Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. My guest today is David Ferreira, Head of Marketing at Bob and Pete's, who are a wholesale bakery supplying quality baked goods to cafes across Australia. With a rich background in packaged goods marketing and operations, David brings a deeply human, practical and strategic approach to leading purpose within the business.
Now, on a personal note, I've known David for longer than I'd like to admit. He was my client when I had my creative marketing agency and when he worked for dairy farmers. That was maybe 15 or so years ago. More recently, we've worked together through Bob and Pete's.
Over the past seven years, David has championed Bob and Pete's purpose journey from guiding the articulation of their higher purpose, baking things better, to embedding it in their values, operations, decision making and stakeholder relationships. David is a passionate advocate for businesses being a force for good, showing that purpose doesn't just inspire, it delivers.
In this episode, which we call Baking Things Better, Bob and Pete's recipe for leading with purpose, David shares the company's journey. What started with one passionate junior marketer asking the tough questions, what are we doing for our community and our planet, has evolved into a deeply embedded purpose strategy that permeates every part of Bob and Pete's operations.
From waste reduction and food donations to employee engagement and redefining sustainability in the food industry, David shares the real, raw and practical story of how purpose, making things better, became the foundation for stronger culture, deeper customer relationships and sustainable profit. This episode is a must listen for business leaders, marketers and purpose-driven professionals seeking to integrate meaningful impact with business performance.
David, welcome to the For Love than many podcast. Thank you, Carolyn. Lovely to be here. So I'm really interested to hear your answer to the first question we kick off with. And that is, what do you think? Is there a role for love in business? Yeah, you pre-warned me on that question, which was great. And my initial reaction, and I still believe it to be true, is there's absolutely room. And I think if you said no to that question, then you wouldn't have experienced
it. I think that's the only reason you would have said no. And so it just either meant that you either hadn't worked with the right team or you had a different philosophy or that you just hadn't got to a point where you could experience it in business. And, you know, people aren't different just because they're working. There are points where you say, you know, you will say to someone, it's just business, I'm sorry.
But it's the rules are still the same whether you know it's social friends or business the rules are the same so if you if you give you'll get if you take you'll get taken that's how it works I love that and so where is the love in that for you is it is it in the work you do is it in you know just just caring about people yeah it's so that's really partnerships for me and that's, you know, trusting people.
You know, believing in people, helping people make the right decisions and treating them like they're worth something. And, you know, it's amazing what you can do just by acknowledging someone.
And it's the old classic, which is, you know, if you take a tiny bit of extra space to say hello to someone, to know someone's name, and I'm talking about a manufacturing facility now whether it's the cleaner or the baker or someone who you know rolls a donut then that's that's how you change the world you know that's that's the classic which is what you're really saying is you're worth knowing and you're important enough for me to
stop and say hello and ultimately that reversed as well which is you know they've got to give you their time And if you remember someone's name on the floor, as an example, just as a simple example, when you shake their hand, you are halfway to getting them to do whatever you want and they will respect you and love you for that. Oh my God, David. So I've been trying to get David onto the podcast for some time and he's been like, yeah, yeah, yeah, nah, yeah.
And I'm so glad you have finally relented and said yes. So I just want to share with our listeners a quick little story because I've known David for many, many years. Many? Maybe 30? No. 30? No, no, no. Mm-hmm. Would they? 25. Anyway. Sorry, I get it. David was my client. When I had my agency, he was my client at Dairy Farmers. And we were working with David when the agency was going through a really tough time.
And it was when the GFC hit, but there had been all these other things and it was a really difficult time. And I was scaling the agency down. And I got a call from David and something had gone wrong with the project.
I don't know if you remember this do you and and basically he said we've got a problem he told me what the problem was and basically said what do you need from me to help make this right or something along those lines and you gave us space to sort things out you gave us your full support it was more it It was just the way you approached it was so different to how I've experienced most clients approaching a problem. And we got things working. We got the project back on track.
And, you know, David was our biggest supporter. And you didn't have to treat us that way, but you did. And the loyalty that we felt for you after that just amplified in droves. And every time David needed something, it was like, yeah, how high do you want us to jump? It was, you know, of course you are, you have that attitude when you're an agency, but it was to another level because we knew we had someone who was a real supporter and just a good human being who wanted to do the right thing.
And I think that goes back to how you just answered that question. Oh, that's lovely. Thank you, Carolyn. I do remember that project and you won't believe it, but I was speaking about this project. But yeah, I was talking about it the other day, this was to my wife, and just saying that the concept was so strong, the actual concept was so, so strong, and just little things getting in the way of that happening were just little things.
And you're always disappointed, but there's always things that go wrong, and there's no one that doesn't have things go wrong, and it's just then how you react to those things that go wrong because, and sometimes you have to react poorly, right? Sometimes there's just no way out other than just cocoon, right? You just have to say, well, that's a, you know, really it's a you problem. But in this case, it was really around how do we fix it?
And also, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but that concept still rolls to this day. Oh, really? No, I didn't know that. Wow. So that went away, that went away, Caroline, for about, for a number of years, It's probably a decade and that now is playing a central role in the promotion of that brand. So even they've recognised how good that concept was and have brought it back. Oh, there you go. We created a little bit of magic together, didn't we?
We did. We did. We really did. And that's a national brand that's sort of gone back 15 years in time, recognised how strong that was and then revisited it, which is a real compliment. Oh, fantastic. That's so great to hear. Okay, so let's get back to love and money. Tell us, if you could share with our listeners, give us a brief summary on where you're at now and what you're doing. So, this is around a transition. That Bob and Pete's made about, what was it, six or seven years ago?
Probably, Carolyn, would that be, that'd be right, wouldn't it? Yeah, probably, yeah, yeah. And I might just preface that, which, that we had a new assistant brand manager that came into the team who was very much of her generation and just bowled in here and said, you know, and she said, well, that's great, we're doing, we're bakery, but what are we doing for the Indigenous population? What are we doing for the, you know, the elephants in Thailand? What are we doing to support the arts?
You know, what are we doing? And I just was going, whoa, just hold on. That's great. It's great to have a purpose, but, you know, what are you talking about? Well, we should be doing more. We should be doing more. And that was Louise Muscolino, who I'm sure we can mention. And she was right. right and she really wanted to change the world and she wanted to make the world better.
And I knew really that the answer wasn't about trying to do everything it's about trying to do something and that that was the that started the journey on what we could do in a meaningful way and that and then I know I contact I contacted you and I know you spoke to her about what it was and that you know what we could do and and the right way to achieve things and that was the start of of our journey of Bob and Pete's journey to to to develop a purpose and then really lean
on that purpose as a way to do business um so that that's the start of this which is you know like as it should be you know a young a young woman in this case who who wanted to change the world but just needed some leadership and mentoring to sort of frame that and to put it in a meaningful way, to make it happen and so from that I think the business has then evolved to to be really an adopter of a purpose-led business you know we so and what what's happened Carolyn and and this is this
is something that you you wouldn't see so much or maybe you see it and and you know you You just, you know, I don't see it as much because I'm in the trenches sort of thing. But when we talk about our values, you know. We now relate that back to our purpose. So we never did that. So when we talk about, you know, how much electricity we're using, we talk that comes back to what our purpose is.
And when we talk about even things like food safety, because we're in the bakery, we bring that back to our purpose. So what happens is it underpins all the good stuff that you can do. And so what happens is when you introduce these things, right, So we introduced the values probably about three or four years ago, and they just slid in straight to the business because we understood about what purpose-led was and why they're important, right?
So, for example, our values, and I'm not sure this is too different from anyone else, to be honest, but we have safety quality, whatever, passion, respect and inclusivity, partnership and delivery, which is, that's probably what everybody has.
But when we bring that to the business as a whole, so when we have our 150-odd employees and we talk about our values, we tie that back to what our purpose is, which is really – so that's the loop that we complete around purpose-led, which is probably a good time just to say what our purpose was. Yeah, please do. We're a bakery. Bob and Pete's Bakery, and our purpose is to bake things better. We say, we're baking things better, which wasn't my idea either. I stole that idea from an old CEO.
He wrote that down and passed it across the room and sort of said, what do you think about that? And I said, that is a great, that's it. I don't even need to work on it anymore. Yep, yep. Perfect, right? So that was lovely as well because it was his little thing. So politically, that was probably a very clever thing to do as well, but it was his.
And then we say that's why we're on a mission to use our business, our products, our people, our resources, our ideas and influence to benefit our team, our community and the planet that we depend on. Bomb peats, corporate, and then we overlay lots of stuff over that but part of that we'll also say is that then, you know, that then becomes about packaging, recyclability and excess food and volunteering and all that sort of stuff. But that's the piece that we use.
So if we sort of talk about, so we've just come through a thousand days without a lost time injury, which in anyone's language is an outstanding achievement. And for a bakery and an artisan bakery that uses equipment and carries dough and uses knives and, you know. And heats things and cools things and wets things and lifts things, all that, that's incredible, right? So a thousand days without it, without anyone having to not come to work because of an injury.
So we we just talk about well if our mission is to benefit our people and do better by our people if we're going to bake things better then absolutely we need to keep them safe yeah right so what are the things we're doing to keep people safe and then everything will flow from there okay well you know great we better have a uniform policy you know we better have a wet floors policy we better have a plan around making sure our floors are level you know like it's the basic stuff that is
underpinned by our purpose and that's just that's just one piece so can i ask you and that's so interesting and i know you've you've got some strategic pillars that have come flowed from that purpose and that that safety first business is one of them you would have all those things that have come out of that you would have done some of them anyway as part of the business, I'm sure. No. Well, we wouldn't have been able to do it easily.
That's the point I'm trying to make, right, is once you put people, once you put community, once you put products, whatever it is in your purpose... Then all these things tie in. So you can say, yeah, absolutely, we need to be safe. Why do we need to be safe? Because we need to protect people. Yeah, well, of course we do because our purpose is. So then everyone goes, well, yeah, that's right, of course.
So how do we do that? So it doesn't, and because it's all tied in, because it's all meshed, you're not having that. It doesn't exist as one single thing. It exists, you know, as safety isn't about safety.
Safety is about being part of our purpose quality that is that is so powerful yeah go on go on it's the same right quality well of course we've got to sell quality products because people want to buy them yeah yeah well of course we've got to make quality because part of our purpose is to bake things better and and to look after our customers so what do they want well they want they want food safety they want product that's consistent they want to be able to make a profit it
they want to they want to have products that sell however you want to spin it but the reality is that that allows you your purpose allows you to layer all these things in without any problem like it's just it becomes a natural way of thinking and and you know most people I imagine and this is what happened when we started and I imagine when everyone starts it comes about okay well how do we reduce our waste we're going to make
things better how to reduce waste okay well that's a component, right? That's a sustainability piece. Yep. The reality is the purpose starts to creep in to everything that you do. This is brilliant. And if you think about it, I guess, before you had that, the unarticulated purpose of the business would have been profitability of any business, right? And look, that's key, right?
You can't have a business that's got the happiest people and they're having the funnest time and the safest if you're not being profitable. You just, it can't work, right? So there's always compromise. The two are hand in hand. They're hand in hand. But what you want, you want purpose to deliver the profit. That's it. Purpose driving profit.
That's right. Because when profit is the central engine room, then things like sustainability become a siloed piece that aren't connected to the main purpose of the organisation. That's right. That's absolutely right. Whereas what you want it is you want it all connected. And so that's why values can sit under your purpose. Yeah. Because it all is the same thing. It's just a new understanding of how it works.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And then you've got the customer piece, which, you know, quality obviously connects to customer, but it's about building trust, isn't it? Well, so I guess it's core, it is. But when we ask, this is some work we're just recently doing. So when we ask our customers just about sustainability, just as we want to make sure we're aligning with our customers' values on sustainability, right?
And so when we go and we look at the UN charters and how it breaks down, it's not, it's not, sustainability is a little bit blurry in terms of how they talk about it, right? So education, you know, typically you wouldn't think about that as a sustainability, but it is, right, because when you know things and you do better and all that sort of stuff.
So what we included was we included quality or hygiene and sanitation, which I know is a stretch, I think it is, about whether our customers care about that. We're a food business, right? I'm just going to ask you to take a step back so that our listeners can understand you're not a retail bakery. We're a B2B. So your customers are? We sell to cafes. So we're asking, I should have started that, should have done that at the start, but it's Bob and Pete's Bakery.
We're a wholesale bakery. We sell predominantly to cafes. and so when we when we talk to our customers we're talking to our cafes and we've said what's in terms of sustainability what is important to you so we've just you know said uh food miles is that important you know recycling is that important so the standard questions you would ask and then we said food hygiene and safety as part of of that right and that looks like we haven't got through it, but that looks like it's their number one.
We've also said how important is it when you make a choice for the supplier you want, you use to be sustainable, you know, to be a sustainable business. And they've said very important. So, you know, four out of five, which, right? So that's, they're basically saying, no, it's important to the decision we make. Interestingly, we've said to your customer or the consumer, in effect, how important is it? And they're saying not very.
Sustainability is not very. Yeah, right. Not very. So I've got to get, I've got to dig a bit, a bit further.
But it looks like safety as in food safety is going to be their top concern in terms of sustainability right now that's a really interesting piece i need to get to the bottom of and i've got to figure out exactly what that means but what what they're trying to say is that if if i'm producing good safe food then i you know then i'm sustainable yeah that's what they're saying is I need to trust you to deliver good,
safe food every time so that I can keep my business running because I'm not hurting anyone. Yeah. And that's something we've never considered as a sustainability piece. We've said we need to be a safe product so we don't go to jail. You know what I mean? But our customers are saying, no, that's great, but extend it forward. It's so important for us, for you to have safe, quality product in terms of sustainability, right?
So I've got to figure that out. And then I've got to tie it back to our purpose as well. I guess I'm just giving you a bit of a brain fart there. What I'm saying is there's so much more to learn. Yeah. And it's a constant journey, the whole thing. But I love that you are taking feedback directly from your customers and, you know, rather than just reacting to it, you're actually trying to connect it back to what is important to the business.
That makes me so happy to hear because that is what drives any business's long-term sustainability, and I'm talking about sustainability in life sustainability of a business, because you are looking after the long-term, you know, well-being of all your stakeholders. Yeah, well, it's the benefit. but it's the benefit to our customer.
And just when I talk about going to jail, what I mean is that, you know, the risk a food manufacturer always has is bacterial, right, which is you make something that contains something that makes someone sick, but what's becoming more important is the allergen, right, which is that, you know, we have a facility that has nuts, right, And so, we have a product that has a nut in it that we either, we don't label properly or it gets across contamination or it uses the wrong,
like it uses hazelnuts, but it should have had walnut, whatever. So, a wrong recipe. And so, therefore, somebody has an allergic reaction. Which can be catastrophic. Catastrophic. Catastrophic. Keeps me up at night, that stuff.
I bet it does. and that's that's what I think that cafe is trying to feed back right which is that you've got a big responsibility to me yeah because if this happens if you're not giving me this product that I can trust and it's safe I'm out of business yeah so are you yeah you know anyway I'm gonna I'm gonna unpick that it was just an interesting it was just an interesting bit of feedback really Really interesting. Really interesting.
I want to go back a little bit and just touch on the origins of your purpose strategy, because you talked about Louise Muscolino and how she agitated for this. And you did, you introduced her to us. But there was something, and I wrote about it in my book, so many people I speak to have that sort of belief that I'm just one person, what can I do? And with Louise, she was junior. She'd just come into the organization. And I think you'd given her a copy of my first book and she'd read it and we
met for coffee and she said, this is great, but who am I? What can I do? That same question. and we had a chat about it and I just urged her to start small and to look at what problems she saw in the business. And the fact that she had you there as her mentor and as her manager and that you were open to these things was absolute gold. But she started off by going, I remember the conversation so clearly. She said, the amount of food waste is insane. and it drives me mad.
And I said, what might you do about it? All I did was ask her questions. And she said, well, I could call Foodbank, but I don't know if it's going to be worth their time to come out. And I said, why don't you make a phone call and ask? And I encouraged her to find allies and collaborators. And she did it. Tell me about the Foodbank partnership now. So, what we're really talking about here is opportunity and then focus.
And so, what we had to do there, and this is everybody's challenge, is to say, what can I change? How can I make a difference? And, you know, if you're a food business and you want to align with young artists, you know that's going to be a very very tough piece to get through anything if you're a food business and you you've you want to make sure that no food ends up in the bin.
And that people can benefit from that, so people who really need it, then that's something that's much closer in that people can understand and you can quickly and easily get people within the business and outside the business to understand. So that's your first challenge is finding what you can change. And in this case, we're a minnow in the whole scheme of things.
But what we said is what can we do, and part of this was food waste, is to make sure no food, and this is where we got to, goes to landfill, right? So that was our big thinking, right? So how do we make sure that stuff that we waste, and every food company has waste, you just can't get around it, how do we make sure that doesn't end up in the ground? And so we looked at, we actually looked at lots and lots of different things.
We changed our waste provider, right? And so not all our products can end up doing good, but in this case, we found one that 100% takes organic waste and either uses it to methane production, so it actually goes to produce something, or to cattle food, right? So that was just little thinking like that. We went and changed, right? So we got someone that would take it, pelletise it, and actually give it to cows, right? And at the time we were doing
this, the drought was on as well. So that was a big thing. But the second part of it was, great, we have all this product that's fine. What do we do with it? So we contacted Foodbank, and this was Foodbank New South Wales and ACT, and just said, hey, we're over here. Can you use some of our product? And they said, we can use everyone's product. And we went, great. What does that look like? And I said, we'll just drop it off and we'll use it. And we went, right.
That seemed pretty easy. And so we actually used one of our drivers and they dropped product off every day, right? And this product then ended up at women's refuges and school canteens and all this sort of stuff that Food Bank does. And they really do a great job. But what it did, it got us close in to the people, the really good people of Food Bank. And what that led to was further discussions. And we just said, look, we really want to help. We really want to help.
And they said, all right, well, what we really need is sliced bread. And again, it just comes down to what you can do and what you can't. Well, we don't make sliced bread. We sell it, but it's someone else, right? It's a very specialist thing. And so we did our best. We never got there with sliced bread. And we said, well, it's not a thing. What else can you do? And they said, well, we don't know, cash. Cash is good. We said, well, that's great. Cash is great. But it doesn't get us anywhere.
Like, that's great. We can give you some money, but just it's not, it's, it's so one dimensional, you know, it doesn't, how am I going to involve a business saying, yeah, we're all going to donate to food bank. It just doesn't, didn't feel right. And anyway, we, we came up with the food bank donor.
And so what we modeled, we modeled this off the Paul Newman source, which is you make a product, you make the best product you can, and then you basically contribute, that product exists to contribute to the charity. And Foodbank, to their credit, just said, yeah, that sounds great. And so the Foodbank Donut is their brand colors. It's purple and white. We sell that across cafe. We do a little bit of marketing with it. Actually, we do a fair amount of marketing with it.
And the story is that everyone we sell, we donate one meal to Food Bank. So we're just coming up to 60,000 meals donated. Wow. Yeah, and we're hoping to do close to 25,000 meals this year, which would be, I mean, 25,000 meals is a lot of meals and we're quite proud of that. The fact that, you know, us being the minnow can do that for Food Bank, we're very proud of. Yep. And that's something that we hope turns into something massive.
Even 25,000 meals a year is a big deal. It's huge. It's huge. It's absolutely huge. Yep. So you've got the donations from the donut. You've got deliveries from leftover food. Yeah. So we, unfortunately, journey of distance beat us a bit there. So we ended up through recommendation with food bank got in touch with addy road which is our local charity yeah and so our donations go down to addy road now so our food donations will go to addy road okay yeah,
Okay, and you're volunteering? Is that still happening? Yeah, so we give the chance for everyone, well, every staff, I guess, to volunteer two days. So that's fine and that's paid. We're desperate to get that increased. So we want everyone in the business to volunteer. Our problem just becomes, and this is stuff you're always knocking, trying to knock down doors.
There's always something you can do better but we would love everyone to volunteer it's just going to come down to we run 24 hours some people start at 6 a.m some people start at 11 some people start at 3 some people start at 7 some people start at three o'clock in the morning so it's it just comes to how how can we make that happen and we're almost there and we we had last year we had about 300 hours volunteering.
Wow. Which is still pretty good for us. Yeah. We would like to take that 400 this year. Ultimately, we think 800 would be that it starts to really infuse into the whole way Baldwin Pete's does things. But, you know, 400 means that we should be able to get around 20 to 30 of our, not just staff, but all the employees going to do some volunteering.
So that's potentially drivers, that's potentially dispatch team, that's the bakers, you know, that's the donut makers, you know, people that just don't normally get a chance to do that sort of stuff. Yeah, that's fantastic. Enjoying the podcast? If you're looking for more inspiration, head to our website, thecauseeffects.com.au, for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good.
Or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest. And so, you know, if you look at the Food Bank Partnership and what's come out of that, that came out of that one person, junior, doing what she could, the little that she could. That alone is amazing, but that alone, you could just say is your CSR piece, right? And what I love about what you guys have done is you have taken that opportunity to go further.
Like and you did the work around you know uncovering your purpose and you know taking that that wonderful phrase baking things better and giving it meaning by qualifying what that means and and then actually looking at how else you could do that and I think, that's where the opportunity lies I see so many businesses who just point to their CSR as well that's our purpose. Yeah, that ticks a box. Yeah, and you've gone to that next stage.
Oh, look, and Carolyn, I don't want to just hang the food bank donut as what we did for sustainability. It's sort of if you walk around this facility, you will see charts that measure how much waste we. We put out the door every day. Like you'll see how much electricity we use. You'll see how much gas we use. You'll see how much water we use. I mean, all these things are just sitting there like as important, measured and important.
You know, the other day when Lena came to see me, she's in finance, right, and she said our electricity usage has gone up in the office. Yeah. And I went, oh, okay, what's going on there? She said, I don't know. Have you left the coffee machine on? Have you turned the lights on? Is the air conditioning coming on? Anyway, so we just sat down and worked out. And I'm not saying that's good or bad. What I'm saying is people care about it, which is great.
I mean, that's something that she's looking at a KPI and saying, well, hold on, we're using too much power. Obviously, there's a cost and a benefit in that respect to the business, but in a bigger piece, we're using less greenhouse gas. I mean, it's like, and we do that for every single thing that you would consider for sustainability. And when we go, when we take things out the door, they're all sorted now.
So we have our organic waste sorted with our plastic waste sorted with our cardboard waste sorted. And it's all, you know, there's some Paul Bugger, bless him, he does the fence, it's Amman. He does a great job and he cares. He sorts the clear plastic from the unclear. It gets bailed. It goes out the door, it gets reused. We don't get charged for our plastic because we found the right person who says, I'll take that away for free. I'm going to sell that on.
So they sell that on to be recycled. We get paid for our cardboard. So every bit of cardboard that goes out, we get money. So for our organic waste, we negotiated a better price because now it's all separated. It's not even in plastic. It's just in bins and they take it and they can use it. And we're getting down to this granular level. Of how are we making, well, how are we baking things better? And it's all being thought about in micro levels.
Like how do we get this thing working better? And so that's, does it go through to everyone in the business? Everyone, right? No, everyone, because like Amman's the last guy on the chain, right? He sorts it and bails it. But the person who gets that box, the driver that brings that box back, he gets paid for that box. Yeah. So we pay him to bring it back. So you incentivize them to bring that box back so you can recycle it. We can reuse it, hopefully, right, but recycle it as well.
And then he has to look at it. Does it have any, did it get a little bit of fondant on it? Did it get a bit of grease on it? Whatever, right? And if it's no good, it's off for recycling. If it isn't, if it's good, he reuses it, right? When people are doing in the factory and they've got waste, you know, we've developed a couple of very successful products that now reuse the croissant So in the past, that would just go back into brioche or be wasted, right?
But now it's being reused. So we're holding value and it's going into a morning bun or a cinnamon spice bun. So efficiency as well. Efficiency, right. But it's all how you look at it, which is we don't want that waste in the bin. Why would we? Yeah. What can we do with it? Okay, well, let's come up with a couple of clever products. And it's a different motivation rather than I've got to do this to save money or whatever.
But it comes because ops will come to us and say, hey, we're throwing, you know, last month we threw out a lot of X. Yeah. Oh, okay, well, what can we do about that? Well, there's no, you know, like, okay, well, let's do this. With a tiny bit of processing, we can turn that into something else. And so that just means it doesn't go out the door, which just means it doesn't end up in landfill. And that's the cycle that just, you know, we're going down to minutiae of thinking about it.
I remember a conversation with you, David, where you were talking about, so the big boxes. So to our listeners, you know, if you go into a cafe, Bob and Pete's 100% yum. We'll include that on one of the promo clips somehow. But David was talking about how, you know, they were implementing this incentive scheme to get drivers to bring back the boxes and they were educating, you were educating your customers on why you were doing this.
And I remember so clearly a conversation we had where some of your big corporate customers, you were saying that they were pushing back and saying, no, we have hygiene rules and you can't do that. Virgin board. They wanted virgin board, yeah. And your attitude was, no, this is what we do. That's right. And this is, you know, all they've got is someone reading from a script, right? And you're right. You just push back. You just say, well, what is it that you
really, what do you need here? Well, we're worried about hygiene. Okay, well, we'll line that with a single laminate piece of plastic. And so that single laminate is very, very easy to recycle and we'll recycle it. is that enough to protect your products from your concerns? I mean, it's part way. Well, what about if we come up with a process in terms of sorting the boxes, right? Now, I'm not sure we 100% got there, to be honest, but what we did was we got
a lot of the way. So we didn't get everyone across the line. Yeah. All we did was we moved a lot of people across the line. Yeah. And so that's a win, you know, that's a win. We should say, too, we've been part of the 1% pledge program which I'm not sure I still get 100%, but the more important piece is that it asks you to find a way to make a promise. And that 1% is about you putting in writing how you're going to give back.
So we put down in writing that 1% of our profit will be given back in some way.
And so in that case it's a it's a personal way we do it as in a Bob and Pete's way but talking to this to the 1% pledge organization they were very open they said we don't care like you make up the rules it's about making the commitment and so I'm still not 100% across the 1% pledge but I get the important part which is you know it's the old stories as soon as you tell your friends you're going to do something it becomes much more powerful and then that's what they're trying
to achieve and so We're very much focused on that. And do you know what I love about 1% Pledge is it's about making something as easy as possible to walk through a door, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, you've got B Corp certification, which is not easy. It is. It's easy.
Hard and it's supposed to be hard right but what I love is one percent pledge actually starts a lot of companies on the journey because it's like we can do that yeah let's start there and one percent of profit turns into one percent of profit plus one percent of time that's right yeah and one percent of net sales or however you want to build it it doesn't matter but what it makes you accountable That's what it does. And it's for you to find where you're comfortable as well.
It's a lot of ways it's a starting spot to get people talking. So tell me, have there been any major barriers in walking this path? Yes, 100%. I think when you believe in something, you're willing to sort of either ignore them, walk under them, climb over them. and we had, you know, I'm happy to talk about it. So we had some, let's say, head office concerns about what we were doing, but we just kept at them.
And I don't know how specifically I should go into this, but let's just say we got told not to do some of this stuff. And in no nasty way, but it just didn't, in terms of systems, we didn't have systems in place.
And so we were sort of told, don't, that's not something that you should do but we ignored it we didn't yeah and and we sort of just said we'll know we'll be successful when when when we're up at one of our management meetings you know and the boss is up presenting this and what a great job it's done right and that took a long time and we we certainly bore some risk around that that would be putting yourselves on the line like management Yeah,
and part of it is, you know, it's that like, you know, it's on you. No, it's not even that. It's like we know what you're doing and we understand what you're doing and we're supportive of what you're doing, but if it goes wrong. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the story. And, you know, we would joke about that and we would sort of manage it like marketers do. A good marketer is always trying to find ways around the rules.
And what happened was that, yeah, I was at a team presentation where the CEO got up and he talked about what a great job Bob and Pete's had done with Foodbank Donor. And that was the moment, you know, when we knew we had changed, you know, we changed the world, you know, not just our world, our greater world, and we had acceptance of what we were doing and that just became so much more powerful because then it became aspirational.
We were doing it and he was presenting it to a group as a good thing to do. That's how you changed the world is by changing yourself. Well, I think there's a lot of things to change, but certainly that was an acknowledgement, that we really had made a difference. And even now we have some of our sister companies, people in our sister companies come and say, we can't believe what you've done. We literally cannot believe it. It's so aspirational. But I just say,
look, we just had a head start. That's all. We're just a couple of years in front of you. You can do the same thing. That's, you know, you just got to start. And what we haven't even touched on is the work you're doing with your employees to help them grow. Because it permeates into every part of the business. You know, we basically just, I haven't told you this, or maybe I have, but, you know, certainly part of your work was around meaningful work. Yeah. And, and we, we use engagement.
So, so we did, we had every single employee, that's everyone. That's from the truck driver to the GM, do our, do our engagement survey. I did an engagement survey and it's global. It's the Gallup engagement. So we scored 4.8. Oh, I might have this a little bit wrong, but I'm going to say it was 4.86, which puts us like in the top 93%. Whoa, that's amazing. Well, I guess it's the top 7%, is it? Oh, I don't know.
But anyway, so yeah, it's amazing. And they've got something like 40,000 companies and we're right at the top. And, you know, a lot of credit for that goes to our GM, to Wayne. Yeah. His ability and his humility and just how he engages with people and allows us to get on with this stuff. But at the end of the day, what the reality is, is all this stuff leads to engaged, happy employees. So you think it's a burden. But it's not. What it does is it delivers all the way through the business.
So you've got people saying, you know what, I love working there. I feel valued. I feel like I've got a future. I feel like people respect me. You know, I do meaningful work. I've got friends there. Like I come to work and I'm surrounded by friends. There's 12 questions. At the end of the day, it's a score out of five. And we're hitting that 4.86. I'm not sure where we even go after that.
But it's the journey, and a lot of this is Wayne's journey, you know, because the guy at the top is the one who decides the culture, really. And we've gone from where we were to, you know, world leading. You know, we are just, we're right at the pinnacle. And that's people like Facebook and Google and, you know, all those guys, Patagonia and all that, do that same survey. We're up there with them. I mean, it's crazy. We're a bakery in Maritville.
That's amazing. And yeah, as you say, credit to Wayne. Wayne Norrish, who is the GM of Bob and Pete's, who from the work that we've done together, and I know I only see a part of it, but I see you as the champion who's been driving a lot of this, but the openness and not just openness, but the desire from Wayne to go on the journey has allowed so much of this to happen as well. It really has. And he's a, he is really a wonderful, generous human.
Like he really is, you know, one of those guys that he's so focused on the result and the profitability and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, he is so hospitable. It's a funny, he's like, he's like the perfect host. You know, he's worried about everybody. And, And this is his sort of crowning achievement, but so much of it is based around the baking things better purpose-led statement. That's what gets you there.
Wonderful. How does it make you feel because this has been a big journey for you? I treat it as a bit black and white. For me, it's just a very logical way to do things. You know that sometimes you find something and you realise that people think differently to how you think. What you just think all along, doesn't that just make sense? So none of this is, I don't feel like any of this is a surprise to me. Which is kind of surprising because you come from corporate.
No, that's absolutely right. Yeah. But at the same point, I started in ops. So I started working with refugees in an ice cream plant. And I got a very good grounding on what makes people motivated and how they want to be treated. So very much that was my grounding in that space. And so, yeah, look, that's a good question. Do you know what? I haven't had time to think about it. That's the truth. You know what? I'm just on to the next thing.
So I don't know. I might have to get back to you on how I feel about it. I'm just, you know. I'd like to hear that.
You know it's ticked now what do we do next sort of stuff so yeah maybe I should just take five minutes and and have a think about it I think you should I think you should David I think you'd be quite surprised I've I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I thank you for for taking the time to to come on this podcast and share your journey I'd like to ask you as we close off to think about the future.
You know, you've come so far already that, And thinking into the future, five years from now to 2030, if you could achieve your wildest dreams through the business, through what you're doing. Through, you know, carrying on this journey, what might that look like? So the first thing is you have to have a successful, profitable business. Like you just, you have to. So you still make, you still have to make the right business decisions. You know, you've still got to fend off your competitors.
You've still got to launch market-leading products. You've still got your service and your quality and all those things, right? So in five years, we're a profitable product, making sure that our customers get exactly what they need, right? And so that's the key, right? So that's the part that helps you grow, that pays the rent, that pays the employers, all that sort of stuff.
But in terms of what the baking things better does like i i've i really i'm really tied to the food bank donor so i i want that to do a hundred thousand meals and so like our next our next step is 50 000 i wanted a hundred thousand a hundred thousand i would get i would get skywriting and i would put it up there and i'd say bob and pete's delivered a hundred thousand probably too big for skywriting, but I would want everybody to know, that that's what Bob and Pete's can do.
And if I think about 100,000 people eating a meal in a room, you know, it's just massive. And the need is there. And the food bank, if the donut can do it, a simple donut can do it, I will be over the moon on that. And, you know, it's not unobtainable. I mean, that just means I need a partner, someone like a Coles Express or a 7-Eleven or a Woolworths or a Coles, and it'll happen. We'll get there. So, look, I can talk about, you know, we want to do more volunteering.
I want engagement scores to stay the same. I want our NPS scores and all, you know, I want to be a safe workplace and all that sort of stuff. I think that's the price of entry. But if I want to change the world, I want the food bag donor to start really making a big difference to the people's lives who need a meal. That would be, you know, I would go to sleep happy and not if we can say that. Wonderful. I love it. David, thank you so much for joining us. The work you're doing is incredible.
And, you know, I think this episode will inspire people to look at their own business and see how they can take that first step and see where it might take them. That's right. Yep. And, you know, and thank you to you too. You've been part of this journey the whole way along and completely supportive. And, you know, your part in this journey has been significant as well. I appreciate that. Thanks for listening to this episode of the For Love and Money podcast.
If you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement, visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au. And remember, doing good is good for business. So if you're not doing good, then what are you doing?