are all, or many of them are asking for very similar or the same information in some cases. But there is no central data repository. So the second goal of SupplyShift was to make sure that suppliers, if they are doing their work and finding out information and calculating things and responding to somebody about a particular thing, that they no longer have to do that again and again and again. They can just authorize submission to other customers, so it lessens the burdens on suppliers, and it lets suppliers understand where they stand relative to others because it provides them with benchmarking and business information.
[00:14:36] Spencer: I see, and the kind of information they’d be entering would be things like what sorts, if they’re growing things, what sorts of fertilizers they’re using or what sorts of irrigation practices they use, and if there if they’re running a factory, what their work conditions are like and wages and benefits and that sort of thing?
[00:14:54] Alex: Those and more, and it really depends on the customers. So different customers of ours have different priorities. Some are really focused on greenhouse gas emissions, so they’re asking for energy use information. Some of them are really focused on labor, and so they’re asking about labor practices and migrant labor use and aspects like that. Some are focused on water and waste and energy, and some are focused on a broader level, on compliance with their supplier code of conduct. It’s one thing to have a supplier sign a supplier code of conduct, it’s another thing to have a supplier answer questions that are related to the supplier code of conduct. You frequently get very different answers,
[00:15:44] Spencer: And how does it work with SupplyShift? What exactly is SupplyShift?
[00:15:49] Alex: Good question. So SupplyShift is a cloud based platform that enables the buyers to load in their suppliers and determine what assessments they want to implement. Then they send the the assessments to their suppliers and what that looks like is a supplier gets an invitation to SupplyShift with with an email from their customer, and then the supplier logs on to SupplyShift. And then they can answer, they can forward to their suppliers — let’s say the supplier’s a broker, right? The direct supplier of our customer is a broker. They don’t really know the answer so they can invite their suppliers, which are the actual manufacturers to answer the questions. The customer can also audit their supply chain, and we have auditing tools. So it’s not just a self-assessment process, it can be coupled or replaced by audit. And it goes all the way down to the farm all the way down to the forest, all the way down to the origin of the goods that end up as a finished product.
[00:17:03] Spencer: And one of the case studies you cite is a company called S & D Coffee and Tea. That’s kind of the sort of company you’re talking about that again, I think a lot of people wouldn’t have even thought of that sort of operating behind the scenes. But S & D supplies coffee to McDonald’s, for example, and you highlight them as a use case using SupplyShift. Can you describe how S & D uses SupplyShift?
[00:17:30] Alex: Certainly. So, S & D Coffee and Tea is probably the biggest coffee company that not many people have heard of. They’re a B to B coffee and tea company —
[00:17:41] Spencer: Meaning “business to business.”
[00:17:43] Alex: Yeah, and they they supply coffee and tea to lots and lots of businesses that rebrand and sell it as their own product. And S & D is really focused on working together with McDonald’s to ensure that McDonald’s’ commitment to responsible coffee sourcing is valid, and one of the things that that requires is tracing all the way down to the farmer, figuring out who the farmers are, what their coffee practices are, as well as providing assistance and training to those farmers to improve their practices so that they are more sustainable. So not only is this into using SupplyShift for assessment, but also for monitoring and keeping track of training that the farmers that are part of the co-ops — it’s a multi tier system, there are, you know, farmers organized into co-ops and they’re organized into regional groups to ensure that they can then pass on the information to McDonald’s to say, “Hey, these are our efforts. This is how far we are going to help you, our customer, McDonald’s, reach your goal of responsible sourcing of coffee.”
[00:19:06] Spencer: And I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that McDonald’s has a commitment to have all of its coffee sustainably sourced by 2020. That’s next year.
[00:19:15] Alex: Isn’t that interesting? It’s part of the trend that I was alluding to earlier that — so the vast majority of our customers, and I can’t name most of them, but the vast majority of them are Fortune 500 companies that are household names. They’re not typically seen as pioneers of sustainability or environmental stewardship, but they are recognizing that they must change and they must adapt, and they must be able to answer the two fundamental questions that consumers are increasingly asking, which is, “Who is in your supply chain and what are they doing relative to environmental and social practices, and McDonald’s over the last five years has taken a seriously progressive view of their sourcing. They’ve made a commitment to responsible beef and reduction of deforestation. They’ve made a commitment to responsible coffee, and I’m pretty sure that there are a couple more and they are well on the way. There is actually a wonderful resource not affiliated with us in any way, and it is called supply-change.org, and it is a nonprofit that tracks corporate commitments and that one is specifically around deforestation and forest practices. But it includes things like palm oil and soy and paper and pulp in packaging, and it tracks corporate commitments and progress made against those commitments.
[00:20:59] Spencer: We’ll be sure to give people the link for that in the notes for this episode. That’s fascinating. You know, this reminds me of something that Jason Furman used to say — he was an economic official in the Obama administration — and people on the sustainability side of things, the social justice side of things, of course, tend to look very skeptically a giant companies like Walmart or McDonald’s — but he used to point out that if you can get a Walmart to change its practices, you know the sustainability initiatives they’ve made, for example, in just the way they handle trucking, just because of their size, the scale of the impact is enormous.
[00:21:41] Alex: Absolutely. And it’s actually one of the reasons why Jamie Barsimantov and I started SupplyShift is that we you know, we had a very successful consulting practice, and we realized that if we wanted to scale our impact, we had to enable more businesses to be more responsible. And I truly believe that most of the poor outcomes that we have seen in the past are because businesses did not have the right information. So my goal is to ensure that businesses have reliable, easy-to-access, and easy-to-digest information about their suppliers, because I don’t believe that in the vast majority of cases companies are aware of the impact that they have within their supply chain and do it consciously and ignore it. I think that they truly don’t have the right information to act on, and so my job is to make it easy.
[00:22:45] Spencer: Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good is produced by Boots Road Group, a marketing firm for organizations that make impact. Boots Road Group builds powerful, beautiful websites with open source tools like Drupal and WordPress. More at bootsroad.com. Now back to our interview with Alex Gershenson of SupplyShift.
[00:23:06] Spencer: So do you have a sense of what the potential scale of the impact is not just through your work at SupplyShift, but through this effort globally, whether people are working with you or with other firms?
[00:23:19] Alex: I think that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface, and I’ll give you one example of something that if it happens and I know the team involved, so I have full confidence that it will. But Walmart last year. Speaking of Walmart, a company that has made huge changes in the way they look at responsible sourcing and sustainability, Walmart launched last year their Project Gigaton. So What that is is a commitment to reduce one gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions from their supply chain in the next five years. For scale the whole globe emits about, I don’t know the most recent number, but about 30 gigatons of carbon per year. So that’s the total human emissions per year is 30 gigatons. Walmart is aiming to reduce one gigaton from their supply chain within the next five years. Right? So the and that’s one company, and that is one initiative. And I am aware of dozens of similar initiatives across different industries. So — and that is just focusing on greenhouse gases, right? That’s not focusing on water. That’s not focusing on waste, that’s not focusing on child labor, and there are initiatives focusing on all of those. So what is the potential scale of the impact? If, in fact, companies that are making these commitments are going to follow through, and I know many that do, but I can’t assume that all will, then, the potential scale of impact is massive.
[00:25:08] Spencer: This is potentially very, very hopeful news as we look at all the bad news with climate change denial and the United States government in particular dragging its feet on taking action in areas like this and in some cases reversing progress. So perhaps the source of hope here is that these giant companies are moving ahead anyway.
[00:25:32] Alex: I think that — so first of all, yes, I think that if we had more government support in terms of climate change or any other environmental aspect, it would have helped, but I believe that the biggest driving factor today and before has always been consumer spending, and the consumers have fundamentally changed. And there was a watershed moment about, let’s see, I think it was about 2014 and 2015, that now, in hindsight, we know was important, but we didn’t then, which was that over 50% of consumer spend globally shifted to millennials or younger. By 2020 is going to be 60%. So 60% of global consumer spend in terms of dollars will be spent by millennials or younger. And that generation is fundamentally different. And it’s fundamentally different because of the tremendous success of our colleagues in marketing. And our colleagues in marketing have essentially tied self-image to brand image very strongly. So on the one hand, millennials and younger are shown to be much more brand loyal than prior generations. On the other hand, they’re much more likely to discard a brand, and that discard is as far as we know fairly permanent. if the brand image suffers, from, you know, an investigation into the labor practices of their suppliers, for instance. So companies are recognizing that they can no longer afford to say, “Oh, yeah, well, that happened, and we’re sorry, and we’re moving on,” because the self-image of the consumer is so closely tied to the brand image., and nobody wants to have their self-image associated with deforestation in the Amazon or slave labor in a clothing factory in Bangladesh.
[00:27:53] Spencer: Boy, there’s a couple of really interesting and important points in there. One, of course, is that consumer demand drives a modern economy. I think it’s something like 70% or something of the United States economy is consumption, and so if you’re talking about power centers, a lot of the power, as you just said, is located with consumers. And if they change their behavior, then everything else has to change. And then this insight into millennials: I think a lot of older people look at millennials and they see how millennials embrace brands in a way that, you know, probably makes their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, people who came up in the ’60’s, uncomfortable, because their whole ethos was rejecting consumption and rejecting identifying with brands, and trying to free themselves from all of that, right? So I think they’ll sometimes look askance at millennials, but it’s very hard to put yourself in the mind of a different group of people and really appreciate how the world looks to them, and there’s of course, always more nuanced than you would have expected from the outside. And as you just pointed out, if people are identifying with brands, then they might very well have higher expectations of those brands, and it ends up having a positive effect if they insist that those brands actually authentically embrace values that those people have grown up with and want to make sure that they’re identifying with,
[00:29:15] Alex: They absolutely do. And one of the — I remember I was at a conference and somebody asked, ”Well, how do we get a premium for responsibly sourced the goods, as far as price?” And one of my fellow panelists said, “Well, it’s not about a premium anymore. It’s about, you know, it is an expectation that the goods that people buy are responsible. Otherwise they just won’t buy them.” So there is an expectation of responsibility and authenticity. It is assumed that that is the way it works. And, you know, one of my predictions is that all of these departments of responsible sourcing that are cropping up are going to disappear in about five years, because there won’t be such a thing as a department of responsible sourcing. It’s just going to be sourcing, because if you’re not doing responsible sourcing then, you’ll be out of business.
[00:30:10] Spencer: Right, right, interesting. It’ll be sort of like you don’t get a premium for making a toaster that doesn’t light your house on fire —
[00:30:17] Alex: Precisely right.
[00:30:19] Spencer: It’s kind of expected. And in this case, the houses the entire planet. And so this leads me to Santa Cruz, where you’re located. Santa Cruz is certainly associated with pro-environmentalist values and humanitarian values, but it’s not known as a major center of industry. Why’re you located in Santa Cruz?
[00:30:41] Alex: Well, first, I’d like to challenge a bit the notion that Santa Cruz isn’t known as a major center of industry. Santa Cruz currently is home to several small, medium and large-scale technology businesses, you know, everybody from Amazon down to us. You know, Plantronics and Looker and PayStand and Inboard Motors and Two Pore Guys and all sorts of different technology. Santa Cruz area was home to Netflix and Seagate and Texas Instruments and on and on. So Santa Cruz has a long, rich, and continuous history of technological innovation. So I’ll just say that because I’m a big fan of what Santa Cruz has to offer, as far as a base for technology, for growing a technology company.
[00:31:49] Spencer: I am too, and I’m glad that you’ve made such a good list of all the interesting operations that are happening in Santa Cruz, ‘cause I really share your perspective that it’s actually a very exciting place and people might think of, you know, beaches and hippies, but it’s really emerged as a center of innovation that combines that sort of humanistic approach to life with all kinds of innovation. It’s actually quite an exciting place to be.
[00:32:16] Alex: Absolutely. And then we have UC Santa Cruz as a great resource. You know, the team here in Santa Cruz is close to 20 people now, and the vast majority of the people that we work with are graduates from of UC Santa Cruz in one form or another, and it’s a great resource for tremendously amazing staff. So that’s number two, and number three is that we are in fact close enough to Silicon Valley to be able to attract and nurture and retain and grow a team of people that are not interested in the commute over the hill and you know Santa Cruz, I don’t remember the latest figures, but it’s over 20,000 people that drive Highway 17 over the hill every day, and, you know, it’s a tremendous pool of talent that we’re very lucky to be able to tap into. And, you know, the greatest value of SupplyShift is, you know, the greatest strength of SupplyShift is the team. And we have a rock star team that is in large part due to us being in Santa Cruz.
[00:33:48] Spencer: How do you look at the human side of growing your tech-based company? As you say, the human side of it is critically important. Do you have a particular culture, for example, that you’re trying to build there?
[00:33:59] Alex: We’re trying to be a little bit more conscious about the culture that we’re trying to build, in a sense that we’re trying to actually ask ourselves that question. But it emerged on its own just through the way that we’ve built the company, and we have a few unspoken rules, and they are somewhat similar to what a university research lab looks like, which is we have to be honest with ourselves, and we have to work together, and no job is too large or too small for anybody on this team. And everybody on the team has moved, once they’ve been here for a while, has moved into different positions based on both their wants and desires and the needs of the company, because as the company grows, the needs grow and we need whole new functions all of a sudden, and a lot of it is really focused on making sure that the team works as efficiently as possible. And my job is to basically help and remove barriers to folks achieving their goals. Not just not just their goals to help the company succeed, but also their personal goals.
[00:35:38] Spencer: Well, it sounds like it’s working. Where do you see SupplyShift going in the future?
[00:35:43] Alex: Well, as we grow, I hope to be the main platform for supply chain data management for large organizations that are focused on ensuring that they know the answers to the two fundamental questions of who their suppliers are, and that includes the suppliers of their suppliers, etc. — and most do not: the 2018 Chief Procurement Officers survey from Deloitte said that only 6% of chief procurement officers of large companies have a good understanding of who is in their supply chain, so there’s a lot of work to do — and making sure that we create a platform that enables companies around the world to produce and sell more responsible products.
[00:36:49] Spencer: Well, Alex, I wish you all the best of luck. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tell me about it today.
[00:36:56] Alex: Thank you so much for inviting me.
[00:36:59] Spencer: You’ve been listening to Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. We just heard my interview with Alex Gershenson of SupplyShift. If you liked it, please give it a rating on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, it makes a big difference. The podcast home is at dastardlycleverness.com. On Twitter, we’re @dastardlyclever, and on Facebook were DastardlyCleverness. The podcast is produced by Boots Road Group. I’m Spencer Critchley. Thanks for listening.