Ann Tracy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Colgate-Palmolive, joins Michael LeBlanc on The Voice of Retail ahead of the Retail Council of Canada Retail Sustainability Conference. An engineer with 35 years at the company, Ann unpacks the 2030 strategy, the shift from advocacy to value creation, the intention-action gap between what shoppers say and buy, and why retailers are essential partners. She takes the stage in Toronto October 28 with RCC President and CEO Kim Furlong. Presented by Konek, Canada's Way To Pay.
Sustainability in retail and consumer packaged goods has spent years filed under advocacy, reporting and good intentions. Ann Tracy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Colgate-Palmolive, wants it filed under growth.
In this episode of The Voice of Retail, Ann joins me from Colgate-Palmolive's research centre in Piscataway, New Jersey, ahead of her appearance at the Retail Council of Canada Retail Sustainability Conference in Toronto, where she takes the stage October 28 for a fireside chat with RCC President and CEO Kim Furlong.
Ann brings an unusual lens to the sustainability conversation. An engineer by training, she has spent more than 35 years at Colgate-Palmolive, most of it in the global supply chain, with assignments across Asia, Europe, the UK and the United States spanning manufacturing, customer service, logistics and divisional supply chain leadership. That operating background shapes how she runs the file today, after the role moved from the supply chain into the company's growth and strategy team, making it broader, more enterprise-wide, and embedded in the business strategy itself.
She also gives listeners a useful reminder of the scale involved. Colgate-Palmolive marks 220 years in the United States this year, generates over twenty billion dollars in net revenue, employs roughly 34,000 people and sells in 200 countries across four core categories: oral care, home care, personal care with regional icons like Palmolive, Sanex and Irish Spring, and pet nutrition through Hill's Pet Nutrition, plus a growing premium skin health business. Colgate sits in more homes than any other brand in the world. At that volume, a small packaging design change ripples through plastic tonnage, pallet counts and the entire retail supply chain.
The heart of our conversation is the 2030 sustainability strategy, which Ann describes as an evolution rather than a revolution, building on the sunset 2025 plan across three ambition spaces: driving social impact, helping millions of homes, and preserving the environment. What distinguishes 2030 is a hard lean into value creation, and her insistence that sustainability teams learn to speak finance and marketing rather than acronyms and temperature scenarios.
We dig into the intention-action gap, where more than ninety percent of consumers say they support sustainability but far fewer act on it because they will not trade away price, convenience, quality or performance, nor should they. We also cover long-term resilience, the finite nature of plant, mineral, animal and fossil-fuel-based ingredients, and why retailers are essential partners in shaping value creation on physical and e-commerce shelves.
A smart, practical listen for retailers, CPG leaders, merchants and sustainability professionals heading to Toronto in October.
Connect with Ann Tracy on LinkedIn, and catch her with Kim Furlong at the Retail Council of Canada Retail Sustainability Conference on October 28.
https://rccretailsustainability.ca/