Companies today face a common challenge: how to develop workable programs that will help them move forward strategically on corporate social responsibility, or CSR, initiatives that matter to customers and employees.  One of the CSR issues I’m deeply involved with at Burger King is animal welfare. Obviously, a corporation like ours could do many things on that front. So we need help choosing the right initiatives. But where can we get it? Should we tap activists as advisers, as McDonald’s did with environmentalists on the issue of packaging? Should we seat activists at the decision-making table, as the new owners of TXU have done?

Burger King has chosen a different path. It’s a deliberative, low-key approach, but it has given us confidence that we’re going about our animal-welfare initiatives in the right way. And lately it has given us unexpected benefits.

We set out on this path a decade or so ago, when animal-rights activists began to generate concerns among consumers. (Admittedly, we had a rather bad relationship with some activist groups at the time.) We chose to establish an advisory panel to generate, filter and analyze ideas for how the company could promote animal welfare. (We aren’t the only food company with such a panel—Safeway, for instance, also relies on an animal-welfare advisory committee, and McDonald’s has a panel, too.)

Our advisory panel helps us sort through the sometimes conflicting suggestions we receive and provides a stringent academic review so that we know our policies are based upon sound science and make sense. The panel also weighs costs against benefits and takes into account our supply-chain issues—the Burger King system is so large that we could virtually cause the country to run out of a particular product if we decided to fill our pipeline with it.

The advisory panel members are volunteers, and most are academic experts; the well-known author and researcher Temple Grandin of Colorado State University is a member. Sometimes we have disagreements, but after we put all the facts and science on the table, in every case we have been able to come up with recommendations that have moved the company forward and addressed the relevant concerns.

On the panel’s advice, last year we announced a new goal for the amount of egg product from cage-free chickens that we use throughout our entire restaurant system. We now aim to have the equivalent of 5 percent of the egg volume of our company-owned restaurants be cage-free. (The company owns 10 percent of our restaurants—the rest are franchised.) We also set a goal of obtaining 10 percent of the pork in the entire system from sows raised without gestation crates.

The panel hoped these moves would encourage the spread of humane practices within the poultry and pork industries. We were surprised by the large number of positive calls and letters we received from consumers in response to our efforts and the favorable press coverage. We’ve undertaken other animal-welfare initiatives that were considerably more expensive and comprehensive, but they’ve never generated this level of positive public response. The public approval has given us a certain external validation for a process that previously we had kept under the radar.

My experience suggests several success factors for setting up and using an outside panel on CSR initiatives:

§          Recruit top experts and leaders in their field who are willing to take the time to work through their differences and create solutions.

§          Identify a staff adviser from the company who is an expert in the field and can be the company and industry resource. This person will schedule meetings, set agendas and give the panel frequent updates about how its advice is being implemented.

§          Don’t parade the panel around just to get publicity. The goal is to make informed, science-based changes that have an impact, not to create media soundbites. Furthermore, publicity seeking may alienate the panelists and waste their valuable time.

It’s important to take the advisory panel seriously and to work hard to show its members that their ideas make a difference. That way they’ll become true partners in helping the company address consumers’ concerns and advance social initiatives.

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Steven Grover is vice president for food safety, quality assurance and regulatory compliance at Burger King, based in Miami.

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