Lean & Green participant Grolsch: ‘We have been caught by the Lean & Green virus’

Lean & Green is the CO₂ reduction program for the logistics sector and an initiative of Connekt. Alwin Kulsdom, team leader shipping & forwarding at Royal Grolsch, one of the participants in the Lean & Green program: “Once you start, you can't really stop.”

One of Connekt's initiatives is the Lean & Green program. Grolsch has been a participant in the program for many years. “We started with the 1st Star in 2012,” says Alwin Kulsdom, team leader shipping & forwarding at Grolsch. The brewery from Enschede has stood for craftsmanship and mastery for 410 years. “We find it very important to pay attention to the world around us in addition to the production, distribution, and sale of our beers. That is why we brew and trade as sustainably as possible.”

Kulsdom describes Lean & Green with the words efficiency, sustainability, and optimization. “Efficiency is naturally central to the lean part. It is about maximizing your value and preventing all kinds of waste,” he explains. “Sustainability emphasizes the green side, where we want to use environmentally friendly and energy-efficient processes. And optimization is the combination of both concepts, so that we continuously improve and try to find the perfect balance between cost savings and environmental awareness.”

Collaboration

Grolsch works with various transport flows, for some of which the company handles the distribution itself, while for other flows, such as pallet transport, it outsources the distribution. For the 1st Lean & Green Star, they focused only on pallet transport in the Netherlands. This required collaboration with the carriers. “Intensive collaboration with your carrier is extremely important. In the beginning, it was a matter of feeling things out,” says Kulsdom, “but once we got up to speed, we wrote a solid action plan and started implementing it. We have actually been using that action plan, which has since been further adapted, ever since that period. And every time, we do smarter things together to optimize it even further.”

When writing the action plan, Grolsch and its carriers concluded that they were already handling things smartly. “We were already working lean, but we had never actually converted that to the green part.”

Carbon footprint reporting

At that time, many companies still saw the platform as a 'nice to have'. “It wasn't really necessary; they could just keep doing their work without that tool.” In recent years, this has changed due to legislation and obligations, such as the CSRD, but also due to market forces. “The demand for good CO2 reports is increasingly becoming a serious topic. It has become a must-have for many companies.”

The minimum requirement for your CO2 reporting is that it at least meets and is compliant with the ISO 14083 standard. “That is a relatively new standard.” The arrival of this international standard indicates that reporting is becoming increasingly important.

Virus

"When achieving the 1st Star, we already achieved a CO₂ reduction of 28.7%. And we were caught by the Lean & Green virus. As Grolsch, we were actually already the greenest beer in the Netherlands, but then we could also show it in the field of transport,” says Kulsdom. “Once you start, you can't really stop. Because you keep initiating new things together that contribute to a great result. And you can convert that result into a financial result and a sustainability result. It is a win-win situation.”

In the meantime, in addition to the 2nd Star, the company has also held the 3rd Star since May 13, 2025. Sometimes that is quite a puzzle. For the 3rd Star, you must have added at least 75% of your transport flows. “If you add more transport flows, you also need more and more data. It is sometimes quite a puzzle to find the right data from the right systems. But I must say, we are getting better and better at it.” Even now that the 3rd Star has been achieved, the company is continuing on the path it has taken. “We are going to deploy the actions we have set in motion, and expand them further, to go for the 4th Star. I look forward to a 'green-colored' future.”

Lean & Green

The brewer has therefore already taken significant steps to make logistics more sustainable, but how does the Lean & Green program contribute to this? “The program provides a certain guideline,” says Kulsdom. “You have to start somewhere, and then it's nice to follow a program that clearly indicates what you should pay attention to.” The Lean & Green community is also of added value. “The advantage of the community is that you can also take a look behind the scenes at each other and see what others are doing to achieve the Stars. Those are things you can smartly copy to apply within your own organization.”

Making CO₂ concrete and collecting the right data was a challenge in the beginning. And then how to analyze that data. “We received a lot of support from Lean & Green in that regard. And the BigMile tool used for that also helped us to ultimately make the results visible.”

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