Since my last update, I have learned so much from a professional development standpoint as well as how to fail successfully.

Failing

These last few months have also given me what I’m sure I’ll call the “Scale Problem” for the rest of my career. As we have been trying to better manage our material wastes, one key piece of information that we have been missing is data regarding where and why we are producing waste in our production. To address this issue, the sustainability team and I decided that we would get back to the practice of weighing the waste bins on the production floor. The only issue was that the scale was broken and needed parts to be fixed.

I talked with several people, got the ball moving and was excited to get the scale fixed and begin measuring our wastes. A month later, the scale was still broken, and nothing had changed. I had wasted a lot of time chasing something that was simply wasting everyone’s time. At this point I had to reevaluate my goals and find a new path to get where I needed to go. I created a new measurement template that would go off volume rather than weight. This proved to be successful and allowed us to see where we are producing the most waste so that we can focus our efforts based on data.

My biggest lesson from all of this is that I can’t just wait on things to be fixed or anchor on the idea that something can’t be done because something is broken or not working as it should. I learned to be more flexible and to always be ready to find another solution to the same problem.

Another change that has come from the work I’ve been doing is that we may not have all the positions at the company that we need to be able to make the changes we want to see. When going through our production process and trying to make changes, one of the biggest realizations we had is that there was no single person in charge of continuous improvement of our process. This realization showed us an opportunity, as no one at the company has the capacity to pick up that work right now. Because of this, Chris, my mentor, decided to move onto trying to get someone to oversee continuous improvement. Now, we will be looking for a process engineer within the next year or so to help us continuously improve our process. Hopefully, this will help us to reduce our material waste and take some steps towards the 2030 goals we set as a company.

Managing capstone projects

Another fun development that has happened since my last post is that I worked with a capstone group from PSU to help me get a head start on Scope 3 emissions at Tofurky. Scope 3 emissions refers to all emissions that take place outside of a company’s own manufacturing (i.e., supply chain and distribution). For their project, they looked at our largest suppliers and through analysis of our sales and purchases last year, were able to give us a series of recommendations to get more thorough data around Scope 3 emissions. This has set us up for 2022 where we will be able to start asking our suppliers more questions as well as using more software to help organize the data we collect.

SEM

One of the coolest advancements so far in my time at Tofurky is that we are now a part of the Oregon Energy Trust’s Strategic Energy Management (SEM) program. This program has around 9 other businesses from around Oregon all participating to become more mindful about their energy usage.

With our team that we created; we have already set goals for reducing our energy usage with this program that will help us to achieve our 2030 goals. In November, we conducted a leak sweep where we walked around with an air leak detector that could help us locate any pipes that were leaking air. In one building alone we were able to find over 25 air leaks, showing us just one of the many opportunities we will have with this program to improve our energy performance.

The next steps with SEM are the biggest for the program and Tofurky. Within the next couple months, we will be conducting what they call a treasure hunt. This will involve the entire Tofurky SEM team and any other employees who wish to join in walking through the manufacturing facilities and pointing out any opportunities that we may have to reduce energy use. I really like Oregon Energy Trust’s approach to this as they look for a large quantity of ideas at first and then narrow it down to the low cost, high impact projects. Through this, we should be able to reduce our energy use drastically within the next year and into the future as well.

The final part of this program that has been cool to me is that it has allowed for me to network with similar businesses. I recently got to talk with the Sustainability Manager at Bob’s Red Mill, and we talked about participating in each other’s treasure hunts. Not only is it allowing our businesses to build a community of practice, but it also serves as a great way for me to get more knowledge and experience from someone who has walked a similar path to what I want to do. I look forward to all that this program can give.

Spanish class

The final thing that I decided to do during my fellowship is join the Tofurky bilingual program. This program is a 16-week class of 8 English speakers and 8 Spanish speakers at the company. Each week we have time to learn vocabulary and grammar from a Spanish teacher, and then we are paired up to speak with someone native in the other language. This has been a wonderful experience so far because not only have I gotten to practice Spanish, but I have also gotten the chance to meet some people from the production floor that I’ve never met before. Most of our production employees also primarily speak Spanish, so this program really helps to bridge the language gap.

Composting Project

The final thing that I’ve done within the last few months is a composting project. Recently, Tofurky discontinued a few products from our product line and as a result, had a bunch of the dry mix that we used leftover. We didn’t want to just throw all that product out so instead we worked with a local composting facility to take all of it. We emptied pallets of ingredients into giant dumpsters and sent it away to be composted. This was just a small one day project but it was cool to see how much waste could possible be diverted in the future.