THE SUSTAINABILITY INTERVIEW
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.
“We’ re committed to driving impact and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions globally through our value chain”
Ann Tracy Chief Sustainability Officer Colgate-Palmolive
That history also shapes how she sees the job.“ It’ s not about me,” she says.“ It’ s about our programme at Colgate.”
Colgate-Palmolive 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.
22 July 2026