Colgate-Palmolive is recasting sustainability as a growth engine, and Ann Tracy says the company’s 2030 strategy is built to prove it. The consumer goods giant’s Chief Sustainability Officer is pushing a tighter, more business-focused model that links environmental action to resilience, value and scale.

Colgate-Palmolive makes oral care, personal care, home care and pet nutrition products sold worldwide – think brands like Softsoap, Irish Spring, Ajax and Hill’s Pet Nutrition, as well as Colgate and Palmolive, of course.

“I report to the team that drives growth and strategy for the company,” Ann explains. “And that’s important because it illustrates how Colgate thinks of the work we're doing. It is embedded or part of our 2030 business strategy, which we call our strategic framework, and sustainability is what we call a transformative enabler alongside AI and operational excellence.”

The ambition is to connect sustainability to commercial performance and everyday product experience.

“It's about driving the overall growth strategy, as well as the way we strategically attack those growth pillars,” she says.

A career built for scale

Ann has spent 35 years at Colgate-Palmolive, most of them in supply chain roles, before becoming Chief Sustainability Officer in 2020. In a company where operations, sourcing and product design are tightly connected, her background has laid the foundations for deep sustainability action.

That history also shapes how she sees the job. “It’s not about me,” she says. “It’s about our programme at Colgate.”

Colgate has tracked environmental data for more than two decades, with baseline information going back to 2002 for utilities, greenhouse gas emissions, waste to landfill and water use. That long record made it natural for sustainability leadership to emerge from supply chain expertise.

From 2025 to 2030

The company’s 2025 strategy taught Colgate-Palmolive two important lessons. The first was the need for sharper, more measurable targets and the second was the need to explain sustainability in business language that finance, marketing and other functions can use.

Ann says the 2030 framework is “an evolution, not a revolution”. In practical terms, that means building on the same platform while making the goals more measurable, more streamlined and more focused.

The strategy is organised around three ambition areas: 

• Eliminating plastic waste
• Climate action
• Bright Smiles, Bright Futures

Ann says the company had to become more disciplined: “You measure what you manage.”

That principle now underpins the 2030 strategy, which she describes as smarter, more accountable and better aligned with the company’s wider business goals. The point is not only to hit targets, but to show how those targets support long-term growth and resilience.

The business case for impact

A major theme in Ann’s leadership is what she calls the “win-win-win” principle. The idea is that consumers win through better products, Colgate-Palmolive wins through brand loyalty and risk reduction, and the planet wins when business performance is strong enough to support scale.

“People win when we innovate,” she says.

The company is increasingly translating environmental work into “dollars created, dollars saved or dollars protected”. That language helps sustainability teams operate as business partners rather than as a separate technical function.

For a global consumer goods company, it means environmental initiatives are evaluated not only for impact, but also for operational savings, compliance value and resilience in the supply chain.

Oral health at global scale

One of Colgate-Palmolive’s core leadership areas is oral health, led through its long-running Bright Smiles, Bright Futures programme. The initiative has been running for more than 30 years and is designed to improve oral health and hygiene education for children and families around the world.

Colgate-Palmolive sells oral care products that are present in more homes than any other company, which Ann presents as a responsibility as much as a market position. That scale, she says, means the business can influence health outcomes far beyond its own shelves.

The company reached its 2025 target of educating two billion children and families one year early and is working towards 2.7 billion by 2030 – “Bright Smiles, Bright Futures 2.0,” as Ann puts it.

The programme is also being updated for a more digitally connected world, so it can reach more people through modern channels as well as community-based education. In Ann’s view, oral health is not a narrow product issue, but part of general health and wellbeing.

Packaging and plastic reform

Plastic is another priority area, because Colgate-Palmolive is a consumer packaged goods company and much of its packaging uses plastic. Ann says the company’s aim is to eliminate plastic waste, while recognising that packaging reform has to work at industrial scale.

The company is part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Global Commitment, a voluntary business pledge to tackle plastic waste and pollution. Under that framework, Colgate-Palmolive has committed to making all of its plastic packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable, with a further target to reduce virgin plastic use.

The company’s recyclable toothpaste tube was a major breakthrough. The old tube contained mixed materials, including aluminium, which made it difficult to recycle. The new tube uses a single plastic material and was designed to meet recyclability standards while preserving product performance. Once the challenge had been overcome, Colgate-Palmolive shared the technology with other tube makers, which Ann views as part of its broader responsibility to help drive industry change.

“We also hired a third party in the US to measure the progress of all tubes, not just Colgate tubes, and we've reached a critical mass in the US where we started the rollout, which is important as we try to encourage scale,” Ann says.

Climate and supply chains

The climate challenge continues to grow in complexity for companies like Colgate-Palmolive as standards and regulations change quickly. 

Colgate-Palmolive has Science Based Targets initiative-approved net zero targets and aims to be net zero carbon by 2040, using 2020 as its baseline year. 

When it comes to Scope 2, Colgate-Palmolive has entered a solar VPPA that covers the equivalent of 100% of its electricity needs in the US with renewable electricity, and in Europe, an offshore wind farm in Finland covers approximately 60%. “Those two levers have driven terrific progress towards our Scope 2,” Ann celebrates.

Ann says Scope 3 emissions are harder still, because they depend heavily on purchased goods and services, especially materials and packaging suppliers. That means climate progress is tightly linked to procurement, manufacturing and supplier engagement.

“It's an evolving space, but we're committed to driving impact and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions globally through our value chain,” Ann says.

A tougher definition of success

There are two sides to success for the future of the Colgate-Palmolive sustainability strategy.

The first is achieving the targets. The second comes with the value driven for the wider company. 

“Success is articulated through the lens of growth and resilience,” Ann explains. “We’ve matured to a point where we’re articulating why achieving, for example, Scope 2 goals are important to the business, because by achieving 42% reduction in Scope 1 and 2, we saved X amount of it, or avoided Y amount of utility costs, or had less shutdowns because of energy disruption or whatever the case may be. 

“There’s numerous examples like that where we can articulate why it’s good for the business. 

The ultimate sustainability goal for Ann begins at the start of a product journey, in sustainable design.

“We’re not selling products based on sustainability, we are delivering more sustainable innovation, but in a way that people delight in using our products, because they’re more fun to use, better to use, have better fragrance, have better long-lasting performance, whatever the case may be, because sustainability has enabled that.”