Real World ESG – Ooni’s sustainability story

Darina Garland co-founded Ooni in 2012 with her husband Kristian Tapaninaho. Kristian invented their first oven out of frustration at not being able to find an affordable, efficient way of cooking great pizza at home.

They initially launched on Kickstarter and since then the range has extended rapidly. The business now sells in 90 countries worldwide and turnover reached £208m in 2021. They are headquartered in Edinburgh, with offices in Austin, Texas and Bonn, Germany. Manufacturing is based in China with product design in Edinburgh.

Ooni places a significant emphasis on sustainability throughout their business operations and we caught up with Darina to find out more about their approach to ESG.

Was ESG and sustainability with you as a personal interest when you set up Ooni or has it grown more latterly? And are there any particular areas of interest?

Before Ooni we had an education business to promote creativity, innovation and problem solving within schools, so we’d always been working with communities. I got to do amazing things like go to Peru to see early sustainable schools and saw the impacts from climate change firsthand - probably earlier than was more mainstream. So, when Kristian and I set up Ooni we knew that we wanted to make it a business for good straight away and then we honed what that meant as we grew, but from early on it was important to us to do things for the planet.

It feels different now, when it's almost an expected thing, but it definitely wasn't expected in 2012.

We spoke to a lot of big companies to see how we could design our most impactful impact. The question I always have, which we still use today, is “if we have any money, how can we make the most impactful impact with that spend?”. Do we start our own charity to plant trees? Do we do carbon offset? Do we give it to people who are already doing good? And how do those big companies approach the partnerships they make? So that was really, really helpful.

It's definitely about that for us but what we've also noticed is that it’s become even more important to our employees as we’ve grown. We’re exactly 340 employees today and it’s often highlighted now as something that people like about Ooni, and it seems to be more important to consumers as they make purchase decisions for physical goods. So it is definitely becoming more mainstream for sure.

In those early days did you face any particular challenges? For example when you were looking for early stage funding or working with retailers?

Not really, because we hadn't had any external funding so we could dance to our own drum and design it our way, so that was important. That kind of fundamental belief in how we design the company stayed with us as we grew.

Retailers didn’t have the same level of care regarding sustainability at the beginning because it didn’t impact them financially, it was just a benefit to them initially but now it is much more appealing. In fact, I was just writing to REI, which is one of our biggest US retailers, who have strong goals in terms of their approach to sustainability. They are really interested to hear about what we were doing and we were able to respond with our whole plan and where we’re up to at the moment with our pledges. It felt good because we're already doing it. It’s now a question that is becoming more frequently asked, but back then it certainly wasn’t.

Our conversation with Patagonia was really interesting because they asked, “why do you need to grow?” and that was really beautifully challenging. Once you get to a certain stage, one of the things you can do is not just always chase the upward trajectory and instead make decisions based on what's fundamentally important to you rather than “we’ve got to grow for growing’s sake”.

In your impact policy, you say that you’re very keen on the idea of repurposing and recycling and reselling, is a second-hand market something that you would actively encourage?

It's really interesting, we've talked about this and are going through a plan to get this up and running.

I learned recently about how, in the fashion world, the second-hand marketplace is going to overtake fast fashion by the end of this decade and I love that. I've been pushing the conversation with the exec team to ask if we can get ahead of that and what I think is interesting is that it no longer devalues the brand to be promoting second-hand items like it used to be.

What’s tricky about it, and we’re doing a lot in terms of auditing this, is the impact of us getting an oven back from a customer, cleaning and getting it back out there versus just letting it happen organically.

What we never do is let things go to landfill. If we get returns and they've been used, we give them to the team or family or friends because they're always good.

Are you seeing more engagement on ESG now from employees, retailers & end customers?

I think it drives purchasing decisions for sure now if you think there's a company that cares and is not just greenwashing.

Earlier on we had a Kickstarter audience who were more design led and probably did care about green issues but now it seems that it's leaking more and more into everyday discussions and decision making.

I was in Texas recently and there are lots of really switched-on sustainable people there but there are also huge trucks in that Texan way, so it is hard to gauge how ‘everyday’ it is. But I think that now it feels like something that's expected from companies which I really support as opposed to a nice ‘add-on’.

But the biggest thing that I've noticed in terms of where it's made a difference is to our workforce. We know from the 340 Ooni global employees so far that it really matters. We just did our employee engagement survey that happens quarterly, and you can see that people love working here and it's basically a lot to do with the culture; they can see the values of the company and that definitely extends to the impact.

How do you balance the potentially competing needs of being an operational business with being sustainable, and have you had advice through the process, or have you have found your own way?

I think it’s been a case of finding our own way. I haven't asked organisations about that balance point, but I have heard other people talking on the subject, saying “we're not perfect” and that's helpful. When you see benchmarking from Patagonia and where they want to improve, or you look at some of these cool brands who are all sustainable but admit that they need to do better.

The best thing that's helped me is being part of a movement. In the team we talk about Pawprint (an app-based tool that helps employees measure their personal carbon footprints) and the different initiatives we use to almost gamify sustainable choices within the team, and there's a competitive element. Then there’s being part of B Corps or the signing of pledges and the Better Business Act and connecting with others at conferences. It’s like we are making a difference you can measure, and that's helped because otherwise you wonder what’s the point of recycling our coffee grounds when I'm going to take a flight?

How did you work out which UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to sign up for?

We chose the SDGs with our impact team, who are focused on this all the time. There's three people plus two exec members, myself being one, that work on this all the time.

They helped us review all of the SDGs, looking at the obvious ones for us. We chose them as we chose our values back in the day, by asking which most connects with you? Which connects with the narrative of the company? Climate Action was a no brainer, as was Zero Hunger - which is why where we’re making social donations and working with charities, it’s usually around hunger relief which ties into our food products.

Life below water was a personal one for Elspeth in our sustainability team, who's worked for Surfers against Sewage. Life on Land and Responsible Consumption and Production, which again, was an absolutely no brainer for somebody who's producing consumer products. So, it was diplomatic and worked well - we always feel like that if you bring others into the decision-making process there's more ownership.

However, whilst these are the SDGs that jump out we believe you can’t really pick and choose them, you can’t select one to focus on if it harms the other so we’re now thinking of them all more holistically.

Do you put your supply chain through the same high standards as you are achieving yourself? And how do you go about evaluating them if they are in China?

Normally we would regularly meet with our partners and that's a big part of any kind of successful business, but Covid obviously stopped that happening. We do have team members in China now, which is great, so they're now going to the factories. We’ve also had independent auditors working to check standards for ethical working conditions and living conditions, so we do take it really seriously. We work closely with our product team who have close relationships with our suppliers. We've developed our modern slavery statement and our ethical trade programme, so all these things have happened and are continuously audited.

Our team out in China are looking at exactly what each factory needs to do, there is definitely scope for improvement from a couple of suppliers and they seem to be pretty compliant with “this is what’s expected”. We’re becoming a big-ish business, although we're still tiny in the grand scheme of things, which I love, but having a bit of clout and saying that this really matters to us is useful. The good news is that I don't think it's just us who are saying these things, so it doesn’t feel like it’s brand-new information to our supplier base and there’s a lot of openness about what needs to happen to improve, plus we’ll help them on that journey. Ultimately, it’s a partnership.

Have you had any criticism at all of what you've been doing, as in not going far enough or concerns about greenwashing?

No, not really. When we've been up for awards before where we've been asked questions like, “how can you be creating a product that involves cooking outdoors and is a physical product shipped from overseas?”. But then when we’ve talked about the things we're doing for our impact fund and how early we started doing them.

I think in more mainstream conversations when you say “we planted 3 million trees so far,” people say “that's amazing,” because it's really tangible. We are aware that it can be seen as an easy out. But you can paint a picture that we're still up for learning and looking at how to offset, and I think when you actually get into all of the initiatives that we’re trying to do and hold ourselves accountable too then it’s actually a good conversation. We have much bigger impact plans for the future and are looking forward to designing them with our team as part of the next 10 years of Ooni Strategy which we’re launching at the end of October.

Have you got particular ambitions for Ooni’s sustainability, in any of its forms, and where you go next?

We signed up to a lot of pledges - the net zeroes, the Better Business Act Coalition and B Corp. We have a much-better-than-living-wage starting salary so yes, we care a lot about making sure that we are doing better than the ‘standard’. We have an open role for a Head of Regenerative Business live at the moment. This person will head up our team and ensure we roll out our new “triple bottom line” ways of working going forward. We want to give the planet equal weighting to the people and the profit when we think of business success.

Ultimately, the best thing you can do is create secure jobs for people and then make sure that we're leveraging our impact fund towards things that will have the most benefit.

Actually, at the TED climate conference I met a few people and said to them: “We want to do as best we can, how do we do that beyond the tree planting and the obvious things?”

There are some brilliant scientists there who said this is becoming a question that's being increasingly asked.  I think trying to connect best practices is something that more people are up for, but it's quite hard to access as an individual and as an organisation.

Because there are so many ways you could go, but in terms of us - we really think this is more important than ever. It's a climate crisis and we have children, lots of our team have children, so there's a lot that we need to do to genuinely to save the planet for them. We’re just getting started but I am happy that it’s more normal for business leaders to think like this because there's clout in that kind of collective for sure.