Kaneka has one of the most environmentally engineered polymers on the market. Green Planet is a bio-based plastic that performs like a conventional polymer — and, dropped in soil or seawater, fully decomposes in about eight weeks. No microplastic residue. The lifecycle analyses are done. Customers already use it for coffee straws, premium packaging and the horticultural clips that used to end up as permanent microplastic in the soil.
It should be easy to sell. Every customer publishes ESG commitments. Regulators keep tightening single-use plastic rules. And yet, when I asked the two procurement and supply chain leaders at Kaneka Belgium how it was going commercially, they gave me the answer I have now heard across our research base:
“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
A better product, losing on price to a worse one. Kaneka is not the exception. Kaneka is the rule.
Where the better product still wins
Green Planet does sell — into premium packaging, luxury food service and boutique horticulture. In those segments the customer’s own brand turns the sustainability premium into part of the value proposition: a premium chocolate maker can build its packaging story on compostability and recover the difference at retail. A mass-market bottle producer cannot.
The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who believes good products sell themselves. Same product, same environmental performance, two opposite outcomes. What decides is not the product but the customer’s system: their market, their brand, their regulatory exposure, their buyers. Planetary value carries only when it is connected to something that system already needs — compliance, brand, financing, viability. That is the first demand our research keeps finding: make it worthwhile in the customer’s system, not in the spec sheet.
The missing line on the page
Why does it lose everywhere else? Not because customers do not value the environmental performance. They say they do. They publish targets that depend on it. It loses because when the deal reaches the procurement committee, the environmental value is not on the page. The standard business case has one line: price. The environmental value lives in the conversation, the marketing material, the sales deck — and none of those are in the room when the committee decides. So the committee compares the one line it has against the incumbent’s line. Green Planet costs more. Green Planet loses.
Mentioning value is not the same as embedding it. This is the demand we call “Show the evidence”: every claim — planetary included — needs a business case built on the customer’s own numbers, owned by a named stakeholder in the buying group, and connected to a risk the buyer already recognises. A benefit that is not on the page does not survive the meeting.
“We’re not there yet”
When we walked through what that would take, the Kaneka leaders were honest:
“That sounds beautiful. We’re not there yet.”
Marc Van Genechten and Danny Beyltiens, Kaneka Belgium
Almost nobody is — and that gap, not any single deal, is the finding. There is also an irony worth recording. As buyers, the same leaders have already moved: describing how Kaneka now chooses its own suppliers, they said it is “always a combination of price and reliability and trust — never just price.” Their customers are making exactly the same shift. The buying side has moved to resilience. The selling side has not yet caught up.
The work
The investment in the better product was not the mistake. The mistake is treating the product as the proposition. The better product can win — it just cannot win by being better. It wins when its value is written into a case the customer can defend to their own committee. That is a selling discipline, not a product feature.
Is it your selling — or your value proposition? Test your own proposition with the seven-question self-audit. From the Future of Selling research programme, co-led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos — see the working paper Engineering Systemic Value in B2B.