With Vice President of Strategy and Sustainability Rina Perrault at the helm, Sun World International is taking steps to lead the way in responsible farming and strategic innovation.
Perrault’s background in corporate strategy and environmental stewardship help her shape Sun World’s approach to sustainability — integrating water conservation and regenerative farming into the company’s long-term vision. Her leadership is driving change not just within Sun World, but across the broader agricultural landscape.
Sun World’s sustainability goals include analyzing its environmental impact, reducing its greenhouse gas footprint and converting farm equipment to electric vehicles. The company has installed solar panels at its Center for Innovation, providing 90% of its electricity, and the company is analyzing how to become carbon neutral in the future.
Sun World’s innovative grape varieties require fewer resources, driving sustainability in the industry. The company is expanding into new crops and managing varieties for other breeders.
The Packer spoke with Perrault to learn more about Sun World’s vision for sustainability.
The Packer: What are Sun World’s current sustainability goals, and how do they align with broader industry trends?
Perrault: We are doing a couple of different things in this portion of the industry. First, we are, of course, analyzing our own environmental impact through our greenhouse gas footprint. One of the new things that we’ve been doing is recording and baselining that so that we can better understand how we impact the environment and how that kind of footprint could be reduced over time. We are looking to use that data to better understand how we impact the world.
We’re very fortunate that Sun World is a small farm operation, which naturally leads to a smaller environmental footprint compared to larger farms, which has been great. Still, we’re trying to better understand how we can continue to reduce that impact.
Some of the projects that we’ve implemented are things like converting our farm equipment to electric vehicles, for example, which has been interesting to see. We’ve installed solar panels at our Center for Innovation so that we are using a renewable energy source — and that actually impacts about 90% of the electricity that we use at the center for information. So, we produce almost as much as we consume.
In terms of our long-term goals, we’re trying to better understand how we can reduce our footprint so that we can declare a year that we are hoping to be carbon neutral. That’s going to be one of the things that we’re looking into doing this year.
In what ways are you driving meaningful change in agriculture?
Because we are a genetics company, we are revolutionizing the industry just by introducing our new products. A big part of my job is thinking about the long-term strategy for the company. When I joined, we bred only grapes and stone fruit, for example. And now last year we acquired a citrus genetics program as well.
There’s a little bit of nuance there that I should highlight. They don’t actually breed new products themselves, but they managed varieties on behalf of other people. But again, one of the great parts of being in this industry is because of those kind of more innovative varieties and higher yields, they are really kind of driving the same kind of impact that we are in a lot of ways.
In terms of how I impact that, a big part of my role is thinking about what crops do we want to expand into within that genetics space. There’s a lot of different opportunities, and our goal is to kind of stay within the permanent specialty crop space. To do so, we ask ‘What are those crops that we want to be focused on? How can we find and partner with the right type of organization to achieve those goals?’
Sometimes that looks like a full acquisition of the company, like we did with Biogold. Sometimes that looks like managing varieties on behalf of a different competitive breeding program. [We’re] trying to kind of think through what our next runway and trajectory for growth is, instead of just table grapes, stone fruit and citrus.
Do you have an example of a complex challenge and how you pivote, or what change was made to overcome the challenge?
One of the biggest challenges that we’ve recently been facing is how do we calculate things like sustainability footprints and greenhouse gas footprints. And maybe that isn’t particularly innovative, … but I’ve really gained a lot of empathy for how challenging that can be. I think that data is one of the biggest challenges that a lot of people face in terms of understanding things like sustainability, and so talking about implementing different solutions to gather that on an ongoing basis has been a very big challenge, at least for a small company like us.
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