Nestlé Purina’s bold step in ocean restoration

In February this year, Nestlé Purina Petcare Europe announced it was investing in an ambitious Ocean Restoration Programme, aiming to restore 1,500 hectares - the equivalent of around 3,700 football pitches - of marine habitats by 2030.

The initiative has recently been featured in Blue Horizons, a new series presented by the World Ocean Council and produced by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions, showcasing Purina Europe’s commitment to advancing the regeneration of soil and ocean ecosystems.

But why did Purina decide to focus on ocean restoration, and how did this ambitious project come about?

We spoke to Director of Corporate Communications & Sustainability for Purina Europe, Kerstin Schmeiduch, to find out the story behind the company’s sustainability strategy and explore the environmental benefits – as well as the business case – for ocean regeneration.

To understand more about the project, it makes sense to learn a little more about Kerstin herself, who has taken the lead in championing ocean regeneration as a key component of Purina Europe’s sustainability strategy.

Kerstin, who began her career as a lawyer, joined Purina Europe just over eleven years ago in a role combining legal responsibilities with corporate communication. This remit expanded over time to encompass internal and external communications, media crisis management, public affairs, and consumer marketing – ultimately leading to her present focus on corporate communication and sustainability, she recounts.

“When I joined Purina, we looked at what we could do for pets, people, and the planet,” Kerstin says. Purina Europe launched the first-ever set of sustainability commitments in 2016, focused on minimizing the company’s environmental impact through sustainable packaging and ingredient sourcing. This was alongside pet-related commitments to encourage responsible pet ownership and pet adoption.

For the next edition of the commitments, Kerstin and her team wanted to do more, she explains. 

Underscored by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Purina Europe undertook an in-depth review where it could help address societal challenges through pet related initiatives.

"We therefore launched a commitment to foster the health of a million people in vulnerable situations by 2030 through the pet human bond," Kerstin explains, noting one example of these initiatives is Purina Europe's partnership with StreetVet, a dedicated team of professional vets and veterinary nurses bringing essential care to people experiencing homelessness and their pets across the UK.

Guided by the Planetary Boundaries Framework developed by the Stockholm Resilience Center, the team then considered the areas the business impacts the most, and established targets for 6 out of the 9 planetary boundaries.

"That’s when we looked at the overarching strategy of where are we in Europe as a business. What do we want to do?”

“We looked at our impact on climate change, biodiversity loss, on the nitrogen and phosphorus we use in our supply chain, and our impact on soil health and ocean acidification,” Kerstin recalls.

“We then looked at it from the outside in,” Kerstin says. “What does climate change mean for our business? What does biodiversity loss mean for our supply resilience? What does ocean acidification mean to us operating as a business? And where can we contribute to making things better in a holistic way?”

And that's where the impulse for Purina Europe’s Ocean Restoration Programme began, Kerstin explains.

"The ocean is essential for all life on earth, providing food and livelihoods to billions of people across the world and due to human activities, there has been a dramatic loss of marine habitats," Kerstin emphasizes.

A key component of Purina’s supply chain is fish, specifically fish by-products which would otherwise end up as waste from human food production and is a valuable and nutritious ingredient in pet food. But healthy stocks of fish in the North Sea, which provide the raw materials for Purina’s products, are under threat from degraded marine habitats, Kerstin points out. 

"Our sourcing region for Europe is the whole northern part of the sea, from Norway down to Portugal. So, what are the challenges in each of these marine habitats from which we source, and what can we do to look after the ocean, and look after the long-term supply resilience?”

Initially focused on restoring seagrass meadows and kelp forests, critical breeding grounds for many key fish stocks in the North Sea, the team quickly realised that a more holistic approach was needed to take account of broader ecological interdependencies, such as the problem of excessive sea urchins in Norway, which impede kelp forest recovery.

“We realized we needed holistic solutions rather than focusing on one species,” Kerstin explains. "And as we are not the experts in that, we have been reaching out to people and organizations already working in that space who already have solutions that are working, to help build that programme and that platform to do marine habitat restoration and demonstrate that there's a business case for scale.”

The project’s success thus hinges on partnering with a range of expert organizations focused on seagrass, kelp, excessive sea urchins, and native oysters.

Participants in the project now include The Seagrass Consortium, represented by one of its founding partners, Sea Ranger Service, focusing on replanting seagrass meadows, while start-up Oyster Heaven works to reconstruct lost native oyster reefs, using natural materials.

Meanwhile, restorative aquaculture venture Urchinomics is tackling the problem of excessive sea urchins in the North Sea, while SeaForester is working to restore seaweed forests utilizing techniques such as mobile seaweed nurseries.

Such partnerships are essential for sharing knowledge and developing solutions that can be scaled globally, Kerstin affirms. “We need many more players to support and do that,” she says, acknowledging that ocean restoration efforts are only just beginning. She envisions a future where shared challenges and collaborative solutions drive significant improvements in ocean health - and firmly believes in the business rationale for ocean restoration.

“If we want to look after the health of marine habitats, we must understand the challenges in each region from which we source,” she asserts. This approach is driven by the understanding that maintaining ocean health is crucial for long-term supply resilience, especially given the reliance on fish byproducts in pet food.

“We also really need to build knowledge and understand how we can establish meaningful and achievable targets for ocean health, to make sure that we gather the evidence that with all the work that we do that our partners do, we can really improve biodiversity,” Kerstin adds.

The first phase of the project, set to conclude by the end of 2025, aims to establish a baseline, common methodologies, and key performance indicators. “We need to demonstrate that these solutions work at scale and are cost-effective,” she emphasizes.

"That is where we can really help establish these common metrics to make sure that whatever we measure is consistent and comparable. We need to get through the first phase, understand what works, what doesn't work, and how can we make it work at scale.”

Successful completion of this phase will pave the way for scaling up to 1,500 hectares by 2030, with the ambition of inspiring broader participation, Kerstin says.

Restoration efforts are currently being planned at various locations in the North Sea and Northern Atlantic, with projects confirmed for France (Arcachon Bay), the Netherlands (including Zeeland), Norway (Tromsø), and Portugal (Cascais & Peniche), while additional sites in Germany and the UK are being evaluated.

With all this in mind, are we going to see more of this type of collaborative initiative between industry players and ocean regeneration experts?

"I really hope so. We are experts at doing great pet nutrition, but we are not experts in marine restoration, so that is why we work with partners that have that expertise, that have solutions, and we can help bring that together," says Kerstin.

"We can share our experience and challenges, and build knowledge and common methodology so that later on, if somebody else wants to take on this kind of project, we can leverage that learning as well. I think that would be fantastic because we can all learn from each other."

Telling the story of ocean regeneration to a wider public is also crucial in encouraging more people to get involved in such endeavours, Kerstin believes, with Purina Europe’s recent collaboration on the Blue Horizons documentaries a case in point.

"We're very excited about that because hopefully it brings the story to a wider audience that is not so familiar with what's happening in the oceans, and it showcases that there are solutions, it creates a moment of hope.”

"There's a lot of climate anxiety, and if I think about everything that doesn't work, I get anxious myself. But we can do something, we can make a difference,” Kerstin says.

"So, let's focus on what we can do, what we can contribute and how we can play our part in helping to move that knowledge forward, with the excitement and the passion and the hope that we can do things right.”