23 Jun 2026

Keynote - Sustainability The New Business Imperative

Keynote - Sustainability The New Business Imperative
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🏠 | Blog | Keynote - Sustainability The New Business Imperative

 

Quick Read Summary

Sustainability and growth have been treated as separate conversations for so long that most organisations have stopped noticing. This Reset Connect London 2026 keynote made the case for sustainability as a growth driver, and set out the sequence of work Asahi went through over six years to make that true rather than aspirational.

The timing is pointed. Consumer trust in sustainability claims is at a low, regulation is tightening and marketing budgets are under scrutiny, so vague green positioning now costs more than it returns. What survives that environment is specific, evidenced and commercially framed.

You will come away with the mechanics: how Asahi built sustainability into finance, marketing and R&D briefs, how it decides which brands can credibly carry a sustainability theme, and how an innovation brief produced revenue streams nobody asked for.

 

 

Sustainability and Growth Only Look Unrelated Until You Redefine Growth

Preeti Srivastav, Group Head of Sustainability at Asahi Group Holdings, opened by naming the split that has held the two apart. Sustainability has been understood as compliance and emissions reduction. Growth has been understood as producing more and selling more. On those definitions, they have nothing to say to each other.

Widen the definition of growth and the picture changes. If growth includes corporate reputation, brand value, consumer loyalty and supply chain resilience, then sustainability sits at the heart of it. Srivastav called this the hidden opportunity, and was candid that Asahi missed it for years while the sustainability function concentrated on reducing carbon, water and waste.

A sustainability team measuring only reductions is reporting to compliance. A team that can also describe its contribution to brand value and resilience is reporting to the growth agenda, which is where the budget sits.

 

Sustainability Belongs in the Brief, Not at the End of It

The foundational work at Asahi was integration. "It cannot be a side conversation," Srivastav said. "It can’t be at the end of a brief. It has to be in the brief."

In practice, that meant rewriting what each function was accountable for. Marketing treats sustainability as a way to add halo to brands and connect with consumers. Finance reports sustainable EBITDA alongside conventional EBITDA, which is earnings adjusted to factor in the price of carbon. R&D receives sustainability technologies as part of the core innovation brief rather than as an add-on. "The CFO was accountable as much as the CSO," she said.

Asahi then went further and connected senior leadership bonuses and incentives to sustainability performance, which Srivastav credited with moving the needle. None of it was quick. She put the journey at around six years.

It is a testable checklist. If sustainability does not appear in the finance reporting pack, the innovation brief and the senior incentive scheme, it is still a side conversation whatever the strategy document says.

 

A Sustainability Story Only Grows a Brand When It Fits the Brand and the Market

Implementation comes first, and Srivastav was direct that the rest of her argument collapses without it. Once renewable energy, water and waste programmes are running, products start accumulating credentials: one made in the UK on 100 per cent renewable energy, another in Italy saving water. That list is the raw material.

Turning it into brand value is a matching exercise rather than a labelling one. Slapping a water claim on a product is too superficial to work. The theme has to be woven into the brand and it has to speak to the consumer being targeted. Talking about renewable energy in a market struggling with water scarcity will not land. Talking about moderation in the UK, where Peroni has built a flagship position around its 0.0 alcohol-free product, rides a wave that already exists.

Srivastav also pushed back on her own profession. The overwhelming majority of sustainability practitioners treat the field as environmental, she argued, when the social side can deliver comparable impact. It is harder, because gender equity means something different in Italy than in India, but a structured, data-driven approach makes it workable. Asahi tested that by stripping the labels from one of its brands, literally cutting packaging impact and figuratively signalling a product for everybody regardless of gender, race or social status.

This explains why most sustainability marketing underperforms. The claim is usually true and simply attached to the wrong brand in the wrong market.

 

Credibility Is the Constraint on Every Claim, and Regulation Helps Protect It

 

Srivastav described walking into a British supermarket and finding an aisle of eco, green and bio labelling she could not decode, and she is a sustainability professional of over 20 years. That was the point. A claim only drives growth when it is "simple, credible and meaningful".

On the obvious failure mode, she was brief: "the only thing I want to say about greenwashing is don’t do it." Everything else in the keynote assumed science, data and evidence as a baseline rather than an achievement.

Her position on regulation was less expected from a commercial speaker. She welcomes the rules, the credibility checks and the consumer challenge, on the grounds that they create a level playing field. Regulation is like broccoli, she said: "just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not good for you." She was equally pointed about the move fast and break things reflex, arguing that anyone breaking things has an obligation to replace them with something better.

Credibility is now the rate limiter on communication. The lag that verification adds to a campaign is the cost of the campaign working at all.

 

The Best Returns From the Innovation Brief Were the Ones Nobody Asked For

Putting sustainability into the core R&D brief produced results Asahi did not specify. The team developed a vending machine that captures carbon, which was the intended outcome. The by-product it generates turned out to support coral reef restoration, and Asahi now runs 30 projects across Japan using it to help coral reproduce. "That was not in the brief," Srivastav said.

Nor was the second discovery. The waste collected at the base of the machine works as a construction material, opening a new revenue stream and a new product entirely. The roads at the R&D facility where the machine was developed are made from it. Biomass waste from the breweries followed the same pattern. It became a tumbler, then a series of products, then a separate Asahi entity built around a portfolio with nothing to do with food and beverage.

This reframes the return on sustainability R&D. The business case was written on emissions reduction. The upside arrived as materials, products and a new operating entity, none of which appeared in the original justification.

 

 

Practical Application, How to Make Sustainability Work as a Growth Driver

Srivastav’s keynote is unusually easy to convert into actions, because she described a sequence rather than a philosophy.

Questions to ask

  • Does sustainability appear in our finance reporting, our innovation brief and our senior incentive scheme?
  • Which of our products have credentials strong enough for a brand to talk about, and which do not?
  • Does the theme we are claiming match what consumers in that specific market actually care about?

Signals to watch

  • Sustainability metrics appearing in bonus scorecards rather than only in the annual report
  • Competitors narrowing their claims to a single evidenced theme rather than broad green positioning
  • Social sustainability themes moving into brand campaigns, not just environmental ones

Traps to avoid

  • Attaching a credential to whichever brand has budget rather than the brand it genuinely fits
  • Communicating before the implementation work is finished, which is where greenwashing risk starts
  • Passing the effort to the consumer instead of carrying it at corporate level

What good looks like is a claim a consumer understands immediately, a brand it plainly belongs to and evidence that survives a regulator reading it. Asahi took about six years to reach that point.

 

 

Key Takeaways

This was a practitioner keynote rather than a trends keynote. The argument was that sustainability drives growth only after a specific and fairly unglamorous sequence of internal work, and Srivastav was open about how long that took.

  • Sustainability looks unrelated to growth only while growth is defined as selling more rather than as brand value, loyalty and resilience
  • Integration means sustainability sits in the finance pack, the innovation brief and the incentive scheme, or it is still a side conversation
  • Asahi reports sustainable EBITDA alongside conventional EBITDA, factoring the price of carbon into the numbers leadership is measured on
  • A sustainability theme grows a brand only when it fits that brand and matters in that specific market
  • Social sustainability is underused and can deliver comparable brand impact to environmental themes when approached with data

 

 

Quote of the Session

"It can’t be at the end of a brief. It has to be in the brief."

Preeti Srivastav, Group Head of Sustainability, Asahi Group Holdings

 

 

Final Thoughts

The most useful thing about this keynote was its order of operations. Srivastav did not argue that sustainability creates growth. She argued that it can, once implementation is genuinely done, once every function owns a piece of it and once claims are matched to brands that can carry them. Skip any of those and the communication fails, usually expensively.

She closed by rejecting a line she had heard the day before, that sustainability is the cost of growth. Her counter, offered by someone who described sustainability practitioners as disillusioned optimists, was that it can be the next driver of it. Coming from a company with a six-year programme and a new business entity behind the claim, that reads as a description of work done rather than a slogan.

 

 

Speakers

Preeti Srivastav, Group Head of Sustainability - Asahi Group Holdings. Preeti has over 20 years of experience working with companies, governments, non-profits and institutions across a range of markets, and previously worked with Greenpeace and We Mean Business before joining Asahi’s executive leadership team.

 

 

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