Hello TEDxPresidio, my name is Pär Larshans.
I'm Chief Sustainability Officer from Max Hamburger Restaurants, a fast food chain from Sweden.
In 2002, the two sons of the founders, Richard and Christopher,
became in charge of the company.
The first thing they did was to travel in the US together with their father
and I think they had more than 800 burgers
during the period of four weeks.
Coming home from the US they, of course, saw not just the good taste
but also the long-term consequences of consuming fast food.
Therefore, in 2003 we launched our Delifresh menu,
that means that we are trying to serve burgers
based on low fat, low sugar, less salt and, of course, fibre-rich breads.
There are many things we do in our road to sustainability.
Another example is, of course, the way that we are hiring people with disabilities.
What we are doing is that we are trying to focus
not on the people with disabilities,
on the other hand, we focus on our managers
and try to take away the prejudices by teaching them
about the people with disabilities and how to train them.
The result of the cause today is that our programme
has been highlighted by the European Union
and, of course, here are also some pictures
where the present Minister of Employment meets some of the employees.
In late 2006, Mr Richard Bergfors was concerned,
he had seen Al Gore's movie "An Unconvenient truth" more than sixteen times.
So, therefore, he came to the top management team with a question:
how is the situation in our company? What is our impact to the climate?
The result of this was depressing in some ways,
meaning that the beef, our prime product,
is more than 70% of our total emissions.
And with that result on hand, we decided to call to action.
(Slide: Putting the carbon on the menu)
(Slide: We offset everything we emmit by planting trees in Africa.)
Other reaction is, of course, our new environmental-friendly restaurants,
that are really focusing on reduced consumption of energy
but also the way how the whole restaurant is environmental deductible.
Running a fast food company just in Sweden,
even if we have the ambition of opening up new restaurants outside Sweden,
I'm still amazed over the big recognition that our programme has had.
Sir Paul McCartney: In Sweden now
they've started to label food
to show the costumers the environmental damage rating,
so it's giving the people a choice.
You're told that, you know, this burger is going to
damage the atmosphere to the equivalent of this and, so,
at least the costumers then can look at the goods and say
well, maybe I don't want to buy them.
So it gives them the chance to buy sensibly and responsibly.
Pär Larshans: And I can assure you, Max as a company will continue
to make efforts to reduce our emissions
and is by other to do the same thing.