Reynolds Consumer Products – Brand Strength &
Household Trends – 30 July 2021
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Specialist:
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Joaquin Zuniga (JZ)
Former VP, Operations at Reynolds Consumer Products LLC
Agenda:
1. US household product segment update – cooking products, waste and storage products and tableware
2. Branded vs private label pricing mix
3. Reynolds's (NASDAQ: REYN) pricing strength and pandemic-related uptick
4. H2 2021 material and manufacturing cost outlook – international opportunities, potential regulatory
challenges in the waste segment and the shift to e-commerce
Contents
Q: Could you give an overview of the household products industry, focusing on kitchen products and the
categories Reynolds plays in?
Q: Could you highlight 2-3 key pre-pandemic industry trends relating to the categories mentioned and how
the pandemic impacted these by channel or volume?
3
4
Q: How would you assess Reynolds’s ability to continue keeping up with trends, such as switching towards
scented bags and differentiating products? How aggressive was that or is the private label relationship? What
has this done for players with strong branded businesses as well as private label businesses, such as
Reynolds?
4
Q: Reynolds likes to specify that it is in 97% of US houses. What might that mean for its ability to maintain
share and pricing? What might be some drawbacks of being so highly penetrated in segments that the
company is fighting to hold share in? Could you discuss the dynamic of trying to maintain market share
while remaining competitive on or potentially increasing pricing?
5
Q: Which areas of Reynolds’s portfolio and divisions do you think are strongest? Where has management
consistently prioritised resources? Where has the business been less successful than you may have expected?5
Q: How does the shift to e-commerce and the digital landscape impact Reynolds’s ability to keep up with
consumers? How has the marketing spend dynamic changed, with some customers using Amazon and other
platforms for products?
5
Q: Can you assess margin dynamics across Reynolds’s segments, particularly Hefty’s Leaf? The waste and
storage category seems to benefit from among the strongest margin across the group. Could you discuss the
flexibility of managing margin pressure and inflation cost?
Q: Which of the factors you mentioned do you think is least controllable? At what point might Reynolds
consider passing price increases onto consumers? Can you discuss the company’s ability to do this and the
difficulty doing that for products such as its Hefty waste and storage portfolio?
Q: You mentioned the strength of Reynolds’s manufacturing capabilities and footprint. What disruptions
have US storm events created for the company? Its Presto Products business suffered in Q1 2021, with
profitability down 22% because of increased material costs and pandemic-related disruptions. Why do you
think the company has positioned itself in a volatile, dormant environment that creates risk for the
production lifeline?
6
7
8
Q: Reynolds’s pandemic-related uptick seems to have started fading, with a volume slowdown, which it is
trying to make up for with price increases. Can you assess the company’s pricing environment? Has demand
started normalising or do you think that while there has been a slowdown, there will be a new normal of
elevated demand that is sustainable?
8
Q: How do you think Reynolds approaches its international presence and related opportunities?
Q: Is anything commonly overlooked about Reynolds that you think investors should monitor?
9
9
Q: Reynolds is a manufacturing-heavy business. What are your thoughts on ESG? The company is
committing to sustainable practices, but with more funds come more regulations on waste. How exposed do
you think the company’s waste practices are?
9
Reynolds Consumer Products – Brand Strength &
Household Trends
Transcription begins at 00:00:04 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Reynolds Consumer Products – Brand Strength &
Household Trends. I am Nyree Hinton and I will be facilitating today’s Interview with Mr Joaquin Zuniga,
former VP Operations at Reynolds Consumer Products LLC.
Sorry for butcheróing your name, so please correct me if I got it wrong, but before we get started, Joaquin,
could you please state I agree or I disagree to the following statement: You understand the definition of
material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such information, or any other information
which is confidential, during this Interview.
JZ: I agree. I understand.
NH: Thank you. Could you start with an introduction of your background and the roles held in the industry?
JZ: My background is as an international manufacturing leader, and I have worked essentially in a
progression of responsibilities, starting from engineering responsibilities. Early on in my career, that was with
what was Mobil Chemical that became Pactiv, that eventually became Reynolds, but I progressed from entry-
level project and process engineering responsibilities to managing some very large projects for Pactiv, or
Reynolds they were at the time, and inclusive of managing all of the Reynolds Hefty business, which was the
waste bag business and bag business. I am currently employed, I am leading a turnaround for a company that
does not compete with Reynolds. It’s just a turnaround in the plastics industry. That’s a little bit of my
background.
[00:02:33]
Q: Could you give an overview of the household products industry, focusing on kitchen products and the
categories Reynolds plays in?
JZ: Fundamentally, in the household kitchen products and what I will classify it as, Reynolds, it really is
operating in three segments and those are the cooking and baking segments, and within the cooking and
baking, that’s where you will see quite a bit of the aluminium products such as the branded foil of Reynolds,
which is an iconic brand. You will see in there the pans that are typically used for turkeys and/or pies, but also
all the papers that are used in cooking applications such as the parchment paper, freezer paper, wax paper and
the slow cooker liner packs. If we continue on the Hefty waste and the storage business unit or offering, it’s
where you will see the Hefty trash bags, and in addition to that, the food bags, and food bags are typically the
slider bags, Hefty slider bags or private label, and within the segment, Hefty also operates in the tableware
segment, where you will see disposable plates, bowls, cups, cutlery. Reynolds, it has the Presto business unit.
It’s a dominant player in private label, private label bags and food bags as well, similar to the Hefty tableware,
I mean the Hefty slider bags, I’m sorry. There are some speciality businesses as well within Presto for a Slide-
Rite, which are speciality bags, but within the household, household kitchen, it’s really the Reynolds cooking
and baking, the Hefty waste and the storage, and then tableware, which is what I alluded to.
Private and confidential 3
[00:05:56]
Q: Could you highlight 2-3 key pre-pandemic industry trends relating to the categories mentioned and how
the pandemic impacted these by channel or volume?
JZ: Pre-COVID, in my opinion, especially within the business unit that I operated, there was a significant
growth that we were following in the waste bag business and there was quite a bit of a trend to indoor bags
were growing vs outdoor bags, and in many regards, there was a trend. It seems like the blend when we take a
look at private label vs the branded, with the strength of Walmart, there was a pretty significant trend to their
private label brand, at least in the waste bag segment, was growing. Quite a bit of a trend also, I would say,
with Amazon and e-commerce. There was fairly a significant shift that was taking place. Perhaps, maybe one
more, if you would. Within waste bags, there was a preference for bags that increasingly were embossed bags
or increasingly, were scented vs a plain bag, the smooth bag. There were some of those, so a little more of a
trend towards that differentiated product, a little more specialised with not necessarily a basic commodity, but
more of a speciality, in my opinion, but that’s what we were observing.
[00:08:41]
Q: How would you assess Reynolds’s ability to continue keeping up with trends, such as switching towards
scented bags and differentiating products? How aggressive was that or is the private label relationship? What
has this done for players with strong branded businesses as well as private label businesses, such as Reynolds?
JZ: Keeping up with trends such as scented bags, and my opinion, Reynolds as a company had always been
very much of what is the customer looking for? Ultimately, I will call it a pull. Not trying to put a product out
there and pushing it, but rather trying to understand what are the needs of the customer and satisfying those,
and if the needs were more scented products or if the need is more of an embossed bag or stretchy bag, the
company, in my opinion, was very willing to support that growth and leverage some of the internal
capabilities. In my opinion, one of the elements that separates Reynolds from competitors is the strength of
the engineering group and the strength of that know-how, and the ability of coming up with very innovative
solutions that, in my mind, try to accomplish two things simultaneously. Try to accomplish value or, in other
words, a cost reduction or a cost optimisation. At the same time, they are offering differentiation or offering
that, for example, a scented bag or an embossed bag is differentiated, but how’s that done in a way that is
economically so it’s not adding cost to it, but leveraging know-how, leveraging the strength of resources? My
opinion, that’s developing technologies that will allow for supporting those needs, and if one day, a customer
wants a particular scent and the following day, it’s a different scent, and those quantities vary in a very
significant way, being able to react to those without creating a lot of manufacturing disruption.
That was something that was, in my mind and in my opinion, something that Reynolds understood really well,
and the second question and in the relationship with private label, I think private label in many ways puts
pressure on pricing, but it, in some ways, is a healthy pressure because if you have to be very efficient in cost,
it’s always there is a, how do we optimise cost? How do we get to that next level? I think, in my opinion, I saw a
partnership with some of those key customers of Reynolds that were willing to have a win-win business
partnership towards coming up, how can we not leave money on the table, or is it that waste is taking place
and how can we remove waste from the supply chain? It could be transportation-related. It could be
packaging-related. It could come in many ways, but at the end of the day, I think it’s synergistic. I think, in my
opinion, there can be a sharing of platforms and many of the benefits, and private label, we optimised
primarily for cost, but lately, what we saw as a trend was that private label was also wanting that
differentiation that the branded had on offer, so I think the company was very careful on what goes towards
the brand and what differentiation goes towards the private label. With the strategic customers, those
relationships were being managed very well by the business units. In particular, the ones that I’m most
familiar with. That’s my opinion. I hope that helps.
Private and confidential 4
[00:14:55]
Q: Reynolds likes to specify that it is in 97% of US houses. What might that mean for its ability to maintain
share and pricing? What might be some drawbacks of being so highly penetrated in segments that the
company is fighting to hold share in? Could you discuss the dynamic of trying to maintain market share while
remaining competitive on or potentially increasing pricing?
JZ: I think that market share and the penetration, first of all, the brand is trusted and is recognised, and I
think there’s just that high degree of confidence, and so it’s not only an iconic brand such as Reynolds or an
iconic brand such as Hefty, and whether it’s number one or number two in the categories, so it’s always very
high up in the categories. I think having a complete offering is something that’s a substantial advantage
because the mix of products allows us to do in many ways one-stop shopping, but there is a trust and a
confidence, in my view. I think there’s a quality element. In my opinion, I was always very proud of the quality
element of the bags, as an example, because it was something that you could, with a very high degree of
confidence, know that it’s going to work. It’s not going to have any issues and in many ways, the thicker,
stronger, it was not something that it was just advertised, but it’s something that the data will show you that it
is in fact thicker, stronger and also, there’s value. If you count the number of bags and if you take a look at how
much is in the package, I think there is a pricing proposition that is enabling a preference, a consistent
preference because of those two things, because if you can get higher quality and you can get it for a lower
price, why not consistently do that, but again, having the complete offering? And maybe perhaps the last one is
that there’s always an element of innovation. Being able to be out there, whether the customers are looking for
scent, or looking for the package, or looking for in the case of when we commercialised the serve-and-store bag
that had a gusseted bag, in my opinion, it was because we were innovating and trying to understand what the
customers were looking for. We were trying to meet a need, and so having an offering that provides those
solutions to the customers, I think that’s important.
[00:19:37]
Q: Which areas of Reynolds’s portfolio and divisions do you think are strongest? Where has management
consistently prioritised resources? Where has the business been less successful than you may have expected?
JZ: I would have, I guess, a limited view from my perspective. From my opinion as a leader in what this meant
in the waste bag business unit, I would say that definitely, waste bags was one of them, and why was that?
There was a tremendous amount of growth that we were enjoying, and I think the company was willing to
support it, and willing to support it with resources and capital investments, and engineering investments as
well to develop technologies to ensure that we were leading, and I think marketing dollars as well, so I think all
around, it was, in my opinion, supported. I think cups, it was a business that perhaps many, many years ago
was smaller, but today, if you go down the aisle in the cups business, whether it’s a party cup, but in general,
cups and leveraged into Hefty brand is something that, at least pre-COVID, there was a significantly higher
social element to it and it was one of those areas in which there was significant investment. I wouldn’t leave
aluminium, even though I’m perhaps the least familiar with it, because in my opinion, that was an area that
the company was paying a lot of attention to, but I am just less familiar with it.
[00:22:24]
Q: How does the shift to e-commerce and the digital landscape impact Reynolds’s ability to keep up with
consumers? How has the marketing spend dynamic changed, with some customers using Amazon and other
platforms for products?
JZ: I will tell you, and unfortunately, e-commerce, it’s something that my opinion is a limited experience, but
what I would say, first of all, digital marketing, in my opinion, for our business unit was something that was an
enabler for going far more directly to the target customer. Whether it was a tall kitchen bag that was in which
the person most likely to be making the purchase, you have a better understanding of the profile of what that
Private and confidential 5
person making that purchase is, and then being able to have very targeted advertisement to that particular
person or that particular segment. Same thing, I could use other examples within the waste bag business of
bags that are more targeted towards the do-it-yourself person doing a renovation or a contractor that’s likely
to be looking at a website or an application too, so I think it allows for much more targeted. Again, today,
being a little more removed, what I would say is I take a look at Amazon, and Amazon has their top-selling
items and as I take a look at the top-selling items from an Amazon perspective, I just see that a Reynolds Wrap
was on the top 10, and this is all public, from public information, but I used to see a Reynolds Wrap in the top
10 consistently and all across. If you take a look at the top 10, it was all Reynolds, and now, there is the Solimo
brand. It’s just out there, and the same thing, you take a look, trash bags are holding their own, but I am
concerned about what I see from an Amazon perspective about the Hefty slider bags that I used to manage and
it’s like, in the world of e-commerce, it seems that they’re hurt, but again, very limited. It’s just not necessarily
one of my areas of expertise.
[00:26:08]
Q: Can you assess margin dynamics across Reynolds’s segments, particularly Hefty’s Leaf? The waste and
storage category seems to benefit from among the strongest margin across the group. Could you discuss the
flexibility of managing margin pressure and inflation cost?
JZ: First of all, I think the factors that are pressuring margins are impacting the competitors in very much the
same way, and so those are going to be the commodity prices because if you take a look at the index for the
plastic resins that are being used, the index will show you that what they’re doing, there’s quite a bit of
pressure. Freight and transportation, and the lack of carriers and all that has been something that is a
common factor across the industry. In the COVID-19 era, labour availability and labour cost is certainly one of
those challenges, but as we take a look at I think what we strategically tried to build and, in my opinion, what I
contributed to, but what the Reynolds team is really focused on is how to be able to manage cost and be able to
manage the margins. I would say that I guess first of all, if I take a look at the Q1 results that are out there, that
are public, I’m a little bit concerned about most business units, inclusive of the waste and storage, lost ground
in Q1 2021 vs Q1 of 2020. However, based on my opinion, there are many sustainable advantages that
Reynolds has and raw material cost optimisation. Raw material accounts for the largest percentage of the cost.
I think there is a very clear understanding that that is the case and there is deep depth of knowledge within the
organisation about the cost of the raw materials, and the blends and the formulations of those raw materials,
and there is a continued effort to optimise those blends to make sure that raw materials are not a competitive
disadvantage, but a competitive advantage. There is a know-how, and resources and people, and to an extent, I
think leveraging data, leveraging technology. I think there are some very complex relationships or cause-and-
effect relationships between formulations that are being used.
During the summer or during the winter, things behave in a different way because of humidity levels, but to
understand the depth of knowledge of the raw materials and the formulation can be used as a differentiator to
be just a little bit ahead. I think ensuring the cost of quality is low, so the business unit I managed, we wanted
to make sure that the external cost of quality was low so that the cost of claims or complaints was very, very
low. Internally, we also wanted to make sure that we were generating the lowest amount of a scrap or internal
scrap, or internal rejects so that it’s just a way of optimising cost, and aiming for Six Sigma levels or better, it’s
just something that we aimed to pursue and not just as a goal, but made sure that it was being achieved
because of the impact on the cost ultimately and on the margin. There is diversifying the raw material supply
and also making sure that not only if there is a hurricane in one location or a flood in the Midwest or
something bad happens in Canada, but just ensuring that the supply, there is a diversification of the supply of
those key raw materials so that there can be a de-risking from that perspective. In my opinion, we did very,
very well when there were many, many headwinds such as hurricanes, but that’s a sustainable element that
was ingrained in the DNA of the business unit. Minimising of scrap. I alluded to internal scrap, but minimising
of scrap when scrap is generated, because scrap is generated in any manufacturing process, but being able to
reuse all the scraps. Minimising what goes to a landfill and/or what gets sold to third parties at a discounted
price, but just efficiently using all those materials, and then I would say strategic partnerships with suppliers
because those partnerships can lead to win-win relationships that can lead to breakthrough opportunities.
Private and confidential 6
I think the manufacturing footprint, in my opinion, if you take a look at where the plants are located, they’re
located throughout the US and there is a minimal dependency on imports. They’re from very, very remote
places of the world, and so optimising that footprint within the US and keeping centres of excellence so there’s
a lot of know-how, a lot of brand power. Brand power can be embedded in operators that have been many,
many years with the company or technicians that know how to fix those pieces of equipment very, very quickly
and make those pieces of equipment be far more efficient than other locations in the world. I think that know-
how combined with the right location, the right scale of the plants and having internal manufacturing
capabilities vs outsourcing, in my opinion, those are advantages. The network, I think in my opinion, Joaquin
Zuniga’s opinion, there is always a depth of awareness of optimising the supply chain so that we’re not just
shipping freight to ourselves, but we’re just using the freight to ship as much as we can directly to the
customer. There’s a regional self-sufficiency so that you won’t have, for example, the trucks going east to then
turn around and go west just because of how the warehouse’s set-up is configured. Also adopt a very deep
awareness of how to fill a truck efficiently so that we’re not just shipping air and so there are combinations of
products. Some products that are super lightweight and some products that are heavy, so you can fully fill a
truck or make sure that there is no waste of space within a carton, so that everything is nice and packed in a
very dense way, so that everything is nice and neat packaged, is optimised, and that may not be a perfect
solution today.
What’s out there maybe today is not perfect, but I think there is that deep awareness of where those
opportunities are so that as fast as possible, the company can go and pursue them. I would tell you, and I
mentioned this, but I want to maybe dwell on that a little bit more, the knowledge of the manufacturing
equipment and knowing how to take a basic piece of equipment, in my opinion, how you take an off-the-shelf
piece of equipment, and how to turbocharge it and make it something they can take it to the next level and
achieve output levels that the competition can’t do or it’s not easily done, let’s say, offshore. I would say, when
it comes to people, I think Reynolds, Hefty, the waste bag business, we tried to be an employer of choice. Tried
to engage employees, tried to have a culture of really valuing employees, starting with safety, but extending to
facilities that were pleasant, well-maintained, where employees, if they had to choose between employer A or
employer B and the facility at Reynolds, at Hefty, it’s just so much more appealing, that people chose and then
felt that they were engaged, they were respected, they were valued, so I think there’s a people-attractiveness
factor. At the end of the day also, it’s difficult to find people in the COVID world, and so I think managing
margins. I think there’s also on a highly repetitive, highly manual processes, how to leverage automation, and
consistent with the theme of brand power or know-how, I think Reynolds, in my opinion, tries to leverage
technology, and one form of technology is automation, but another form of technology, in my mind, is data. I
think both of those, automation and data mining, to be as sufficient as possible, those were used to be
leveraged as competitive advantages.
[00:38:52]
Q: Which of the factors you mentioned do you think is least controllable? At what point might Reynolds
consider passing price increases onto consumers? Can you discuss the company’s ability to do this and the
difficulty doing that for products such as its Hefty waste and storage portfolio?
JZ: Unfortunately, despite all the efforts and everything, the vast majority of the cost is the raw materials and
the fundamental commodity, so polyethylene. That fundamental commodity has the greatest percentage of the
cost and if it goes up in that portion, unfortunately, that puts so much pressure that there is an element of
pass-through. What I always saw, and again, being a manufacturing person, not necessarily being the one that
was making that happen, but was sitting right next to the team players that there were, but in my opinion,
what I saw is that we didn’t necessarily have to lead because in some ways, we knew we were efficient and our
competitors, it seemed that they were leading those actions. Again, my view is that we didn’t have to be
number one in taking a price action. We just had to be a very fast follower, not determining. We knew what the
competitors, what their actions were or we had market intelligence to allow us to better understand that, but if
we had the better understanding of what that was and not necessarily have to go out and lead, but then how
could we recognise that we could exactly the same or we could do something that’s slightly different? Knowing
that we were priced more competitively, pricing was one of the things that we wanted to maintain those deltas,
and so as long as we maintained that delta and we were having the strong communication with the customer,
Private and confidential 7
and still understanding as to why in many cases with agreements and how the index tied to it so that there was
logic to why those changes are taking place. I think fundamentally, Reynolds has a good ability to execute
pricing actions with a fairly high degree of confidence based on those elements that I just mentioned.
[00:42:50]
Q: You mentioned the strength of Reynolds’s manufacturing capabilities and footprint. What disruptions have
US storm events created for the company? Its Presto Products business suffered in Q1 2021, with profitability
down 22% because of increased material costs and pandemic-related disruptions. Why do you think the
company has positioned itself in a volatile, dormant environment that creates risk for the production lifeline?
JZ: Unfortunately, I’m a little bit (? 43.47), so my assumption is that, the waste and storage plants, it’s
primarily a waste bag plant that is in central Texas, in Temple, Texas. When the storms had the impact on
electricity, and the rolling blackouts and electricity constraints on top of the bad weather, I think that, it was a
significant impact. Fundamentally, the footprint is based in locations in Illinois, in Pennsylvania and in Texas,
and it should be all public knowledge, but unfortunately, the location in Texas saw the element of electricity
disruption and the weather disruption. There are agreements that take place with the electricity supply in
which many, many, many companies, it’s an industry standard practice that most likely was in place, but I
don’t know that for a fact that that was true in Q1, but it’s an industry practice of committing to a significant
discount in the cost of electricity in exchange for being on of the first large users of electricity to be taken
offline. Some of that comes with a notification via telephone, but followed by, it could be an automatic
shutdown or it could be an opportunity to reduce the load and then automatically, the utility can actually shut
power down, so my assumption is that as electricity and the demand, and that there just wasn’t enough
electricity for the region, then the plant was impacted from that in addition to the weather. The third element
is the raw materials. Unfortunately, the US, many, many of the petrochemicals are from the Gulf and despite
all the de-risking that companies tried to do in diversifying the resins supply, the reality is there is a
vulnerability that still exists because there’s such a high dependency on that region.
[00:47:45]
Q: Reynolds’s pandemic-related uptick seems to have started fading, with a volume slowdown, which it is
trying to make up for with price increases. Can you assess the company’s pricing environment? Has demand
started normalising or do you think that while there has been a slowdown, there will be a new normal of
elevated demand that is sustainable?
JZ: I think there’s a dynamic going on that as more people stayed home during COVID, there was a very
significant demand. Pre-COVID, there was very significant demand just because Walmart and the big retailers,
in my opinion, those partnerships that Reynolds had with the right customers and those relationships were
working. When COVID took place and started to take place, people were staying home, immediately, things
like now, people are using more trash bags at home vs institutional liner or more of a commodity liner that is
used at the office, and now, there’s that shift, but I just don’t have data, I haven’t done enough research, but I
think we’re on a hunt to a new normal. New normal, I don’t think everyone that used to work at the office is
going to go back to the office. I think there is not an insignificant percentage of people that are going to
continue to work remotely or demand to work remotely or even ask to work remotely, and as that plays out, I
think there’s a normalisation of volume. From a pricing perspective, I can only speculate that there had been a
lot of pressure due to the commodities and fairly aggressive pricing actions, and with quite a bit of a demand,
but I think some of those are going to stay. My assumption is that perhaps there is an element of cost increases
that’s coming from labour. Labour is such a smaller percentage vs the raw material and certainly there has
been pressure on labour for Reynolds, like everyone else in the US, but I think Reynolds has some unique
advantages there, so I guess there may be some ability to control cost on the margin, but anyway. I’m sorry I’m
not able to answer the question a little bit better. It’s a bit of an unknown, in my opinion.
Private and confidential 8
[00:52:11]
Q: How do you think Reynolds approaches its international presence and related opportunities?
JZ: I always view Reynolds very, very domestic. US, Canada to an extent a little bit and Mexico. I think there
are opportunities and I think there are significant opportunities that are very limited, so some of the business
units have done a little bit more than others in international, and in my opinion, cooking perhaps has been
just taking an effort out there, but I would say it’s international. It is an iconic brand and Reynolds is
recognised no matter where you go, and no matter where you go, if you mention Reynolds, Reynolds is an
iconic brand everywhere in the world. Hefty, not so much and I think there are opportunities out there. Is it
something that has been emphasised? No, in my opinion, and I think we’re very, very US. The business had
been focused primarily in North America and primarily in the US.
[00:54:11]
Q: Is anything commonly overlooked about Reynolds that you think investors should monitor?
JZ: No. I think all the public information out there, it very much describes. Perhaps the culture. I think there’s
a cultural element. It’s a can-do team approach. I think there’s a speed of decision-making.
[00:55:04]
Q: Reynolds is a manufacturing-heavy business. What are your thoughts on ESG? The company is committing
to sustainable practices, but with more funds come more regulations on waste. How exposed do you think the
company’s waste practices are?
JZ: I would say depending on the business unit. I think perhaps some business units much more than others.
I think aluminium, for example, or the cooking, but maybe not so much. A lot of the aluminium is really
recycled aluminium and I think I would say the exposure is probably largest in the tableware business and
specifically foam, offering the foam plates, but I think, in my opinion, the company had taken many mitigating
steps to try to, first of all, recognise that foam is an important product offering, but there are alternatives out
there. Whether it’s a paper-based offering, there are many, many other, and there is quite a bit of expertise
within the company, in my opinion, about some of the new next-generation materials, whether they’re corn-
based or sugarcane-based, and so I think there can be. Some of those come at a significant cost, so when do
you do that? Same thing for waste bags. Waste bags, primarily, everything is really in a very traditional sense,
but could you go after some of the materials from renewables? Certainly it is a possibility. They come at a cost,
and some of the regulations are beginning to take place. How are those going to unfold? I will tell you this. It’s
probably something that the company understands it well, in my opinion, because they’re looking at it and
people are not just asleep at the wheel, but in my opinion, that’s something out there that regulations or
external factors could be, so there’s a risk out there, but I think it’s something that can be mitigated through a
number of elements.
[00:58:45]
NH: I think this is a good spot to end the Interview, so let me close by saying thank you again for your input.
We got through a lot. Thank you clients for joining Third Bridge Forum’s Interview. If you’d like to speak to
Joaquin in a private call or meeting, please let your relationship manager know. Have a good one.
Transcription ends at 00:59:00 of the recorded material.
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