Aaron Schreiber-Stainthorp, Sustainability Specialist, Jackson Family Wines
Jackson Family Wines (JFW), is a family owned wine company known for their commitment to producing high quality wines including Kendall-Jackson, La Crema, Freemark Abbey, Stonestreet and many more. Kendall-Jackson Vintners Reserve Chardonnay has been the number one Chardonnay in the US for the past 25 years. Along with the company’s commitment to making artisan quality wines is a commitment to being a responsible company, which has lead JFW to be a leader in sustainability.
Be sure to check out Aaron’s website which details the offerings of his consulting firm, Sustainability Squared for food and beverage clients at https://aaronstainthorp.com
What do you actually do all day?
I make Sustainability the default by capturing data, implementing better systems, and training staff. A lot of the job varies day by day and involves working with employees at all levels of the company. Being a change advocate requires being creative, flexible, resilient, and having good data.
Operational efficiency, including data analysis, is probably the largest portion of the work I do. I start out by gathering as much data on an issue as I can, researching and brainstorming potential solutions, and then actually going on-site to see how some of those ideas work on the ground. I utilize a lot of tools from the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance which is a great resource for those in the wine or beverage industry.
Our company owns multiple wineries and vineyards. We have 50 locations, (150 including vineyards), and we’re actively pursuing sustainability initiatives at each site. I’ve developed some high-level company-wide recommendations; however, those recommendations need to be tailored to each specific site. For example, with waste, one site might use different materials, or have a different waste hauler with different capabilities, or different space constraints. A lot of my time is spent walking through the facility, working with the staff, and figuring out how to best custom tailor the program for that site. You learn quickly that the solutions that may sound great in the office don’t always work at each facility.
Our winemakers are very focused on temperature control and sanitation. They need to carefully control the temperature to influence fermentation and the proper aging and flavor development of the wine. That means that for the winemaking part of the process, the areas I concentrate on are increasing the efficiency of our heating and cooling processes and trying to reduce the amount of water required for cleaning. We’ve made great strides in both areas with industry leading advancements in barrel washing (Jackson Family Wines won the 2015 Environmental Leader award) and in sanitation (developing cutting edge waterless sanitation techniques).
We also focus a lot on waste, we have a goal of getting zero waste certified. Our wineries have a diversion rate of 98.2% because almost all of the material is getting composted or recycled. The secret behind that is the pomace, which is the word we use for the grape seeds, stems, and skins left over from juicing. Pomace makes up 91% of our wineries waste stream and we compost all of it, and put it back in our vineyards, which brings the whole process full circle. We’ve got several projects going right now to try to lower the cost and improve the quality of that compost as it’s a critical component to growing high quality grapes.
We’ve been doing experiments on carbon sequestration as well. In the vineyards we are increasing our sequestration through the addition of compost and reductions in tillage. We also own a lot of land in its natural state, only 50% of the land we own is planted to vineyard. We are doing a detailed GIS project to see if we can sequester more carbon on that land through the application of compost there too.
One of our largest projects so far will be released in two weeks; it’s an internal dashboard that displays all of our sustainability data in pretty close to real time. Everyone will be able to see each facility’s energy use, water use, solar generation, waste generation, and production metrics (gallons of wine made). Managers can use that data to make better decisions, and we can also use the dashboard to create rankings in terms of production ratios such was water use to wine produced. We have to normalize things so that the biggest wineries don’t always rank the highest since absolute savings for them can be pretty high. I love this project because we’re putting real time measurement metrics behind all of our sustainability initiatives, which makes it easier to identify opportunities and call out hot spots that need more attention. Sharing this data with everyone also makes it everyone’s responsibility to help improve company-wide sustainability.
This ties into our second sustainability report, which we are releasing an updated chapter of each month this year. In our inaugural report in 2016 we announced our very ambitious goals for 2021: 33% reduction in water use intensity, 50% of winemaking electricity coming from on-site renewables, and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity by 25%.
What are some of the key skills for success in this role?
To be successful requires being able to work with people across the organization. Most sustainability professionals have an amazing job, but very little actual authority, so convincing others to help you is a key requisite for success.
Secondly, understanding efficiency is one of the simplest but most powerful concepts. Using that as a framework, it helps to always have an open mind to understand why things are done the way they are and imagine alternate ways to accomplish the same goal. Wine is a tricky area to do this in because there are plenty of areas where we can embrace efficiency, but within the wine world you also need to respect the winemakers as artists and ensure they have room to experiment and innovate so we can all enjoy the fruit of their labors.
What is your favorite part of your job?
One of the things I love about working in sustainability in general is that a lot of the initial concepts are deceptively simple, but as you dive in to implementing them, you need to constantly learn and adapt to make initiatives successful, and it’s fascinating where that takes you. For example, I came to this job with almost no knowledge of carbon sequestration and now it’s a big part of what I do.
There are so many things I love about my job specifically, but I think my absolute favorite is that I get direct contact with the wonderful people who work on site every day. I also love that Jackson Family Wines has been very data driven about sustainability. We’ve been implementing more and more ways to collect data and now we can start to use it to make better decisions, which is really exciting.
One of the other things I love is that as a company we’re really focused on producing high quality wine, not producing at the lowest cost, which I think is also such a great way to talk about sustainability. Sustainability and making quality wine are both all about finding the best ways to utilize your resources. For example, we don’t care about having “heavy vines” which is a method of production that maximizes the number of grapes on the vine, we care about having healthy soil because we want to have high quality grapes. That lets us as a company have a different conversation about what we optimize and what it means to be a successful company.
What is the hardest part of your job?
Data. Collecting data, analyzing data, and making it actionable are the hardest parts of my job. This big dashboard project has really been a lot of “data janitorial work” spending time on ensuring we have reliable, consistent, integrated data. Sometimes that meant collecting data where it didn’t exist before, other times cleaning up the collection process, and still others finding ways to fill in holes or other strange aspects.
A lot of our facilities simply had no data collection on certain things until recently. Take waste for example, most facilities have a waste disposal container. You know how big the container is and how much you pay to have it emptied regularly, but you have no idea how full the container is at each pickup so you have no idea what volume of waste you’re disposing of. You can try to do a waste audit, but that just gives you a snapshot in time, there’s no trend history. We created a waste database with specific metrics for each site. We’ve got a named ‘waste czar’ at each site who tracks how full the containers are at each pickup (25% full, 80% full, etc). Since we know the volume of each container, we can calculate the volume of our waste. We then use the EPA’s volume to weight metrics to estimate the weight of our waste and recycling. We also periodically confirm that we’re using the right multiplier for each type of waste by having our haulers drive an empty truck on a scale, then fill the truck and get weighed again. We are really careful about that because our loads tend to be heavier than EPA averages because of how much glass we recycle. With pomace we are able to measure the actual weight with scales at our wineries so we get exact weight measurements for those. I would love to see scales integrated with the waste removal trucks, it’s not logistically difficult to do, but many haulers don’t want to make that investment. Waste haulers often make the most money on the large dumpsters with empty space, so focusing on Zero Waste is a chance to save money by right sizing waste containers.
There are also examples of places where data does exist, but it’s messy. When we wanted to start collecting detailed water data, measurements were read manually from analog meters and then typed into Excel. There’s lots of opportunity for error in a process like that, so we installed smart meters at all our production facilities.
What are the game changers in your world?
This data automation project will be huge for us. It will allow us to identify a lot more opportunities and to make smarter decisions.
What was your path to this role?
I managed national energy efficiency campaigns with the Alliance to Save Energy for several years in Washington DC before going back to school to get a Masters in Sustainability Management from the Kogod School of Business at American University. After graduating I was accepted as an EDF Climate Corps fellow and was able to put my experience to use as a fellow for Jackson Family Wines. Once I started working in the wine industry, I never looked back. It had been the most fun I’d ever had at work, and the most work I’d ever done. Unfortunately, when my fellowship was over my manager didn’t have any openings on his team, so he reached out to his contacts in the space letting them know I had done great work on a water efficiency project for him. One of those wineries reached out and hired me so I had the opportunity to lead sustainability efforts with Francis Ford Coppola for two years. When my old manager from Jackson Family Wines let me know they had a new opening, I jumped at the chance to return. My manager has been a true mentor to me for years and has really supported my growth in the industry since the beginning.
What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?
Don’t just follow your passion, find ways to be useful. The more value you can bring to the table, the more influence you end up having which helps advance sustainability as quickly as possible. We have a lot of ground we need to catch up on.
What are your favorite resources?
Currently, I’m a huge fan of the Sustainable Nation podcast. They interview senior sustainability leaders and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in learning about careers in sustainability.
I think it is incredibly impactful to get involved in local efforts where ever you live. Find a way to bring your sustainability work home with you and connect with others in your community. In this line of work, I truly think you need to bring your work home with you.
The California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance has some incredible resources. When I first came out here, I was able to read 400 pages of PDFs they had put together which was essentially a how-to guide for what I do now. This included, things like how to conduct energy and water audits in a winery and interactive Excel tools for calculating the return of various projects specific to wine.
This will be my first year going to the Sustainable Brands conference. I do a lot of work on operational efficiency, cost savings, and optimization but at the sustainable brands conference I’ll be able to learn a lot about how to tell our story in a way that’s compelling to customers. If sustainability can be seen as a way to unlock growth instead of just cutting costs, that’s going to be huge. There’s a big movement to push sustainability certification in Sonoma county and in the wine industry to get wine certified in the same way that fair trade coffee is. There’s currently certification for wineries and vineyards themselves, but this is going to be the first vintage that the California Sustainable Winegrowing certification can be put on a wine bottle. Having that product certification helps provide confidence to wine drinkers that they are supporting responsible, quality wine making that is better for the planet.
My website is a great resource for companies in Sonoma county as well. I’ve started a consulting firm helping both wine and brewery clients advance their sustainability initiatives.
The Soma Sustainable Enterprise Conference is a local conference that focuses on wine and sustainability.
One of my very favorite books is Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It reviews the top 100 solutions with the greatest potential to reduce carbon in the atmosphere across the globe. It’s very approachable but also very detailed. Interestingly, a lot of the solutions relate to land management.
Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?
Captain Planet, definitely. Aside from that I’ve been very impressed by the work of Paul Hawken in helping to coordinate Project Drawdown. That is an amazing and inspiring resource for those who haven’t seen it.
I’m also lucky enough to get to work with my mentor, Julien Gervreau who is always pushing the envelope for what sustainability means and how to have the biggest impact possible.
