As a business concept, ‘blue wooden pallets’ may not sound like the most trailblazing or environmentally conscious. After all, we have seen countless pallets stacked up around retail outlets for decades; they seem to be a fairly straightforward means for transporting goods – and they are made from trees. 

But last summer, Graham Chipchase, CEO of world-leading pallets provider Brambles, was named CBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for Services to Sustainability. So, there is clearly more to this product than meets the eye.

“Brambles is a very complex business,” Chipchase says. “We play a critical role in the global supply chain and we’re the leading provider of plastic pallets as well as wooden ones. But it’s not the material that makes the business sustainable – it’s how the pallets are treated and used.”

Chipchase points out that Brambles is one of the founding voices in the ‘circular economy’ – a business ethos based on principles of reuse and repair (for previous Insights coverage on circularity, click here and here). “With a little upkeep, pallets can last for about 10 years,” he says. “So they’re being reused extensively. But the most fascinating part of the business is how we’re optimising the supplier network to reduce carbon emissions.”

For example, Chipchase explains, if a manufacturer wants to ship a high volume of, say, fast-moving consumer goods to a particular retailer’s warehouse, Brambles will pinpoint another customer based near that warehouse that wants to ship their own goods elsewhere. The latter can then take over the emptied pallets for their shipment.

In parallel, the company is helping to crack down on food waste by putting digital trackers on its pallets. The trackers monitor the temperature of goods and how long they are spending in warehouses. If the products have been idling in storage for too long or getting too warm, a Brambles computer system will alert the retailer. “We’ve just trialled that in New Zealand,” Chipchase says. “It’s going to be a really interesting business for us.”

Mastering strategy

Chipchase’s appetite for complexity goes as far back as secondary school, where he took double maths, physics and chemistry with the aim of training to be a fighter pilot. Stymied by issues with his vision, he abandoned that plan and pursued the chemistry path – first in a gap year with BP, then in a four-year degree. However, following that course, Chipchase felt drawn to other challenges.

“I was getting much more interested in sales, marketing and how businesses work,” he says.

In 1985, Chipchase had interviews with all the major UK accounting firms and found a foothold at Coopers & Lybrand, where he hit it off with the people he met in the interview process. “It meant that I didn’t have to decide straight away which industry I wanted to go into,” he notes. “Plus, I didn’t mind doing exams.”

Chipchase spent five years at the firm, starting in audit and moving into corporate tax – then headed into the multinational world with a post in the corporate finance wing of the British Oxygen Company (BOC). His subsequent 11-year stint in BOC’s US arm could have gone on for longer, he says, but an opportunity came along to reconnect with his love of aviation.

“In 2001, I joined GKN Aerospace, then based in Farnham, Surrey,” he explains. “It was a smaller business, but with a bigger responsibility. I was now Finance Director, and getting very involved with corporate strategy.”

At GKN, Chipchase distinguished himself with a spate of acquisitions, and was eventually headhunted for the CFO role at consumer packaging specialists Rexam Plc, becoming one of the youngest finance chiefs in the FTSE 100.

In 2008, the global crash sparked a turbulent time at Rexam, but in 2010, Chipchase was appointed CEO of the entire company. Seeking cash flow and higher returns for shareholders, the business soon divested many of the companies Chipchase had acquired. In 2016, Rexam itself was purchased by the US-based Ball Corporation.

Compelling credentials

Around that time, headhunters called again, asking Chipchase whether he would be interested in the CEO role at a global logistics corporation he may not have heard of called Brambles. He was already clued up: in his time at GKN, the company had worked with Brambles on a joint venture.

In 2019, under his leadership, Brambles embarked upon an ambitious digital transformation journey that is still in progress. That mission has been bolstered by the company’s record on sustainability which, in Chipchase’s assessment, is “a superb attractor and retainer of talent”. He notes: “In year one of our transformation, we set out to hire 200 new data analysts. Nine out of 10 people we interviewed said that they’d applied because of our sustainability credentials.”

Chipchase is thankful for how his accountancy training has underpinned his career. “You have to be articulate as well as numerate,” he says. “A good CFO is someone who can tell a story about numbers in a way that non-accountants can understand, which often involves using words and pictures as well as the numbers themselves. Alongside that, a CEO with experience of leading the finance function typically forms a strong bond with their own CFO, because they share a common language.”

Brambles is now ramping up its sustainability efforts to exceed net-zero requirements. “We’re working on a project in Mexico to create a new forest – and new jobs,” Chipchase adds. “It’s important to demonstrate that you can go beyond net zero and do additional good on top of that.”