Name: Jade Mahuzier | Global Category Manager & Sustainability Manager for Commercial Equipment

Company: Heineken

Connect with Jade on LinkedIn

Welcome to our series aimed at spotlighting the individual leaders within BIER member companies and stakeholder organizations. Learn how these practitioners and their companies are addressing pressing challenges around water, energy, agriculture, climate change, and what inspires each of them to advance environmental sustainability in the beverage sector and collectively, overall.

Briefly describe your role and responsibilities and how long you have worked with your company.

I'm the Global Category Manager for Commercial Equipment and the Sustainability Manager for Commercial Equipment at Heineken. I've been with the company for three years, and before that, I worked at Danone and other similar companies.

In my current role, I wear two hats, procurement and sustainability, which is something I truly enjoy, I have the unique opportunity to integrate both perspectives. This means I can strategically balance cost considerations with the environmental sustainability ambitions in our "Brew a Better World" strategy.

One of the key challenges in my role is that more energy-efficient fridges can come at a higher cost. As a buyer, this means that it is less about short-term negotiation and more about building partnerships rooted in shared goals. This often means working together on longer-term agreements, aligning on innovation priorities, or exploring alternative deal structures.

Ultimately, it’s about playing with different parameters with Heineken’s Net Zero roadmap while minimizing budget impact. This requires balancing two key levers: long-term supplier relationships and financial optimization.

What are your specific priorities for 2025?

One concrete example in my area of responsibility is our supplier engagement and procurement strategy for commercial equipment. We have had a well-established protocol in place for several years, which has proven to be effective. This protocol is used for our suppliers to continuously improve the energy efficiency of the fridges they provide us.

For 2025, we have stayed on course with this roadmap, requiring suppliers to meet increasingly stringent energy efficiency standards. This means pushing for fridges with a progressively lower Energy Efficiency Index (EEI) while maintaining strong partnerships with suppliers.

How do you feel being a BIER member will help you successfully address the key areas you are addressing in 2025?

I really appreciate this question because it made me reflect on Heineken’s role within the industry and how we position ourselves in relation to BIER.

One thing I often hear from our suppliers is that Heineken is willing to experiment and push boundaries. They tell us, “Heineken is really daring to try new things.” I genuinely believe that we are committed to taking action, making decisions, and implementing programs that drive real change. Whether every decision is perfect or not, we move forward, take risks, and act.

At the same time, I recognize that we cannot transform the industry alone. This is where organizations like BIER play a critical role. There’s a saying I really like: "Alone, you go faster; together, you go further." I believe Heineken excels in being daring to lead, but for true systemic change, we need collaboration and shared knowledge.

BIER provides an essential platform for collective action, where we can share experiences and stay aware of what others in the industry are doing. This isn’t just about individual ambition; it’s about leveraging a network to drive long-term impact together. By working collectively, we can align on best practices, develop common projects, and ensure that sustainability progress extends beyond just one company.

For me, the key to success in 2025 isn’t just Heineken daring to act; it’s daring to act while also engaging, collaborating, and learning from others. That’s where BIER’s role becomes invaluable.

Name one of the practical solutions or best practices you learned in working with BIER and its members and why it was important to you and/ or your company.

One of the most valuable practical solutions I’ve gained from working with BIER is the power of collaboration. This connects closely to my previous point about the importance of working together to drive real industry-wide change.

I’m part of a workstream on energy efficiency initiatives, collaborating with a respected colleague from Carlsberg Group. Normally, you might think, “Wait, Carlsberg? A direct competitor?” But in this setting, it’s actually a great experience. Together, we worked on selecting the companies that participated in the 2025 Cool Challenge, an initiative focused on advancing refrigeration efficiency. Now in its second year, the Cool Challenge is part of the Coolition, a BIER-led initiative to reduce the environmental impact of commercial refrigeration equipment in the beverage industry. The Coolition brings together BIER members, refrigeration equipment manufacturers, and component suppliers to drive meaningful, sector-wide progress. It has been incredibly insightful to contribute to this collaboration.

What makes this experience so valuable is that it creates a trusted space for open discussions. In this forum, we can exchange non-confidential insights, challenge each other’s perspectives, and share knowledge in a way that benefits everyone. It’s a reminder that, despite being competitors, we are ultimately facing the same challenges and striving for the same goals.

This process has reinforced an important truth: We cannot move forward alone. Heineken, Carlsberg, and other industry players are all in the same boat when it comes to environmental sustainability, and progress in areas like energy efficiency depends on collective action. Yes, there are boundaries, we must always comply with competition law rules but at the core, this collaboration is built on good intentions and a shared vision to drive meaningful change with the resources we have.

At the end of the day, BIER is about connection, and that same spirit applies to sustainability. Working with BIER and its members has shown me that when we come together, we can accelerate progress in ways we simply couldn’t achieve alone.

Share a recent accomplishment of your company’s sustainability initiatives/achievements you are most proud of and why.

When I think about a recent sustainability accomplishment that makes me proud, I realize it’s not always about flashy projects—it’s about real, measurable progress. It might sound like just numbers, but achieving a 34% reduction in our Scope 1 & 2 emissions compared to our 2022 baseline is a huge achievement!

These figures represent years of effort, dedication, and countless hours of brainstorming, strategizing, and collaborating across markets. It’s easy to see numbers and not fully grasp the work behind them, but I see my colleagues and myself really putting their hearts in. Whether it’s convincing operating companies, learning from local markets, or overcoming complex challenges, there’s a massive collective effort behind these improvements.

While sustainability metrics might not always feel exciting to read, they tell the story of real impact, and that’s something worth celebrating.

If you had one superpower that could be used to radically accelerate and scale sustainable best practices, which one would it be, and how would you use it?

I really like this question because it’s refreshing, it makes you think differently. It’s also a tough one because, of course, I’d love to have many superpowers. But if I had to choose just one, the first thing that comes to mind is the power to scale up great sustainability innovations instantly.

This ties closely to initiatives like the Cool Challenge, where we see some truly brilliant ideas—innovations that make me think, Wow, that’s so smart! How did no one think of this before? We have incredible minds developing solutions, and we have large companies like Heineken that can offer visibility and support. But the biggest challenge isn’t having great ideas—it’s scaling them.

Scaling takes time. It can take years to bring an innovation from concept to full implementation.

That’s why my ideal superpower would be the ability to immediately scale a great idea without all the roadblocks. Imagine if an entrepreneur or a startup came up with a breakthrough solution, and instead of years of testing, negotiating, and adapting, it could just be instantly deployed at scale. It would radically accelerate the impact of sustainability innovations, allowing us to move from concept to action in a fraction of the time.

Maybe this perspective comes from my procurement and supply chain background, where I see firsthand how difficult it is to bring great ideas to life at scale. But I truly believe that if we could overcome this challenge, we could drive sustainability forward in ways we can’t even imagine today.