Ocean Spray Cranberries – Eric Chappell – 2014

Goals

Eric Chappell served as an EDF Climate Corps fellow with Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc. and focused on improving the co-op’s understanding of the environmental impacts created by the transportation of its products, both between its facilities and to customers.

Solutions

Pairing the results of his impact analysis with employee insights, Chappell worked to locate a number of opportunities that could reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and costs. Working directly with Ocean Spray’s warehouse and logistics team, Chappell first evaluated its greenhouse gas emissions tracking tool. From there, Chappell identified transportation lanes which would have the greatest effects on both costs and emissions by switching to intermodal (rail) transportation.  Chappell also delved deeper into understanding a single distribution center which presented multiple opportunities for order optimization. After a thorough analysis, Chappell identified two strategies for reducing costs and emissions. First, encouraging customers to place orders on a regular schedule would increase order consolidation opportunities, and this could mean up to 11 percent fewer truck deliveries to major customers. Second, placing larger, less frequent orders would reduce the amount of pallet deconstruction occurring at the distribution center, cutting labor costs, packaging waste and operational energy use. Once these tasks had been completed, Chappell compared Ocean Spray’s transportation activities with those of other food and beverage companies, creating a benchmark for the co-op.

Potential Impact

A switch to 75 percent intermodal routes on the lanes Chappell identified would yield a 10 percent reduction in GHG emissions from transportation. Less frequent orders would reduct pallet deconstruction and cut labor, packaging and operational costs. Chappell’s benchmark provides Ocean Spray with a set of industry ‘best practices’ and a road map for the organization’s continued development of an industry leading sustainable transportation model.