In 2014, Unilever reported that their Sustainable Living Brands, the product lines with the most explicit sustainability positioning, like Dove and Ben & Jerry’s, were growing 30% faster than the rest of the portfolio and delivering more than half the company’s growth. This is the number that made the Sustainable Living Plan consequential rather than just ambitious. The mission and the revenue were moving in the same direction.
Launched in 2010 under CEO Paul Polman, the USLP set three primary objectives across a 10-year horizon: improve health and well-being for more than a billion people, halve the environmental footprint of their products, and enhance livelihoods for millions of people across their value chain.
What the Plan Actually Committed To
The USLP wasn’t a values statement. It was a set of more than 70 time-bound, measurable targets. That specificity is the design feature that made it different from most corporate sustainability programs of its era.
The greenhouse gas goal: reduce emissions by 50% by 2020, working across thousands of suppliers in their supply chain. The company acknowledged explicitly that supply chain emissions, not their own operations, represented the majority of their footprint. Getting to 50% required engaging suppliers on emissions data, which Unilever did by creating supplier platforms and collaborative programs rather than just demanding disclosure.
The packaging goal: halve packaging waste through a combination of reducing packaging materials, improving recyclability, and partnering with governments and NGOs on waste collection infrastructure in markets where that infrastructure didn’t exist. Unilever’s green recycling points in cities, where consumers drop off household recyclables for discount coupons redeemable against Unilever products, demonstrate the operational creativity the plan required.
The USLP’s most important design decision wasn’t the targets — it was insisting that the sustainability agenda and the growth agenda were the same thing. That framing changed what questions got asked in every planning meeting.
Where It Worked and Where It Didn’t
Unilever achieved many of the USLP’s targets, including substantial progress on greenhouse gas emissions, water usage reduction, and sustainable sourcing certification for agricultural commodities. The Sustainable Living Brands’ growth premium over the broader portfolio was sustained through the plan’s duration.
The palm oil target, reducing unsustainably produced palm oil, was one area where progress lagged. Unilever reported in 2014 that they had failed to reduce palm oil from non-RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) certified plantations by more than 19%, far short of their target. This acknowledgment of failure is more instructive than the successes. When a company publishes what it didn’t achieve alongside what it did, it signals genuine measurement rather than managed communication.
The USLP’s successor commitments, including a net-zero emissions goal and a plastics-free packaging target, carry more credibility because of this track record of honest reporting.
What Retailers and Companies Can Learn
The USLP demonstrated several things that were genuinely novel for a major consumer goods company at scale:
Supplier engagement changes more than mandates. Unilever’s collaborative supplier programs on regenerative agriculture and greenhouse gas reduction moved more quickly than top-down standards alone would have.
The Sustainable Living Brands business case made the financial argument visible. Instead of asking investors to accept sustainability costs, Unilever showed that sustainability-positioned brands could grow faster.
Transparency about failures builds more credibility than perfection. The companies that followed Unilever’s model learned that disclosing the palm oil miss, rather than burying it, actually strengthened stakeholder trust in the plan’s overall integrity.
P.S. Unilever’s annual sustainability reports from the USLP period (2010-2020) are publicly available and worth reading as a template for how a large company sets, measures, and communicates about sustainability targets, including the ones they didn’t meet.