How Suntory Global Spirits Prioritises Sustainability

When sustainability and risk share the same leadership, they evolve from separate priorities into two parts of one strategic vision.

That’s how Kim Marotta, Chief Environmental Sustainability Officer and Head of Enterprise Risk Management at Suntory Global Spirits, sees her combined role — one she stepped into at the end of 2024.

With nearly 40 years of experience, including more than two decades shaping sustainability in the beverage sector, Kim brings a rare perspective to the drinks industry. Her professional journey began far from boardrooms and distilleries, as a criminal defence attorney tackling social and community challenges firsthand.

That early grounding in justice, wellbeing and “making things better for everybody” shaped her later commitment to corporate responsibility and, ultimately, to helping advance Suntory’s Proof Positive agenda — a global initiative focused on protecting nature, empowering consumers, and strengthening communities across the company’s value chain. She shares her priorities, challenges and sucesses.

Can you give me a brief overview of Suntory’s sustainability strategy?

When we talk about sustainability, we frame it as our “Proof Positive” strategy. It is about the positive impact we are going to have on our environment, on our communities and on our people. 

We have three pillars.

The first is all about the environment, and that is the one I look after – we call it our Nature pillar. I can talk specifics as we come back to it, but it is really about improving nature and the environment.  

Our second pillar is about our consumers – in this space, it is everything we do around alcohol responsibility. 

And the third is about our communities, so it covers everything we do to build an inclusive culture, connect with communities and provide volunteer hours, particularly in the places where we live, work and play.

Why is it important to create a more sustainable future for spirits?

We want to be in business for the long term, and the way we are going to do that is not only by ensuring that we have resilience in our own business, but also that we have resilience in the commodities and raw materials that we rely on to grow our business.  

These are brands that have been around for hundreds of years and through generations, and many of them were started because of their connection to nature. Distilleries were often located where they are because of the environment or the surrounding nature – where you could find the most pristine water and the most fertile ground for growing crops. That is where distilleries were located and where they have remained for generations.  

If you think about Maker’s Mark in Loretto, Kentucky, or Jim Beam in Clermont, Kentucky, those families chose those places because of that. The same is true of our distilleries in Japan and the bountiful water that is available there, or in Spain or Mexico for tequila. All of those opportunities are really rooted in the surroundings that made those distilleries able to produce the best‑tasting products.

How is Suntory making spirits more sustainable?

The first and foremost is water. For our spirits, you need high‑quality, great‑tasting water to produce a fantastic experience. It is important to us not only that we have the best quality, but also that we have sufficient quantity of water and that the communities where we operate also have access to clean water.  

For us, when we think about water, we break it into three areas. First is to look at our own house and make sure we are reducing as much water as we can to produce our products, so we are as efficient as possible. We do that in a variety of ways. One of the easiest is making sure we put in good practices and go after efficiencies wherever we can, but we also make sizeable capital investments.  

An example would be what we call closed‑loop cooling, which we have brought to most of our distilleries. That allows us to reuse water instead of taking it in and discharging it back into waterways. Those types of operational efficiencies and capital investments have helped us reduce our water use quite significantly. Since 2015 we had set a goal to reduce our water use in operations by 50%, and we hit that goal early. We are super excited – it is a lot of work.

It is a culture change and it is about investment, and we are very thrilled about that.  

The other area is protecting our watersheds – not only protecting the biodiversity and nature that the water relies on, but also protecting water quantity for the long term.  

We have 33 distilleries where, over the long term, the risk to our watersheds is a little more tenuous and we need to look at long‑term availability. We have distilleries in India, Spain and Mexico, and we have made a commitment to replenish those watersheds – to put back the same amount of water that we are using. 

In Mexico in particular we have a partnership with several of our peers and competitors, including AB InBev and others in the spirits industry, as well as Dr Pepper. So soft drinks, beer and spirits are all collaborating together because we all rely on the same watershed outside Tequila, Mexico, to produce our products, whether it is tequila, soft drinks or beer. Collectively, we are working on replenishing water in that watershed.  

It is called the Charco Bendito project, and it is in the Lerma–Santiago river basin. Similar projects are being replicated in Spain and India.  

We are also looking at peatland natural water sanctuaries in partnership with our parent company, Suntory. The connection between peat, bogs and water is really important to us, so we are helping restore peat in what we call natural water sanctuaries and have made long‑term commitments there. Our most recent project covers around 395 acres of peatland, and we have committed several million dollars over the long term.  

Lastly, tying back to our brands, we are not just focusing on areas where water is under stress but also on places where we want to protect water proactively. Maker’s Mark and Jim Beam, for example, both have natural water sanctuaries. The areas from which we draw water are important to us, so we continue to invest in forestry, biodiversity and nature‑based solutions to protect those watersheds.

There was a group formed by many of us in the beverage industry called BIOBA. It brought together companies that have been committed to watersheds for a long time and helped us figure out how we can measure the benefits to nature.  

We have got pretty good at measuring water – we talked about replenishing, and we know that if we put in wetlands, irrigation improvements or riparian buffers, we can measure how much water we will replenish into a watershed. What we are trying to do now is not only measure water, but also the positive impacts we are having on nature. We have not perfected it – it is still a work in progress – but we are getting there, so we can talk about measurable impact and change and set real, scalable targets.

Are there any particular projects outside of water that you think are having a real impact?

Absolutely. If you move to climate, this is obviously of significant importance to us. We have targets around Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, as well as Scope 3 emissions. For Scope 1, one of our biggest investments is an anaerobic digester at one of our distilleries, Booker Noe in Kentucky. It is a US$400m investment that will help us significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions at that distillery, which is one of the largest in the world. We estimate it could deliver about a 50% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions there, and we should be able to bring that anaerobic digester online this year.  

For Scope 2, right now we have been purchasing renewable electricity credits, so our Scope 2 emissions are effectively zero, but we are continuing to look for opportunities to engage in virtual power purchase agreements and to find real, market‑based opportunities, both for us and with our suppliers. There is more to come in that space.  

Scope 3 is our biggest challenge. As with many of our peers and competitors in beverage, more than 80% of our greenhouse gas emissions are in Scope 3. We need to look both upstream and downstream and work in tandem with our suppliers and help influence them.  

Over the last year, we have spent a substantial amount of time looking at what is out there in the market and what other companies, NGOs and leading groups – from the World Economic Forum to Business for Social Responsibility – are doing. We developed what we call a Supplier Maturity Mountain. For each category – starting with packaging and then, for example, glass, which is one of our biggest levers in Scope 3 – we know where all of our glass suppliers sit on that maturity mountain. We then set real targets for our category buyers to help increase their suppliers’ efforts, and we work with suppliers to help decarbonise and reduce our Scope 3 emissions.  

It has been a game‑changer for us and has created a strong relationship across our organisation, particularly between sustainability and procurement, and with all our suppliers. We do this for each supplier category: corn has its own maturity mountain, as do cardboard, glass, transport and logistics. It represents a big opportunity.  

Packaging is also significant. In spirits, packaging is often the first thing consumers see, so it is hard to claim you have sustainable packaging if you are not leaning into what you can do around lightweighting, recyclability and reducing your Scope 3 emissions. Transportation and logistics – how we move products from distilleries to distributors and how raw materials move to our distilleries – are another focus for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  

The last area, and the one that has a significant amount of focus, is what we do in forests and fields. In the field in particular, we have pilots in corn, agave and barley in markets and countries around the world, not just with us but in partnership with Suntory Holdings. We have learned you cannot do it alone – you have to collaborate and build partnerships.  

A great example is a partnership we recently announced in the US around corn. We had been running our own pilots, but we source corn from the same growers as our peers and competitors. We have now announced a partnership with Diageo, Brown‑Forman, Heaven Hill, the Kentucky Distillers’ Association and a non‑profit called Precision Conservation Management. Collectively, over five years, we are working across 100,000 acres and have committed US$3m between our companies. It is an example of how you can scale up and create sizeable change. We will be focused on regenerative agriculture practices, which are better for our products because regenerative methods enhance soil health, which enhances the flavour of the corn and other raw materials we source, and they also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  

What are the main challenges?

On the global side, we operate everywhere from India to Japan to Clermont, Kentucky, so we have to figure out how to have enough pilots in different places and how to grow those pilots so that we can then take best practice and learning and apply it more broadly.  

A real advantage for us is being part of Suntory Holdings. It is not just our company; there are other operating units such as Suntory Beverage & Food in Europe, Asia, India and beyond. We can share best practice, learn from each other and lean into each other’s strengths. Suntory Beverage & Food, for example, relies more heavily on soft drinks, so they have a lot of innovation and investment in PET. We, on the other hand, are more advanced in glass because that is a bigger focus for us. We can learn from each other and bring those global learnings together, which gives us a great opportunity and helps address some of the global challenges.  

Coming back to Scope 3, we have sizeable supply chains, so we need to keep influencing and helping drive progress. Most of our suppliers are fairly engaged on sustainability, but it is a journey for everyone. We all need to keep making step changes. We know there is a lot of work to do and some big levers we need to pull, or obstacles we need to overcome together.  

Our aim is to be open and transparent with our suppliers and to act as a resource. We do have some smaller suppliers in countries like India and Mexico who may not yet fully understand or know how to track their Scope 1, 2 or 3 emissions. We are open to providing resources, working together and seeing how far we can move together.

The other is the balance around reporting. I have been at this for nearly two decades, and the reporting requirements now are unlike anything I have ever seen.  

While you want to stay focused on continuing to do good, we have had to allocate people in our team to spend a significant amount of their time on reporting. There is also the seismic change across the business. Companies are obviously prepared for financial reporting, but integrating environmental, social and governance metrics to the same standard represents a really seismic change. As a privately held company, that is definitely a challenge for us – one we are up for and focused on – but it takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

What does the future hold for sustainability at Suntory Spirits?

The future is exciting. We launched the Proof Positive strategy in 2019, even though we have had decades of engagement and connection to the environment through our work on water and greenhouse gas emissions. That is when we really put a name, a stamp and official targets around it.  

Now we are at the point where we can move from pilots to impact – from strategic thinking to execution. All the foundations have been set, and now we have the opportunity to keep moving forward. As a business, sustainability is fully embraced. It is deeply embedded within our overarching strategy for Suntory Global Spirits, part of our vision and really part of our culture.  

All of that is rooted in our heritage, going back to Suntory Holdings. When you think about that connection, Suntory Holdings often talks about a deep connection to nature. For us, it starts with the parent company and comes all the way through, and now we have the opportunity to create scalable and sizeable change.