Name: Lauren Eisenmenger | Director, Environmental Sustainability and Regulatory Compliance
Company: Suntory Global Spirits
Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn
Welcome to our series aimed at spotlighting the individual leaders within BIER member companies and stakeholder organizations. Learn how these practitioners and their companies are addressing pressing challenges around water, energy, agriculture, climate change, and what inspires each of them to advance environmental sustainability in the beverage sector and collectively, overall.
Briefly describe your role and responsibilities, and how long you have worked with your company.
I joined Suntory Global Spirits in July 2021 and currently serve as the Director of Environmental Sustainability and Regulatory Compliance. My primary focus is on Scope 3 emissions and developing strategies to reduce them in alignment with our 2030 targets and beyond. This involves close collaboration with internal technical experts in packaging, agriculture and logistics, as well as a strong partnership with our sourcing team, given that approximately 80% of our emissions stem from supplier activity. A significant part of my role is working to engage our supply chain and encourage interventions that support emissions reductions aligned with our climate goals.
On the regulatory side, I focus on packaging regulations across North America, tracking developments in extended producer responsibility (EPR), deposit return systems, and minimum recycled content mandates. I analyze how emerging legislation may impact our business, calculate cost implications, and help shape our company’s policy positions to support fair and effective legislation.
In this evolving policy landscape, collaboration is essential. We rely on our industry associations, including the American Glass Packaging Institute and Ameripen, to keep us informed.
Finally, I also support our internal digital tools, including the recent launch of our environmental data management system. I work to ensure data collection is streamlined and effective, minimizing the effort required from teams while maximizing accuracy.
How has the company’s sustainability program evolved over the years, and what are your specific priorities for 2025?
Suntory Global Spirits has been on a sustainability journey for many years, but a significant turning point came in 2021 with the appointment of our Chief Sustainability Officer, Kim Marotta, and the formal launch of our Proof Positive sustainability strategy. This milestone began a more integrated and ambitious approach, backed by subject matter experts across key environmental and social impact areas—including climate, water, packaging and agriculture.
Proof Positive is built around three interconnected pillars:
- Nature Positive – focusing on minimizing our environmental impact across water, climate, forest, field and packaging;
- Community Positive – emphasizing inclusive growth and community engagement;
- Consumer Positive – promoting well-being, informed choices and reducing alcohol-related harm.
Since then, we’ve made significant progress, including hitting our 2030 water usage rate target ahead of schedule. This early success has allowed us to re-evaluate and raise our ambition in water stewardship. In parallel, we’ve strengthened our sustainability governance by expanding our reporting capabilities in response to emerging regulatory frameworks such as CSRD and California’s climate disclosure requirements. As a privately held company, this is a relatively new but necessary shift, and we’re building the expertise to meet these expectations without losing focus on the work itself.
We’ve also integrated sustainability into enterprise risk management, something we’re especially proud of. Our dedicated ERM lead, embedded within the sustainability team, ensures insights from our climate scenario analysis directly inform company-wide risk assessments and investment decisions.
Looking ahead to 2025, our priorities include:
- Finalizing and publishing our Climate Transition Plan by 2026, including a roadmap to net zero across Scopes 1, 2 and 3;
- Continuing work on Scope 3 emissions, including the launch of a glass recovery project in Kentucky to improve recycling infrastructure and support circularity;
- Advancing a five-year regenerative agriculture project in the U.S. corn supply shed in collaboration with several BIER members;
- Scaling our new Supplier Maturity Mountain engagement program to help drive measurable improvements across our supply chain;
- Deepening internal alignment and capability-building to ensure resilience in the face of acute and chronic climate risks, such as extreme weather events.
The momentum we’ve built is both broad and deep, spanning infrastructure, innovation and collaboration. We are proud to be part of a global beverage industry that is aligning around shared sustainability goals, and we’re committed to contributing actively through our partnerships, technical work and long-term investment in scalable solutions.
How do you feel being a BIER member will help you successfully address the key areas you are addressing in 2025?
Being a member of BIER has been instrumental in helping us advance our sustainability priorities at Suntory Global Spirits. The collaborative environment BIER fosters, through both structured and informal exchanges, has provided us with tangible insights, trusted relationships and practical tools that directly support our work.
One of the most valuable recent experiences has been BIER’s member-only ad hoc session on climate transition planning. The timing aligned perfectly with the kickoff of our climate transition plan, and hearing from members who have already published theirs, along with a contributor to the Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT) framework, was incredibly informative. The session allowed us to ask in-depth questions, understand the rationale behind various approaches, and identify peers we can continue to engage with as we shape our roadmap to net zero by 2050.
The value of peer exchange extends beyond planning. As we ramp up work in areas like Scope 3 emissions, glass recycling infrastructure and regenerative agriculture, BIER’s network helps facilitate collaboration that amplifies impact. For example, we’re exploring partnerships with other beverage companies and distributors to collectively invest in glass recovery programs, initiatives that would be difficult to scale alone. We’re also one of several BIER members participating in a new five-year regenerative agriculture program aimed at improving outcomes in the U.S. corn supply shed.
Equally important is BIER’s role in knowledge sharing around emerging reporting frameworks. With the increasing complexity of regulations like CSRD and California’s climate disclosure rules, we’ve benefited from hearing how other members are preparing their reporting strategies, prioritizing material topics and aligning with new expectations. This level of transparency and best-practice exchange has been especially helpful for our internal reporting and sustainability teams.
Overall, the ability to connect with others facing similar challenges, openly and candidly, makes BIER unique. It’s a space where practical conversations happen and we learn together. That shared vision and willingness to support one another is what makes the work not only more effective but also more meaningful.
Name one of the practical solutions or best practices you learned in working with BIER and its members and why it was important to you and/ or your company.
One of the most valuable practical solutions we’ve gained through BIER is the opportunity to align on methodologies, particularly around how data is calculated and reported across the beverage sector. A great example is the guidance BIER has developed around reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Our team at Suntory Global Spirits references BIER’s GHG Emissions Sector Guidance as part of our annual reporting, and we call it out explicitly in our methodology. The consistency and credibility this provides are incredibly important, especially in a landscape where stakeholders are increasingly scrutinizing disclosures.
Beyond GHGs, we see significant value in the potential to standardize other areas, such as recycled content calculation for glass packaging. As more companies disclose recycled content percentages, we’ve recognized the need for a shared approach. For example, should internal scrap from suppliers be included or excluded? If we’re all calculating it differently, then even well-intentioned transparency can create an uneven playing field. BIER is uniquely positioned to facilitate those technical discussions, evaluate the options, and, when feasible, help the group align on a sector-wide standard.
That level of methodological alignment is critical. It not only strengthens the integrity of the data we publish, but it ensures we’re not unintentionally penalizing ourselves for taking a more rigorous approach. It also fosters trust, both across peers and with external stakeholders, when we can say, “This is the standard we all follow.”
More broadly, the structure of BIER’s pitch sessions and ad hoc working groups has created an effective channel for raising these types of technical challenges. It’s been refreshing to engage with peers who are equally committed and technically grounded, and to explore ideas that can elevate consistency across the industry collectively.
For us, that’s the kind of practical, high-impact support that makes BIER stand out, not just as a forum for collaboration, but as a driver of alignment and shared progress across the beverage sector.
Share a recent accomplishment of your company’s sustainability initiatives/achievements you are most proud of and why.
I’d like to first give well-deserved credit to our site teams and my colleague Matthew Blanford for achieving our 2030 water usage rate reduction goal ahead of schedule, a major milestone for Suntory Global Spirits. The accomplishment I’m most proud of personally is the launch of our Supplier Sustainability Maturity Mountain program in 2024.
This initiative was designed to deepen engagement with the suppliers who represent the majority of our Scope 3 emissions. It focuses on high-impact categories and strategic suppliers with long-term relevance to our business. Rather than taking a check-the-box approach, the program encourages suppliers to set science-aligned targets, develop abatement plans and cascade those expectations down their value chains. It’s about aligning our supply partners with the same ambition and accountability we hold ourselves to.
What makes this program especially powerful is how it has sparked a more strategic, collaborative relationship between our sourcing and sustainability teams and with our suppliers themselves. We’ve established a structured maturity model, assigning each supplier a level and score based on their sustainability performance. Sourcing teams now have clear KPIs to help suppliers advance up the “mountain,” and we provide tailored resources and training to support those efforts.
We’re also meeting suppliers where they are. For partners in strategic regions who lack internal capacity or experience, we’ve set aside funds to provide direct consultant support. This helps them build foundational knowledge, like understanding Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, and equips them to begin reporting and managing their climate impact more effectively.
Perhaps the most rewarding outcome has been the transformation in how these conversations unfold. We’re now engaging directly with suppliers’ sustainability leads, not just their commercial teams. The dialogue has become richer, more technical and more innovative, resulting in mutual learning and shared progress. We’ve seen sustainability professionals on the supplier side proactively sharing ideas, exploring joint projects and truly partnering with us in ways that simply didn’t happen before this program launched.
Ultimately, our goal is simple: support every supplier in moving up the maturity mountain, regardless of where they start. It’s a long-term investment in shared success and one that reflects our broader philosophy of collaborative impact. Sustainability, at its best, is not just about meeting targets. It’s about helping others rise with you.
If you had one superpower that could be used to radically accelerate and scale sustainable best practices, which one would it be, and how would you use it?
If I had one superpower to accelerate sustainability progress, it would be the ability to remove every barrier that limits collaboration, whether legal, structural, or competitive, and replace it with an incentive framework that rewards working together. Imagine a world where companies could seamlessly partner across sectors, openly share data, co-invest in projects and amplify impact, without worrying about NDAs, competitive sensitivities, or restrictive procurement processes. That’s the superpower I’d choose.
While competition can motivate innovation, sustainability is one space where progress shouldn’t be siloed or used as a differentiator. Some of the most pressing challenges, like scaling glass recycling or accelerating regenerative agriculture, simply can’t be solved by one company alone. We need shared solutions, shared responsibility and shared success. If frameworks like SBTi or regulatory standards could actually incentivize collaborative emissions reductions, maybe those reductions count even more, which would shift the dynamic dramatically.
At Suntory Global Spirits, we’ve seen firsthand how powerful collaboration can be. It’s at the core of many of our efforts, from supplier engagement to joint value chain initiatives. And through BIER, we’re able to connect with peers who share that vision, where the collective mission matters more than the scoreboard.
That’s why I appreciate BIER so much. It’s a space where that spirit of openness already exists, where people come together not just to problem-solve, but to energize one another. Even in a complex and often uncertain landscape, being part of a community like BIER reminds us of what’s possible when we lead with purpose and generosity.
So, yes, if I could wave a magic wand, I’d eliminate the red tape, dissolve the fear of competitive exposure and elevate collaboration as the true measure of progress. And maybe unlimited funding would be a close second. But it’s that human connection, driven by trust, purpose and shared action, that I believe would change everything.
