Zach Tucker: Leading Maple Leaf Farms Toward a Sustainable Future

Allan Gray

Hello, everyone. Allan Gray here. DIAL Ventures. Back with you on the DIALed IN podcast. Looking forward today to having a great conversation with Zach Tucker about what they do at Maple Leaf Farms regarding sustainability. Zach, thanks for being with us today.

Zach Tucker

Sure thing. Glad to be here.

Allan Gray

In full disclosure, Zach, we know each other. We've known each other for a little while now. One, part of a family that's been a big supporter of Purdue University for many years, a company that's critically important to food and agribusiness here in the state of Indiana.

Also, Zach is a student of the MS-MBA program, and we had a chance to work together while you were in that class with me. We even traveled to Brazil a bit together. Just wanted to let our audience know that, hey, we're not talking to somebody that nobody knows. I do know Zach pretty well. Zach, thanks.

Zach Tucker

I was going to say, you get to know some people pretty well when you travel internationally with them. It's a fun time.

Allan Gray

‍When you spend six days on a bus in Brazil, we're going to get to know each other pretty well.

Zach Tucker

Oh, yeah.

Allan Gray

I, at least, give some disclosure to the group about that. We do, in fact, know each other. But I think it'd be good, Zach, if maybe you introduced yourself. There's several things in your background that I think really led you to where you are today. Maybe you can give us a little bit of a rundown of who is Zach Tucker and how did he get to where he is.

Zach Tucker

Sure. Zach Tucker. I am the Director of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility at Maple Leaf Farms. I've been here at Maple Leaf now for almost 12 years, right out of school. Purdue graduate in Animal Agribusiness. That's my undergrad… and like Allan just said, I finished up the MS-MBA in December for Food and Agribusiness with Purdue/ IU, so that's where my schooling's been at.

Where I come in with Maple Leaf is, is Maple Leaf is a family business, particularly my family. I'm a fourth-generation family member of the company Maple Leaf. We've been around for a while. Started in 1958, my great-grandfather started it in '58. My grandfather, Terry Tucker, took over about 10 or so years later.

Unfortunately, my great-grandfather passed away from a sudden heart attack at the very early age of 53, which was just very unexpected. He took over and ran the shift for a while. About 2001, 2002, my dad and uncle took over as co-presidents from a day-to-day standpoint. I joined in 2013…

Allan Gray

Zach, tell me a little bit about what are the different roles you've played with the company.

Zach Tucker

As my background would say, I was in animal science. I started out in our live production department. I spent six years in the department there, running anything from our internal auditing program with our trident stewardship program, biosecurity. I was the biosecurity officer for a number of years there. Research, coordinating research, whether that was internally or externally, with academia or companies, things like that, as, among other things, looking at poultry science association, affiliations, things like that.

Allan Gray

When you're in the family business, Zach, I assume that your responsibilities, many of them… This is a professional organization. I don't want to underplay that. Also, when you're in a family organization, you're one of the family members. You also do whatever Grandpa and Dad say this would be a good thing for you to be doing.

Zach Tucker

Family business is an interesting dynamic, to say the least. You have to choose which hat to put on at any given point in time. You can look at, are you a family member that day? Are you an owner that day? Are you an employee that day? You have to go into any number of places with the right hat on for that particular moment.

At the moment, my dad's CEO now. I report directly to him. One of the things with that is, when we go into conversation, we got to determine what hat is on? Is this father-son talking here, or is this boss report that's talking? Sometimes that gets intermixed. You have to be careful there and try to compartmentalize as best you can.

My dad and I look at this philosophy, we want it to be a conversation, because it's not just a, "You need to go do this." It needs to be, what is the whole purpose of what you're doing. Later on, after live production, he's like, "We need to talk about what are some next steps for you." I said, "This would be a good area. What do you think?" I said, "Let's do it."

I went into our quality assurance department and ran our compliance labeling and such for regulatory for a while there, for several years. We didn't do it quite as long or as quickly in live production as we probably should have. After that, I moved into human resources there for a couple of years.

It was during COVID. What was one of the biggest issues during COVID? The retention side of things was just a paramount issue. They placed me over retention and some connection with recruiting and internal work in that regard. Anything from surveying, to work on engagement programs, things like that. There was just a bunch to do there, trying to figure out how can we get people in that want to stay. We've definitely righted some ships there now, so it's a good thing.

Now that brings me to this role that I'm in. It was actually a nice little transition into what I'm doing now as over top of sustainability and CSR.

Allan Gray

Excellent. Zach, it strikes me as you and I are sitting here visiting, we've probably made an assumption we shouldn't make. Look, Maple Leaf Farms is the leading company in its industry. I don't think there's any doubt about that, actually. The issue would be, I'm going to guess that 85% of our audience doesn't know who Maple Leaf Farms is. What do you do?

Zach Tucker

If we want to put a moniker on it, you could say we're North America's largest producer of duck. You can maybe say Western Hemisphere. I think we could do that. I'd say the only area that we are deficient in, from a world standpoint, is volume. That's it. You're going to have your China producers that are just knocking it out of the park in terms of volume.

That's not what we do here. What we're doing here is, we have an integrated system where we're producing what we believe to be the best duck in the world from an efficiency standpoint, livability. We have good ducks that are going to perform well, and I think goes very well with the sustainability piece of what we're trying to do in the world, which, if we're talking sustainability, my thought on that is, if you want to boil it down, I want to do more with less, at the end of the day. That's always been my thought, is how can we do more with less resources, and our duck certainly does that.

Allan Gray

Great, Zach. We'll be careful and say we're North America's largest duck producer, but it's an integrated system. If I understand it correctly…

Zach Tucker

… Whether it's ours or private label. We do private label as well.

Allan Gray

You do both of those. I seem to recall one time having a conversation with your father, I was a bit fascinated by. You may even sell some of your duck genetics to others.

Zach Tucker

Yes. That's becoming a major part of our business. It's been a number of years since we started doing that. In terms of our strategy for it all, initially, we were more so saying China was going to be the main focus. China has become increasingly a more difficult environment to do business… as an American company.

We have tried to refocus what we did. We were actually doing stuff in China pre-2015, 2015 being when AI first really hit the United States, from a commercial standpoint. From that point in time, it's pretty much been China shut down from an export-import standpoint.

We've had some openings here, but we're like, "Why would we go through the hoops to get that back when we know it's probably going to get shut down 6 months later?" We've refocused that livestock sales side on more places like Europe now, or even like some of the Middle East or North Africa. Egypt, for example, being newer customer of ours, where we're looking at different producers there. Poland, Hungary are two options in Europe that have become really big players for us. Potentially, even France is actually coming online.

During COVID, normally our duck, which is a Peking duck, wouldn't be as readily acceptable in France. Because of COVID, believe it or not, they started not having as much access to what they are traditionally used to, your Mallards, your Muscovies, what have you. They said, "We're going to give Peking a try," and it's started to catch on more. There's opportunity there.

One of our largest customers is in England. We've been working with them, gosh, better part of 20 years now.

Allan Gray

Great.

Zach Tucker

Just continue to grow. We're sold out this year on that side. That's not a bad deal.

Allan Gray

That's a good thing. That's always a good thing. Zach, give the audience a bit of a perspective of, "We've started down this path already" scope, but scale and scope of Maple Leaf Farms, headquartered in Goshen, Indiana, I think.

Zach Tucker

Leesburg.

Allan Gray

In Leesburg, Indiana. But you have a few different plants in the US. You're selling animal genetics. How many producers do you have? How many plants do you have? Give me some sense of just the scope of the company.

Zach Tucker

We have a full-sized genetic facility. That's where we're doing all our pedigrees. We have seven pure line strains that we maintain from a company standpoint, for genetic purposes. We have three hatcheries currently, one for genetic purposes and research, one main commercial hatchery, and then an overflow commercial/livestock hatchery that we utilize.

We have several internal farms as well that we use for, whether it's research or breeding purposes. As far as commercial, like contract producers, we're probably looking at about 180 right now.

Allan Gray

About 180 different farmers feeding out your ducks for you?

Zach Tucker

Yeah. Whether that's breeder or grower. Because that's the one thing you're going to find with our company is a lot… You've only started to see it, even like Tyson, for example. I can't remember how many years ago when they purchased Cobb. They were really only doing the meat side of things, and they were buying the genetics from Cobb. They just said, "Let's just buy Cobb. Now we have a genetic company on hand."

We've been doing this for 40 years. For us, it's been a huge part of our sustainability story, which is, how do we maximize the whole process? If you want to talk about a vertically-integrated company, I would be amiss to not put us in that list of one of the more highly vertical companies for that reason.

Allan Gray

You got 180 producers feeding how many plants?

Zach Tucker

We have two processing plants. We have a raw processing plant, or that's where the birds come in, and that's where you're going to have your whole body, birds, things like that. We have a further processing plant. That'll be products like your boneless duck breasts, that will be roast half duck, which has become one of our main flagship products over the last 10 years, you name it, further process versus just whole body.

We have a distribution center as well. That one is a six-story freezer that we have… I can't remember how many pallets we can fit in there. It's in the thousands of pallets that we ship out of every day of the week.

Allan Gray

That's fantastic. I know some other things about it. I'll share with them just because I find it fascinating. First of all, the duck is excellent and actually easier to prepare than I had originally thought. Your dad taught me, said, "No, this isn't that hard to do. You can produce this stuff. You can grill this duck." He taught me how to grill them. Man, it's outstanding. Grilled duck breast is outstanding. Once you have…

Zach Tucker

It's great.

Allan Gray

It's tasty, isn't it?

Zach Tucker

Yeah.

Allan Gray

But you have down business, I think, because the feathers turn into pillows and whatever else they do with that sort of stuff.

Zach Tucker

That's one of the benefits of working with waterfowl. You look at chickens, turkeys, it's not easy to necessarily get rid of your feather waste.

Allan Gray

The inability to utilize feather meal like you used to doesn't help things either. What are they doing with it?

Zach Tucker

We do not have to do that. We have subsidiaries up in Grand Rapids, the Eurasia Group is what we call it. You have Eurasia Feather Co and DOWN Incorporated. Eurasia is more of a feather broker. They're bringing in feathers from all over, not just our own, and we're selling them. DOWN Incorporated is doing finished goods, so comforters, pillows, down blankets.

We're even working a really cool opportunity here. We're actually working on an organic fiber. It's a truly hypoallergenic product, so to speak, where we take fiber that we already have, and we can create this product that is natural but also has none of what you might have from an allergen standpoint with a feather pillow, because the feather pillows will trap… sometimes or things like that. I'll be the first to admit that. It can happen.

But this product is wonderful because that's what a lot of people, especially from a fill standpoint for a couch fill or something, they want this, and we can do that now. We're doing some incredible stuff up there. We can ship next-day products out now because of the investments we've made up there, which is for… The type of products we make is pretty unheard of in the industry. It's becoming a real player for us.

Allan Gray

It's just fascinating. Zach, your company, leading duck company in North America, highly vertically integrated, very successful company, recognized brands, excellent quality in your products, and you think about how you utilize every single piece of that process to advantage, which I think is this definition of sustainability. I want to switch gears and go there, and I'm going to ask you directly, your title, Director of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. What is that?

Zach Tucker

What does it mean? For some reason, I laugh about this. We like our titles here at Maple for some reason. It's like, what? It's a big title, whatever. But what it boils down to is… We have to focus on a number of things. Obviously, the sustainability side of it all, we can talk even further in detail about that.

But like I said, I want to always be moving us forward in terms of, are we able to do more with our processes with less resources, whether that's man-hours, whether that's feed water, you name it. Those are the things we focus on. But one thing that I'm focused on as well is actually the aspect of culture within the company. I think part of it deals with the sustainability, where we're trying to build a sustainable culture, both we want it to continue to be in a certain way, but also sustainability as part of that culture.

We have four pillars that we look at in terms of our CSR program, that's environmental sustainability, ethical responsibility, philanthropy, and financial responsibility.

Environmental sustainability, that's what a lot of people would think of as part of your traditional sustainability that you're managing the environmental side of it all.

Ethical responsibility, you're dealing with the people side of it all. Are you taking care of your people? Are you making sure that they have opportunities for growth and development? You name it.

Philanthropy, I think that's pretty straightforward. You want to have the community side of it all. Ethical goes with the community side as well. But I look at the philanthropy as the community piece. What are you doing in it? Are you recognizing the community for, whether it's philanthropy, service, those sorts of things. That's part of that building that community service-minded culture.

Then financial responsibility is more so the ethical side of business versus the people side of it. Also looking at, are we reporting things the way we're supposed to? Are we doing what we say we do from a business standpoint, that sort of stuff.

I'm not the one running these things. That is something that everyone is supposed to be doing on a day-to-day basis. More so what I am is I'm the one who's trying to verify that we're doing that. If we're not, how do we fix that? How do we change that? It's more so putting extra emphasis on where we want to be from a culture standpoint.

Allan Gray

In some ways like a continuous improvement approach. This is a little bit of your quality background coming in to saying, "Okay, are we doing sustainability in a high-quality way, perhaps?”

Zach Tucker

Yeah. You look at, and I'll use the term ESG for Environmental, Social, Governance. We certainly can match up with that with the way we're looking at these things with the environmental side, the social side, and the governance. It's a way that we can look at it and match up with that because there are a number of people in the industries and out in the world who really want to look at that piece of it, the ESG side of it all.

Allan Gray

Zach, can you make this philosophy that you have here, these values that you express, these four values, four pillars you talk about, bring that to life for me? Can you tell me a story or two about, here's how this looks at Maple Leaf, and if you're willing to, maybe one story that's, "Man, here's a win, here's a big success we've had, and here's a story about where we're still challenged to figure out how we're going to do that?"

Zach Tucker

So, for example, the environmental sustainability, that could mean any number of things. That could mean we're just simply being good stewards of our environment. What are we doing with water management, waste management, those things. But other sides of it all are, like, maybe, like, the green energy side of things. I'm looking at, like, a solar project right now, where could that be a benefit to us? Whether it's producing energy for ourselves or eventually being a producer of green energy, there's opportunity there.

Ethical engagement is a really important aspect within our company. This goes along with philanthropy, too, but actually, I'll leave it for philanthropy. Ethical responsibility training wise, we've actually developed these training programs recently where, when I was in HR, I started this process where we, with a couple other people, and we started with one level of training, which is kind of this introductory, "Hey, we're getting some managers and supervisors in here. Let's get some just engagement here with the training side of things." Well, we've since added two more training levels to it, where there's a second level, which is more engagement for those individuals that were in there before, and it's much more, there's project-based aspects to it.

Then the third level is for people who have been targeted for the sake of potential upper management eventually, and saying, like, these people are going to go into that. They've also expressed interest, I should say. It's a two-way street in that regard. Those are some of the things there we want to make sure people feel like they have the ability to grow with us in the business.

Philanthropy. That could be any number of things, whether it is supporting an organization. We're currently giving a pretty sizable gift to an organization in our town called Joe's Kids, which is a children's therapy company in town, so doing speech, ARC, physical therapy for children. It's one of those that pulls in kids from any number of surrounding counties. They had the ability to go from a very, rather small location to now they have a very sizable location that they're able to service so many more children that way. There's one there.

Another one in that regard is, I'm revisiting how we do our giving as a company as a whole. I'm thinking about how can I drive engagement through philanthropic giving? What I mean by that is, can I set up tiers based upon what the level of employment you're at. Whether you're a manager or just in the front lines or in the plants and say, "Hey, you're allotted x amount of dollars every year that Maple Leaf will donate on your behalf and saying, 'Hey, where do you want this money to go?'" Actually having that engagement… They are part of, they're part of our stakeholder group, and we want them to feel like they have some control and direction of where things are going, and so know that things that they want to support, we're going to support.

Allan Gray

That's really cool, because that's really driving the culture of saying, hey, we want sustainability, ESG concepts to be a part of who everybody in our organization is. We'll help you do that by saying, hey, well, let's think about how we want to donate, where you think you want to have that kind of impact in a social sort of way with ESG. Really, that's really cool.

Zach Tucker

That's the thing about it, with sustainability and such, there is an aspect which you have to have it ingrained in your culture at the end of the day. That's why I'm helping to direct culture now is because of that fact. It has to be hand in hand because if no one actually believes in it, it's not going to work. Then financial responsibility, one cool, real quick, one cool thing that I'm excited, I'm looking to do is we're hoping to do an employee assistance fund here in the future where it'll be through a local organization that handles funds or trusts or things like that, and being able to set up a trust for the benefit of our employees for when things like might go awry in their lives or something of that nature.

But that's down the pipe a little bit. But that's something I think we as a local employer can really make some huge headway with some, with our employees knowing that we have their back in the case there's, like, a major issue that happens in their lives, like a fire or something like that.

Allan Gray

That's, again, fascinating stuff that you're leaning into and really sort of culture driven in all four areas, I think is really fantastic. But, Zach, let me be a fly in the ointment for a moment and get down to the brass tacks of this. Not everybody thinks about sustainability, ESG, regenerative agriculture, climate smart, whatever we're going to call it today, as necessarily good business.

I'm curious about, because of your experiences; one, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I get the sense you don't necessarily agree with that. But maybe you do. But tell me a little bit about, let's start… First of all, your company interacts an awful lot with folks that are producers. I think many of the producers who feed ducks for you also do other things in agriculture as well. Tell me a little bit about the business of sustainability in agriculture. What's the sense of your growers with respect to this? How do you all try to engage that group in your sustainability efforts? Tell me a little bit about that.

Zach Tucker

There are a number of ways we look at that. One, we're bringing our producers in on an annual basis, and we're meeting with them. We talk about whether it's our performance, whether it is things going on in the world, that thing that we need to be aware of. Potential practices, those sorts of things. I'll give you an example, even if it's not required by law based upon sizes of facilities, from like a CAFO CFO standpoint, our producers have, like, nutrient management plans for the facilities.

Because we wanted to make sure that we know where the manure is going, where it's… We give our farmers the ability to utilize that manure that they produced on their farms. We're not taking it from them. That's a great opportunity for them to utilize in their other endeavors. I mean, they've got fields to spread on, and there's one opportunity right there that we have.

Allan Gray

Let me just follow up on that, Zach. You're not going to take that from them. They get to utilize. It's a great benefit to them. But you want to know what their plan is with it, what they're doing with it?

Zach Tucker

Yeah, because we want to make sure that we're not just all willy-nilly, spreading everywhere. We have to be good stewards for our neighbor's sake and our environment's sake. We can't just be spreading anywhere. One of the things that we've pushed with them is we've incentivized them for a number of things over the years, whether it's that, whether it is making sure that when we build barns or maybe even retrofitting it, when we have pits, for example, with our barns actually having covered pits as opposed to open pits.

The lagoon system is not something we like to see anymore. It's just not a good standpoint from an environment… potentially environment, I should say. If you, say you have a heavy rain and you're really full, you might, you're having some runoff there but also smell things like that. We've incentivized them any number of ways over the years to work with us on things that we're bringing up as things come down the pike towards us from an environmental standpoint or what have you.

Allan Gray

They fight you over these things?

Zach Tucker

There can be moments where there's some testiness, for sure, over some of these things. Because it might be something they don't understand initially or that's just new to them. They're not aware. But I think we've got a really good team here that does a great job of being able to explain it all. I got to give a lot of props to our field tech team. We have good relationships with our farmers, with their field techs. They're visiting them rather frequently, less when AI is around, because, frankly, sometimes it's not worth the risk going there more.

But, yeah, it's part of those good relationships and explaining it to them. That's why we like to bring them in for dinner and meetings where we can say, "Hey, like, we want to talk about this with you. We want to explain why. What's the why?" Because so often you can just tell anyone, hand out edicts and say, "Hey, we're doing this" and we don't want to do that. We want to be good partners in this. We want to make sure that we're continuing to support our farmers, whether that is with increased cost of production. Are we keeping in line with their pay, so on and so forth.

Allan Gray

Great. I wanted to pursue this a little bit because it's a group that's not, it's not really your employees.

Zach Tucker

No.

Allan Gray

This is sort of your suppliers that you're trying to get them to come along with you on this journey. You got to take a little bit of different approach to that. It's different when it's a collaborative, needs to be a collaborative activity.

Zach Tucker

It's one of the selling sides of live production. When you're working with a contract producer, you have to be able to sell ideas and practices within that process.

Allan Gray

Also, Zach, to be fair, incentives. I mean, I hear you saying incentives. I don't know that that's always money, but sometimes it is. It may be co-investment in some of the things that you need to do, right?

Zach Tucker

Yeah. There can certainly be, like, if there's, if we're running like a trial or a study with something, there's going to be some benefit and some capacity, typically for someone. We don't want to throw them off if they're unwilling to do it or if they're not going to get some form of benefit to it.

Allan Gray

Right.

Zach Tucker

We have annual awards, too, that are based on performance. High performers will get incentivized. It's in a bonus type structure.

Allan Gray

Good. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit, and let's talk about Maple Leaf Farms business. A lot of the things you've talked about I think are great. I put them in the category of doing good. We should. We have corporate responsibility. We have responsibility as good citizens to do good.

Zach Tucker

Yeah.

Allan Gray

Why is doing good? The examples you've given, why is doing good, good business?

Zach Tucker

Well, I…

Allan Gray

… What makes it. I think maybe think about a different way. Zach, if I'm the CEO, I'm saying, Zach, what's the return on our investment in you and the things you're doing?

Zach Tucker

Well, I think at the end of the day, there's both internal and external aspects of which doing good business benefits. Internally, as any employee, they want to be working for a company that they feel like is making a difference, doing good in some capacity. You can only work, I feel like you can only work for a company so long that you don't feel like is doing the right things.

If you're like, oh, this company is breaking the law or doing something, you really don't want to work for that company. Like, you don't have that loyalty to that company because you're not giving them the loyalty of being an ethical company and being someplace that you should want to work for. Like, there's part of that. You should want to be that beacon of a company that people want to work for. Internally, you want people to feel proud of where they work, and they want to feel like this is that their values are part of, are matching up with your values.

Externally, whether that is, there are any number of people that you know or entities that you could be talking about, whether it's your community. Where you live. If people see that you're not a good, upstanding business, what's going to happen there? Other people aren't going to want to work for you. People, you’re a reputation, reputational risk right there. Same thing with investors.

If you're not doing good business, investors, whether you're looking for or whether that's investors, where you're looking for a potential partnership or if you're looking at strictly debt financing, they're going to find some of those things out, and it's not going to go well for you. There's that aspect, and reputationally, you don't want to be doing, having poor business practices, because it's a snowball effect. At the end of the day, it just, it gets worse. Did I answer your question?

Allan Gray

I think so. I mean, I think so. I certainly understand the idea of doing good, but my question is, will somebody pay more for your product because you're doing good? Is that how you think about it?

Zach Tucker

I think it depends. When I look at sustainability, there's certainly going to be, potentially be an upfront charge for what you're doing, depending on the practice. Are you having to put in new equipment that benefits your process? Will people pay more? I don't know. Just recently, we, if you weren't aware, we were in some chicken products as well at one point. We were doing some chicken products and we actually exited that market. It was for a number of reasons. It was difficult to do that anymore from a food safety standpoint.

Basically, with the whole salmonella framework, reduction framework going on, this is the first category that they looked at, and they said, "You got to have zero. Zero." Well, these products aren't cooked products. Buying chicken or getting chicken on the market, even if you're buying Category I, which is what we were doing, USDA Category I, it still has up to 7% penetration of salmonella. Well, that's a problem because then it's either; A, you have to put it into a cooked operation, which we did not have a cook operation for chicken. We're using that for duck.

Or; two, you have to essentially cook it. You actually just have to cook the product. Whether you can take the product that you weren't using and put it in or just have a straight cook to product from the beginning. We've done testing on that. For that particular product, no one wanted to buy a product that had a higher, a better safety aspect to it with being cooked. No one wanted to buy it for the price.

To answer your question is, yeah, you can do good, and you can try and offer this product that in theory people should want. It's a safer product in the sense of, because, I mean, let's be honest, that product was typically going to be microwaved in some capacity, even though it shouldn't have been. You try to do good, but it doesn't always work out. It comes back to the whole idea of you want to look at sustainability. But you can't miss a forest for the trees in the sense of you still have to search for profit in a business. Without profit, all the good things that you do are for naught.

Allan Gray

Yeah, I think that's a really important call-out. Sustainability includes, hey, the business has to be sustainable, which means it's going to have to be profitable. I think that's a really good example where you had to exit a product because what's, what would be the right sustainable product to produce is just not economically sustainable, so it can't…

Zach Tucker

There's different aspects of it. You could have the environmental sustainability side of something that's great, but does it economically match up for you? Because, I mean, like I said, working on a solar project, I don't know if it's going to be, we're not at that point yet. I don't know if it's going to be economically viable in terms of an ROI yet. I don't know, if it's not, then I can't just say, "Oh, we're going to do this," and it's going to hurt the company. From a fiduciary responsibility. I can't in good conscience do that.

Allan Gray

Yeah.

Zach Tucker

Social-wise, there could be a number of things we could have improved benefits, or something like that, but to what extent do we want to do that? Because if it's too much, to the point where we are actually getting hurt for it and we're suddenly losing money, that becomes a problem. As much as we want to help people.

Now, I could go on a tangent as far as what are the intangible benefits of helping your people. Because at the end of the day, if you give benefits to your people, like I'm looking at, what are we looking at from like childcare, daycare, after-school care type stuff, what benefit does that help our people to the point where that helps keep their house in order, and what does that mean in terms of what they're bringing to work every day? Because if your house is in order, I truly believe that if people's houses are in order, they're going to bring a better version of themselves to work.

Allan Gray

That's likely to pay off. Those are some places where we invest in the social side of things, our people side of things where sometimes it's hard to calculate the exact ROI for it, but generally, we know that, or we think…

Zach Tucker

You could get a good return on it those, typically.

Allan Gray

Yeah, typically, you can get a good return on those. That's right.

Zach Tucker

Then just economic development in terms of new automation projects. You can sit there and say, "Hey, we just installed a machine, where you're going from doing x amount for a whole day to suddenly, you're doing the same amount in a matter of a shift." That type of situation is an economic sustainability standpoint where you are truly doing more with less.

Allan Gray

Right. Very good. Tell me, Zach, what's your vision of the future? Where is this idea of sustainability in the food and AG sector? Where's that going?

Zach Tucker

Well, I definitely don't think any of this stuff is going away. I think you're going to see different variations of it. You're seeing more emphasis on some of the emissions type stuff right now in terms of sustainability. I know we're working towards that stuff right now ourselves. It's a newer thing. I don't know fully what that's going to look like. I think it's going to continue for a number of years for sure as we look at this further. I think there's still a lot of…

Allan Gray

In that space, Zach, you all are starting to think about how you're measuring your carbon footprint or what your greenhouse gas emissions are. Your Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3, you all are thinking about that sort of stuff, too.

Zach Tucker

That stuff is definitely in our minds right now as far as what that's looking like. Investing in programs that we can better calculate those things, understand that, and compare it against any number of frameworks just so we're aware of it. It's, right now, as a private company, we're not expected to necessarily be reporting on a lot of these things. We're not, but we want to be out in the forefront of it. Just so we're aware, and then if it does come time, that there's more expectations of information, then, yeah, we're there.

But what you're going to see, in my opinion, is you're going to see more companies for a while, unless there's some form of pendulum swing back the other way, you're going to see more emphasis on some of these science-based type targets or those things for emissions reduction, temperature reduction, those things.

You're seeing it in a number of companies, in terms of expectations, starting to pop up more. I know Walmart, for example, I believe it's voluntary right now, but like Project Gigawatt, I believe is what it's called. That's one. I know Aldi's working on some of that stuff, too, in terms of science-based targets. Yeah. There's all sorts of things that we have to have on our radar to think about that.

Allan Gray

Yeah. Because some of these folks are your downstream customers, right?

Zach Tucker

Absolutely.

Allan Gray

Do they have these conversations with you, or you're starting to end up having conversations with them saying, "Hey, where are you on this? What do you…?"

Zach Tucker

We're starting to, we're starting to see it as well, so it's getting the push. I think you'll continue to see some of this push. I will admit, sometimes I do have some hesitancy when it comes to thinking about these things because anytime I go to one of these, like, a conference, anytime I see a talk on whether it's emissions, these things, I'll admit, sometimes I'm a little skeptical because no one can really tell me how, what we're going to be doing, actually will do what they say it's going to do.

Anytime that I've asked the question, people will just brush me off, and I'm like, "Oh, okay." But I'm not saying… an important aspect that we're keeping an eye on what we're doing from a pollution standpoint, from emissions, but I think some of the messaging that's been done over the years has been not as good. Why you have so much hesitancy on... You've got a group of people who are very hesitant with the scope stuff and emissions, and the green movement, and then you got another side that's all gung-ho on it, and it's like, can we not find some middle ground here? Because people want to know how it's going to be done.

People get why it's going to be done, but it's, like, how does this work? And I think if we can figure out how it's going to work and how it's not going to hurt companies. Because like I said, we have to make sure if companies aren't making a profit, and they go under, what was the point of doing something? Because that's the problem. It's still pretty cost-prohibitive for many companies to get into some of this stuff.

Allan Gray

Well, I think you hit on an important point there that we see happening in DIAL Ventures as well as… we look into this space. You have outcomes on one side; and generally speaking, there are differences. Different people want different outcomes; but generally speaking, they're all sort of, "Hey, let's do good for," in this case, what we're talking about mostly the environment, but "Hey, let's do good for the environment, let's do good for people, let's do good for society, let's make sure companies behave good," all the ESG components.

Generally speaking, I don't think there's much argument over that. The question is the how, and then whether or not it's dictated to us, or there's opportunities, or there's incentives for changing the behaviors that would lead to some outcome. And one: or do we even know what those behaviors are that would actually lead to the outcomes that we're trying to get to? And two: how are we going to make sure that those things get incentivized properly? Seems to me like that's a big issue in this part of this industry right now.

Zach Tucker

Yeah, that's the big issue, because I don't think whether you're talking just your family farmer out there or a conglomerate type situation, where people are actively going to be like, "Forget the environment types." No one's going to do that. People want to be good stewards of the environment generally. I like to think you're going to have a very large majority of those people like, "Yeah, we want to protect the environment. We don't want to pollute things purposefully.” But, yeah, when it comes time for, "Whoa, well, we need to do our own part." Well, it's like, "Okay, but what, but how?"

How do we do that? And is it worth the cost or the time? Or I guess you could look at it both ways. Time is money, but is it worth it at the end of the day versus the impact that will have? I think what will hopefully happen over the next five to ten years, is we will see better understanding of what the impact is from some of these programs, from some of the early adopters of these types of programs, and hopefully we see some form of better science-based information that says, "Hey, this is actually doing this for us right now, and this is the benefit."

That's what I'd like to see, at least, because then I think it's a lot easier to sell any number of ideas at that point if you have actual information of saying, "Hey, this is working for us, and here's how we know it." I don't know.

Allan Gray

Sounds to me like somebody who speaks from experience of doing the things you're doing now to do good business and how you've had to sell that throughout your organization… the things that we're doing, but you're able to explain to people how and why together, and that's how you're able to move Maple Leaf Farms forward in their sustainability efforts.

Zach Tucker

One of the things we state is, we talk about our sustainability program. We want it to be ethically grounded, scientifically verified, and economically viable. Those are the three main things. When I look at ethically grounded and, I guess, even scientifically verified, I do not want us to be a company that's accused of greenwashing at the end of the day, we're doing these things, but we're not actually doing anything. If we say we're going to do something, we better do it. Otherwise, again, that's just lying to people's faces at that point, if we're not.

Allan Gray

Zach, excellent discussion here. I really appreciate it. Listen, I got one last question for you. You're not prepared for this. I didn't give it to you ahead of time or anything…

Zach Tucker

Rapid fire.

Allan Gray

But, Zach, I'd like to ask all of my guests before I finish up, if you had to pick one theme song. What's your theme song, Zach?

Zach Tucker

Theme song. That's a good question. I might have to do a quick little look here at what I got up going right now.

Allan Gray

What's on your playlist?

Zach Tucker

Well, I'll go with one. Just because being a dad of two little girls, Penelope and Ariana, my wife Gabby and I are always finding our phones are littered with the kid music, but some of the stuff's not too bad, right? My daughters love Trolls. The movie Trolls, and so, “Can't Stop the Feeling” is a pretty good one, right?

Allan Gray

“Can't Stop the Feeling.”

Zach Tucker

Just to try and keep moving, stay positive, and keep... It's not bad. “Can't Stop the Feeling.”

Allan Gray

You know what? I was going to ask you. I thought about that, and I thought, no, I won't ask him, but I will tell you. I'm not sure if it was “Can't Stop the Feeling,” but it might have been. I think I might have heard a song like that one on the bus in Brazil.

Zach Tucker

It's very possible. Certainly, I'm known to sing here or there. I had the opportunity to sing a little bit at Marcus's house.

Allan Gray

At Purdue?

Zach Tucker

Oh, no. I was hanging down in Brazil.

Allan Gray

Oh, that's right.

Zach Tucker

Yeah, so I got an opportunity to sing a little bit, and it's always been one of my little things I do, whether it was choir or musicals, drama, those things.

Allan Gray

Great. Well, Zach, again, thank you for the time today. I appreciate you talking to us. Really love Maple Leaf Farms. I really love the fact that you make duck because hardly anybody does it, and I love duck. But you're doing it in a sustainable way. That's really trying to have real impact on the environment, on people, and still keep your business strong. I think that's really fantastic stuff. Congratulations on the things you've done so far.

Zach Tucker

Thanks, Allan. I appreciate it. Been fun.