Selling sustainability when the market stops paying for it

One sustainable B2B proposition is stalling in price negotiations. Another is expanding across blue-chip buyers. The difference is not the cause. It is the positioning — and Kaneka can learn from Tony’s Chocolonely.

Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme

Two sustainable propositions, both sold business-to-business, both asking a buyer to pay more for an offering that is better for the world. One of them keeps collapsing in the price negotiation. The other has signed up around twenty major companies — Ben & Jerry’s, ALDI, Albert Heijn, Waitrose, and more — and is still growing. The first is Kaneka’s Green Planet, a fully compostable bioplastic. The second is Tony’s Open Chain, the cocoa-sourcing platform that Tony’s Chocolonely sells to other chocolate companies. The contrast between them is the most useful lesson available right now on how to sell sustainability in a market that has stopped paying for it on principle alone.

This case sets the two side by side, works through seven dimensions on which they differ, and draws a practical conclusion: the market is genuinely harder than it was, but sustainable offerings can still be sold — if they are positioned the way Tony’s positions Open Chain, and not the way most industrial suppliers position a better material. For Kaneka, and for any supplier with a Green-Planet-shaped problem, the path forward runs through rebuilding the proposition along these dimensions, and ultimately through the Layered Business Case.

The proposition that cannot get out of a price negotiation

Kaneka, the European arm of a Japanese diversified chemicals group, developed Green Planet: a bio-based polymer made from plant feedstocks that performs like a conventional plastic but fully decomposes in soil or seawater in roughly eight weeks, leaving no microplastic behind. The lifecycle analyses are done. The carbon displacement against the petrochemical equivalent is known. It is, on every environmental measure, the better product.

And in the mass-market segments Kaneka hoped to enter, it loses. The procurement leaders at Kaneka described the problem in a sentence that has become a touchstone for our research.

I can easily find products that are better for the environment. But my customer doesn’t want to pay for it.
Marc Van Genechten and Danny Beyltiens, Kaneka Belgium

Green Planet still sells — but only into premium and luxury segments, where the customer’s own brand can build a story around compostability and recover the premium at retail. In the mass market, where the buyer’s end consumer is price-sensitive, the willingness to pay is missing. Kaneka has, in their own words, effectively put Green Planet in the freezer: not abandoned, but waiting for conditions that justify it. The market is not gone. It is far smaller than the product deserves.

The proposition that keeps winning blue-chip buyers

Tony’s Chocolonely is a Dutch impact-driven chocolate company built around one mission: ending exploitation and illegal child labour in the cocoa industry. What concerns us here is not its consumer bars but its B2B offering. In 2019, Tony’s launched Open Chain: a way for other chocolate companies to source cocoa according to Tony’s five sourcing principles — fully traceable beans, a higher price that funds a living income for farmers, long-term commitments, strong farmer cooperatives, and a focus on quality and productivity. Companies that join are called Mission Allies.

Open Chain is, in commercial terms, a platform. Tony’s sells access to its ethical-sourcing infrastructure, its cooperative relationships in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and its impact data and reporting. The Mission Allies — among them Ben & Jerry’s, ALDI (whose Choceur Choco Changer bar runs on the model), Albert Heijn (sourcing its Delicata own-label through Open Chain), Waitrose, Jumbo, HEMA, Huel and the US brand Feastables — pay the living-income premium and, in effect, pay to plug into a system they would struggle to build alone. This is a sustainable proposition sold business-to-business, asking the buyer to pay more, and it is expanding. One of the Open Chain leads put the company’s position memorably.

Tony’s is proving it’s possible to be well-liked and profitable.
Joke Aerts, Open Chain Lead, Tony’s Chocolonely

The honest objection: chocolate is not bioplastic

Before drawing any lesson, the obvious objection has to be put on the table, because it is partly right. Chocolate is an impulse product with a high emotional charge. The person who buys a Tony’s bar is an emotional buyer making a small, frequent, identity-expressing purchase, and is demonstrably willing to absorb a price premium — chocolate of this kind sells at twenty to thirty per cent above mass brands and the premium holds even under cost-of-living pressure. A compostable polymer, by contrast, is a hidden industrial input. No end consumer ever sees the Green Planet pellet, feels anything about it, or chooses a product because of it. The emotional buyer who carries the chocolate premium simply does not exist in the bioplastic value chain.

That asymmetry is real, and any honest comparison has to concede it. But it explains less of the gap than it first appears. Open Chain is not sold to the emotional consumer. It is sold to ALDI’s and Albert Heijn’s procurement and category teams — hard-nosed B2B buyers who are exactly as cost-disciplined as Kaneka’s industrial customers. The question worth asking is not why chocolate consumers pay more. It is why a supermarket chain’s buyer signs up to a cocoa premium while an industrial buyer walks away from a polymer premium. Both are B2B decisions. The difference is in how the two propositions are built — and that difference is something Kaneka can act on, where the difference in consumer emotion is not.

Seven dimensions of difference

Comparing the two propositions across seven dimensions makes the source of the gap precise. Some of the differences follow from the product category and cannot be changed. Others follow from positioning choices — and those are the ones that matter, because they can be copied.

Dimension	Tony’s Open Chain	Kaneka Green Planet
Value visibility	High — the impact can be shown on the pack and told to the end consumer.	Often low — the value is hidden inside a material specification the end consumer never sees.
Emotional simplicity	Very high — one clear moral idea: fair chocolate, no exploitation.	Lower — the benefit is technical and conditional, dependent on disposal and application.
Buyer risk	Low for the chocolate buyer — joining is reputationally safe and reversible.	Higher for the industrial buyer — switching material carries technical and performance risk.
System dependency	Medium — the proposition mostly needs cocoa sourcing to change.	High — value depends on application, disposal, regulation, and the waste system all aligning.
Premium logic	Moral identity plus brand preference — the premium is part of the product’s meaning.	Risk reduction plus compliance plus application fit — the premium must be argued, not felt.
Market mechanism	Consumer pull justifies B2B adoption — shoppers reward the buyer for joining.	The B2B buyer needs a quantified business case; there is no consumer pull to lean on.
Main sales risk	Ethical scepticism or resistance to the price premium.	Price comparison, technical uncertainty, and unclear value capture.

Read down the columns and a pattern emerges. Open Chain scores well on visibility, emotional simplicity, low buyer risk, and a market mechanism in which consumer pull does the supplier’s persuading for it. Green Planet scores poorly on exactly those dimensions: its value is hidden in a spec, technically conditional, dependent on a whole waste and regulatory system aligning, and unsupported by any downstream pull. Crucially, only some of this is category destiny. The buyer-risk gap, the value-visibility gap, and the premium-logic gap are not fixed facts about bioplastic. They are consequences of how the proposition has been packaged — and they can be closed.

What Open Chain does that Green Planet does not

Three of Open Chain’s moves are directly transferable to an industrial supplier, and Kaneka does none of them yet.

First, Open Chain makes the value visible and gives the buyer something to show. A Mission Ally can put the proof of its sourcing on the pack, in its reporting, and in its own sustainability story. The buyer is not asked to absorb a cost for an invisible benefit; the buyer is handed a visible asset it can use with its own stakeholders. Green Planet, by contrast, disappears into a material specification. The industrial buyer who pays the premium has nothing to show for it inside their own organisation.

Second, Open Chain lowers the buyer’s risk by being a membership in a proven system rather than a leap into the unknown. Joining is reputationally safe, supported by Tony’s infrastructure and data, and visibly already chosen by respected peers — when ALDI, Albert Heijn and Ben & Jerry’s are in, a category manager joining is following the market, not betting against it. Green Planet asks the buyer to take on technical and performance risk by switching material, largely alone. The proposition carries risk toward the buyer instead of absorbing it.

Third, Open Chain turns the premium into something the buyer’s business wants, not merely tolerates. For a Mission Ally, the living-income premium buys moral identity, brand preference, and a defensible answer to the regulatory and reputational pressure bearing down on cocoa. The premium is part of the value, not a cost on top of it. Green Planet’s premium is presented as a cost to be justified against a cheaper, dirtier incumbent — and a premium framed as a cost will always lose to a buyer under margin pressure.

What Kaneka should do

The conclusion is not that Kaneka should give up on the mass market, nor that bioplastic is doomed to lose. It is that Kaneka should rebuild the Green Planet proposition along the seven dimensions where Open Chain is strong and Green Planet is weak — treating those dimensions as a design brief, not as a verdict.

That means giving the buyer something visible to show: certified, traceable impact data the customer can carry into its own sustainability reporting and put in front of its own stakeholders, so the premium buys a usable asset rather than an invisible virtue.

It means lowering the buyer’s risk by wrapping the material in a system — application support, disposal and end-of-life pathways, regulatory-compliance evidence, and a roster of reference customers who have already switched — so that adopting Green Planet feels like joining a proven model rather than taking a solitary technical gamble. And it means reframing the premium as risk reduction and compliance value rather than as an environmental surcharge, because in a market that now prices risk, a premium that answers a regulatory and reputational exposure is defensible in a way that a premium answering only a carbon number is not.

Each of these moves runs into the same structural wall, and clearing it is where our own method comes in. The reason Green Planet loses is that when the deal reaches the buyer’s procurement committee, the environmental and risk value is not on the page — the standard business case template has one line, price, and the premium loses against it. The discipline we call the Layered Business Case exists precisely to fix this: to name each non-financial dimension of value precisely, attach it to a stakeholder inside the buying coalition who owns the corresponding risk, connect it to an exposure the buyer already recognises, and structure it alongside the financial case rather than beneath it. Open Chain, in effect, has built its Layered Business Case into the proposition itself — the visibility, the membership, the data, and the moral premium are all on the page from the start. Kaneka has to construct deliberately what Tony’s gets partly for free from the emotional pull of chocolate.

The market is harder. Sustainability still sells.

The lesson of putting these two cases side by side is not the comfortable one that sustainability sells itself, nor the defeatist one that it can no longer be sold. Both are wrong. Sustainability sold on environmental merit alone has hit a hard ceiling under economic pressure; that is why Green Planet sits in the freezer. But sustainability positioned for visibility, low buyer risk, defensible premium logic, and a market mechanism that pulls the buyer forward is still expanding — that is why Open Chain keeps signing blue-chip allies in the same difficult market.

Chocolate makes the positioning easier, because an emotional consumer is already pulling the proposition through the chain. Bioplastic makes it harder, because no such consumer exists. But harder is not impossible. The dimensions that make Open Chain travel are, for the most part, dimensions a deliberate supplier can engineer into an industrial proposition — and the Layered Business Case is the tool for engineering them. The better product cannot win by being better. It wins by being positioned, and structured, so that the buyer can say yes and defend it. That is as true for a compostable polymer as it is for a fair chocolate bar.

About this case. Prepared for the Future of Selling research programme, co-led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens (Solvay Brussels School / AMS Antwerp Management School) and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos (Cranfield School of Management). The Kaneka Green Planet material is drawn from Future of Selling research interviews with Marc Van Genechten and Danny Beyltiens at Kaneka Belgium. The Tony’s Open Chain material draws on public information about Tony’s Chocolonely’s Open Chain initiative and its Mission Allies. The seven-dimension comparison is an analytical framework developed for this case. The Layered Business Case is the proposition-structuring discipline of the Future of Selling programme. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.