Sustainable hamburgers - Par Larsens at TEDxPresidio

Pär Larshans is the Chief sustainability officer at Max Hamburger, a fast food chain founded in 1968 by a Swedish family.
Pär has been working at Max for more than 25 years. He is used to deal with such themes as leadership, sustainability or human rights, especially the rights of disabled people. He combines his work at MAX with lectures on behalf of the Swedish foreign ministry, where he works with leaders from China, Russia, India and many other countries on sustainable leadership in business.

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 a 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 emit
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 customers 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 inspire others to do the same thing.