Unilever boss Nicky Sparshott’s vision for local manufacturing in a post-Covid world

Unilever’s Australasian CEO has a grand vision for local Australian food manufacturing.

Nicky Sparshott at her Sydney home. ‘Never have we seen as much desire from people to turn to brands that they trust.’ Picture: Nikki Short

It was an excited Nicky Sparshott who returned to her home town of Sydney with her family in mid-January after a decade working in the bustle and humidity of Singapore.

For four years she’d been running the global speciality teas business of consumer brands ­behemoth Unilever, and the 46-year-old had just agreed to become the group’s Australia and New Zealand CEO.

She planned to take a sabbatical between jobs so she and her husband could renovate their home in Balmain they had bought while abroad and never lived in.

“Then COVID-19 hit so the sabbatical didn’t happen. And I felt incredibly compelled to become part of the team from that moment,” Sparshott tells The Australian.

“My very first address to the ­organisation was a virtual town hall with [departing CEO] Clive [Stiff] with all of our teams across our factories and offices. I had to let everyone know we would be working from home because of COVID-19.”

The mother of two describes starting her new job from home, juggling work and caring for her children Keira and Lachlan — she and husband Graeme decided to push ahead with the renovation — as an “incredible equaliser”.

“I had some really interesting incidents,” she says. “In one of my first few town halls my husband didn’t realise I was on a meeting with 500 people and walked into the room after a cycle with his Lycra on … But it allowed you to create an intimacy with your team members, very much walking in each other’s shoes.”

Sparshott, who has been training to be a kung fu fighter, and enjoys listening to podcasts about serial killers and 1980s music, created a “DJ Nicky” segment at the end of every staff town hall session where she would play one of her favourite pop songs.

“Music has always been a part of my life,” she says. “At this ­moment of collective crisis, I wanted to find a unifier for the whole organisation. The first track I ever ran was Let’s Get This Party Started, because I thought ‘we all in this together’.

“Another month I played Push It from Salt-N-Pepa. Another I played was Out Of The Woods, by Taylor Swift. It was all about the context and we have a lot of young people among our staff.”

Fast-forward eight months, and she says Unilever’s Australasian operations, which employ more than 1100 staff in offices and manufacturing facilities, have been emboldened by the pandemic. The Dutch-British group is one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies, boasting 400 brands including household names such as Streets, Dove, Rexona and Flora.

Sparshott joined Unilever ANZ in 2006 as marketing director for foods, ice cream and beverages, before moving to Singapore.

“Never have we seen as much desire from people to turn to brands that they trust. Big brands, many of which have iconic status. They stand for ‘Australian made’ and during COVID-19 we were really pleased we were able to provide assurance for people at a time when they were unsure,” she says.

“The other interesting thing was the increasing amount of conviction we saw for people to buy brands with purpose, for example ones that have invested in sustainable manufacturing. It could have been at a time like that consumers made choices on other levers.”

Despite the pandemic crisis, Unilever hasn’t lost sight of the global vision inspired by its former Dutch chief executive Paul Polman, who a decade ago outlined a 10-year Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. Its goals included doubling Unilever’s revenue while slashing its environmental footprint by 50 per cent and sourcing 100 per cent of its raw materials sustainably.

Former Unilever chief executive Paul Polman. Picture: Bloomberg

The vision has been carried through by Polman’s successor, Englishman Alan Jope, who has announced plans to achieve net zero emissions from all Unilever products by 2039.

Unilever’s brands will also collectively invest €1bn ($1.6bn) over the next 10 years in a new dedicated Climate and Nature Fund.

“Even as a young kid I had always been very passionate about the environment and serving communities, especially those that are less fortunate,” says Sparshott, a director of the World Wildlife Fund Australia.

“I met Paul Polman a number of times — every year he ran a leadership forum which brought together 200 people from around the world and I went to nine of them, including his final one in London [in 2018].

“He created an incredible legacy in his team and it is still core to what Unilever believes. He was a great leader and Alan is the same. He is cut from the same cloth in terms of values and commitments … [And] I can’t work in an organisation where there is a values disconnect.”

Locally, Unilever is also moving to 100 per cent renewable electricity consumption through a five-year power purchase agreement with energy retailer Red Energy, which supports wind and solar farms in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

But against the sustainability backdrop, Sparshott says COVID-19 has also provided an opportunity to change old ways to improve the profitability of the local business.

Unilever New Zealand is trialling a four-day work week concept for its staff where the employees are paid for five days while working just four. The aim is to shift the focus of staff from time spent at work to output and impact.

After 12 months, Unilever will assess the outcome and look at how it could work for its 155,000 employees globally.

Sparshott says 2020 has provided an opportunity to open ­another level of dialogue with the union movement “to unlock greater productivity and get ­mutually beneficial outcomes for team members that are working in our factories but also drive greater flexibility. So that we can produce for local consumption and for the export market with confidence,’’ she says.

“There is an opportunity to relook at how we are doing some of those things in a way that genuinely leaves no one behind but is much more future fit … We now need to think differently about what this new world looks like — can we look at job sharing … The one thing we really want to do is pioneer what the future of work looks like.”

While there will be ongoing restructuring across Unilever’s local operations, she says: “We are not going to cut ourselves to glory. We need to continue to grow. We will continue to invest in iconic brands and we will up the focus on innovation.”

The federal government chose food and beverages as one of six manufacturing sectors to benefit from $1.5bn in funding in the October budget, including accelerated depreciation schedules for big capital investments, from which the government is hoping to stimulate $200bn in business investment in new ­machinery and equipment.

“Australia should surely have some strong comparative advantage in this space. We have proximity to amazing ingredients, we have great agriculture that we can tap into and amazing safety and quality credentials. There are many conditions in place,’’ Sparshott says.

“With the right incentives there is an opportunity to expand capacity to increase jobs to ensure that we can sustainably produce products without that quality compromise.”

During 24 years of working across the food, beverages, healthcare and personal care sectors (she worked at The Coca-Cola Company, P&G and ­George Patterson before Unilever), Sparshott says she has had the “good fortune of working with some incredibly good leaders”. She says: “Many have been men and they have been very good role models for me.

“I have equally worked with some leaders that have taught me what never to do and they have made it more imminently challenging.”

Her most confronting experience came in Singapore three years ago, when a senior executive invited her to a meeting.

“He sat me down and said ‘I want to have a conversation with you because you are at a point in your career where you need to make a choice and you need to come back to me on it. I need to know if your career or your husband’s career is going to take precedence from this point on so I can develop a career plan accordingly,” she says.

“I said to him: ‘You would never ask a male that question. And I told him ‘my husband and I have managed to very successfully juggle dual careers because we support each other. Graeme takes equal share of the things we have in the house, which allows us to do both well.’ He really struggled with my answer.”

Sparshott says the best career advice she ever received was from famed author Bryce Courtenay, with whom she did a summer internship when he was the creative director at George Patterson. “His parting words to me were ‘when you are dancing on thin ice you may as well tap dance’,’’ she says.

Sparshott’s deepest fall through the ice came when she was working in the UK on a brand launch that fell flat badly.

“So I have learnt as much from the successes as I have from the times where I have got it wrong,’’ she says. “I am a big believer in having a beginner’s mindset. Twenty-five years of experience can be my biggest asset but it can also be the blind spot I bring to the table.”