Sustainability Woven through Strategy

As Cal-Maine’s first Chief Strategy Officer, Keira Lombardo partners with the senior leadership team to shape enterprise strategy, stakeholder engagement, and sustainability efforts. With over two decades in food and agriculture, she focuses on advancing innovation and long-term value—aligning purpose and performance to build a more resilient, responsible food system.

Allen Whitley is a long-time sustainability practitioner known for transforming environmental strategy into measurable impact across agriculture, technology, and the public sector. As Director of Sustainability at Cal-Maine Foods, he champions data-driven practices that turn waste into resources, strengthen operational resilience, and align sustainability with business prioritization and growth. His cross-industry experience has helped shape more transparent and future-ready sustainability models across industries.

In modern agriculture, sustainability isn’t a standalone pillar or a year-end report—it’s the connective tissue of enterprise strategy. The companies that endure are those that weave sustainability through how they plan, invest, operate, and partner. Done right, it fuels process innovation, builds efficiency across the value chain, and creates the kind of impact that strengthens resilience and trust.

At Cal-Maine Foods—the largest egg company in the United States and a leader in the egg-based food industry—this shows up in the work we do every day. Our portfolio spans the full egg value ladder, from conventional to specialty, including cage-free, organic, brown, free-range, pasture-raised, and nutritionally enhanced, serving retail and foodservice nationwide.

We also participate in prepared foods with formats like egg patties, omelets, folded and scrambled eggs, hard-cooked eggs, pancakes, waffles, and specialty wraps. Our branded family— Eggland’s Best®, Land O’Lakes®, Farmhouse Eggs®, 4Grain®, Sunups®, MeadowCreek Foods®, and Crepini®—reflects the breadth of how we meet evolving consumer needs. Our strategy combines scale, operational excellence, and financial discipline with a commitment to innovation and sustainability to deliver trusted nutrition, enduring partnerships, and long-term value.

What does it mean for sustainability to be woven through strategy? It starts with process innovation. Managing water, energy, packaging, and waste isn’t treated as compliance—it’s treated as design. When operations are engineered for efficiency, materials move in smarter loops, waste becomes input, and risk recedes. The outcome is both environmental and operational: a system that runs leaner, more reliably, and closer to customers’ needs.

It also lives in people and culture. A safe, skilled, and engaged workforce is a strategic advantage. Embedding sustainability into training, safety practices, and leadership development doesn’t happen on the edges; it’s part of how teams plan, learn, and improve. That shared discipline shows up in how we solve problems, adopt new tools, and elevate standards together.

Sustainability runs through our community partnerships as well. Agriculture is deeply local, so the health of our communities and the health of our business move in tandem. Hunger relief, education, and nonprofit partnerships aren’t side projects; they reinforce the ecosystems that support our operations. When employees volunteer and we collaborate with community organizations, we strengthen the fabric we all depend on.

The same is true for animal welfare and food safety. Responsible care and rigorous quality systems are inseparable from brand trust and supply continuity. Third-party certifications, ongoing training, and continuous improvement keep standards high—and make sustainability a daily practice, not an annual promise.

Finally, governance keeps sustainability tied to strategy. Clear oversight, transparent reporting, and independent verification ensure environmental and social considerations inform real decisions— capital planning, risk management, procurement, and long-term growth priorities. In other words, sustainability lives where strategy lives: in the choices leaders make and the systems they build.

Taken together, these are not separate initiatives. They are threads—environmental stewardship, people and culture, community engagement, animal welfare, food safety, and governance—woven through the enterprise. They connect process innovation to measurable impact and ensure that responsibility and performance rise together.

The lesson for agribusiness leaders is simple and actionable: don’t bolt sustainability onto strategy; thread it through. Design processes to use fewer resources and create more value. Equip people to lead improvement. Build community partnerships that strengthen resilience. Safeguard animals and product integrity to protect trust. Anchor it all in governance so sustainability shows up in the decisions that matter most.

Sustainability, woven this way, becomes a force multiplier. It sharpens execution, reduces risk, and compounds trust over time. Not because it stands apart from strategy—but because it lives everywhere strategy is made.