Stewart Lindsay spent fifteen years in global agribusiness at Bunge and a stretch at The Nature Conservancy before taking the chief sustainability officer’s chair at Campbell’s. He has spent most of that time in a job that doesn’t fit anywhere on a conventional org chart.
Q: Why is the CSO job so different from every other job in the company?
Stewart: Sustainability is science, it’s social choice, it’s economics, it’s politics, it’s academics. Nobody in a company is paid to think about all of those things and how they interact — consumers, customers, investors, regulators, activists — and what it means for the company. The key to the role is to look across all of that, pull it together into a conviction, and then distill it: what’s the impact of this?
Q: What makes you confident the sustainability trend won’t reverse?
Stewart: When I connect the dots, I see the constituency for sustainability growing. People internalize it more, and they see the connection between their own behavior and these topics. There’s a repricing of environmental assets happening — carbon taxes, carbon markets, biofuels. Extended producer responsibility is a repricing of packaging. If you believe the arc is heading in one direction, you need to live by that. The optimism isn’t a feeling. It’s a conclusion.
Q: Campbell’s is a North American company. No regulator is forcing your hand the way one might in Europe. How do you set priorities?
Stewart: It’s on us to look at where the trends are moving and ask where we can find real value. I often challenge my team: the question isn’t “What are we required to do?”, it’s “What does it mean to be an iconic American food company — and in light of that, what should we be doing?” That flips sustainability from a compliance mindset, which it’s always at risk of becoming, into a vision and accomplishment mindset.
The full profile covers a sustainability program in Rajasthan that worked almost perfectly, the scorecard at Campbell’s that can move every bonus in the company, and how Stewart grappled with a traceable soy project in Brazil that ran into resistance at every level.
Stewart Lindsay represents The Campbell’s Company as a Board Chair in the ESG & CSR Board. The ESG & CSR Board is an Assemble community that helps senior ESG, sustainability, and social impact leaders at the world’s largest organizations make better, faster decisions through trusted peer intelligence.
