While B2B companies often aren’t household names, their impact is vast. A perfect example of this is Henry Schein. As the world’s largest provider of healthcare products, services, and solutions to office-based dental and medical practitioners, the company serves about one million customers in 34 countries, works with approximately 4,800  suppliers globally, and has more than 25,000 employees, known as Team Schein Members.

That scale makes Henry Schein a leader in its sector and its sustainability strategy pioneering, and at the centre of that endeavour is Jennifer Kim Field, Chief Sustainability Officer at Henry Schein and Interim President of the Henry Schein Cares Foundation. She leads global sustainability, corporate citizenship and social impact, working across internal and external stakeholders to create shared value that supports long-term growth and competitiveness.

“We believe you can succeed in business while making a positive difference in the world,” Jennifer says.

Henry Schein Cares

Henry Schein Cares, the company’s global corporate citizenship programme, turns 25 this year, but its roots go back more than nine decades, to founders Henry and Esther Schein.

“They instilled values and built a culture that embeds what we now call corporate citizenship and sustainability,” Jennifer explains.

Today, that heritage underpins the Community, Caring, and Career Team Schein Values and brand promise. Henry Schein positions itself as a partner that helps healthcare practitioners grow their practices and best serve patients while cutting costs and environmental impacts.

“Sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have – it is essential to how we support our customers,” Jennifer says.

​That thinking is embedded in the company’s corporate strategic plan, BOLD+1. BOLD stands for building, operationalising, leveraging and digitising, and +1 is about creating shared value for stakeholders.​

More than 30 years ago, Henry Schein also formalised its stakeholder model, the Mosaic of Success. This places five groups at the core of decision-making: Team Schein Members, customers, suppliers, shareholders and society. 

Taken together, Jennifer says that “they drive sustained growth and amplify our collective strengths to make the world healthier together.”

Why climate is a healthcare issue

Henry Schein defines sustainability broadly under environmental, social and governance efforts.

On the environmental side, the company’s focus is squarely on climate and wider planetary health. “The connection between climate change and health is clear,” Jennifer says. The World Health Organization identifies climate change as one of the greatest health threats facing humanity. It estimates that one in four deaths results from extreme weather events such as heatwaves, storms and floods.

Extreme weather also has direct supply chain implications. It can disrupt production and logistics, leading to interruptions of critical medicines and medical supplies. 

While healthcare is not among the top-emitting sectors, the aggregate impact is significant.

“If you compared the healthcare sector to a country, we would be the fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions,” Jennifer reveals.

Four environmental pillars, one net zero plan

To operationalise this, Henry Schein has identified four environmental focus areas.

The first is Green Team Schein, which mobilises employees in activities such as beach clean-ups and tree planting to improve local environments in the communities where we operate.

The second is currently named Practice Green, a global initiative to help customers and suppliers reduce their environmental footprint and help create a greener dental or medical practice.

“If you do not know where to begin, there are checklists and ten easy steps to get started,” Jennifer explains.

The third and fourth pillars focus on Henry Schein’s own operations – supply chain and circularity, and the company’s Net Zero 2050 plan.

Supply chain and circularity address waste, water and other resource footprints across the network.​

Net Zero 2050 is Henry Schein’s decarbonisation roadmap, guided by science-based targets to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and approach net zero by 2050. In 2021, Henry Schein joined the Business Ambition for 1.5°C initiative, aligned with the Paris Agreement. That commitment set the stage for validated science-based targets covering near-term reductions and long-term net zero.

“It took us two-and-a-half years from joining that initiative to validation,” Jennifer says.

The work included educating and engaging stakeholders and launching an Environmental Impact Council in 2022 to accelerate progress.

“We chose a science-based path because it strengthens our mission to make the world healthier together,” she explains.

By 2030, Henry Schein aims to source 100% renewable energy and maintain that through 2050. It has committed to reduce Scope 1 emissions – from direct operations such as buildings and fleets – by 42% and reduce Scope 3 emissions by 51.6% per million USD value added (gross profit).

Hotspots, logistics and building a smarter supply chain

Like many multinationals, Henry Schein’s biggest emissions lie in Scope 3, so the company has mapped hotspots in purchased goods and services to prioritise supplier engagement. “Hotspots are vital – you cannot address everything at once,” Jennifer emphasises.

Transportation is another major lever. Henry Schein works with logistics partners to consolidate shipments and optimise its network to balance cost, efficiency and emissions.

Crucially, Jennifer says, “we include sustainability alongside cost and quality of customer service in these discussions.”

One flagship example is its partnership with UPS. Together, they redesigned the distribution network using advanced modelling from UPS’s customer solutions team, allowing Henry Schein to increase next-day delivery capacity from 55% to 92% of customers. At the same time, it avoided an estimated 75% rise in emissions – roughly equivalent to taking 20,000 cars off the road.

That logistics work reflects a broader philosophy. Quoting Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain Jim Mullins, Jennifer says: “We believe an efficient supply chain is a sustainable one.”

Governance, data and investor-grade sustainability 

At Henry Schein, board oversight of sustainability rests with the nominating and governance committee – made up entirely of independent directors. Jennifer leads the management of sustainability activities but sees herself as a “conductor of an orchestra”.

“I cannot do it alone. The sum of the parts is critical,” she says.

A global Sustainability Committee, an Environmental Impact Council, a Safety Committee and a Supply Chain Transparency Working Group all align around common goals. The aim is to make sure “we are playing at the same tempo from the same sheet of music,” Jennifer explains.

On data, Henry Schein has deliberately integrated sustainability into its financial reporting backbone.

Jennifer’s team partners closely with the corporate accounting and external reporting function, led by Chief Accounting Officer Olga Timoshkina.

Over several years, the company has shifted sustainability data collection to mirror financial reporting standards.

“We have implemented similar data governance and controls to those used in SOX compliance,” Jennifer says, referring to the Sarbanes-Oxley framework for financial reporting.

The goal is investor-grade, audit-ready sustainability data. The company has also adopted a specialist sustainability data platform, Watershed, to manage greenhouse gas and environmental metrics.

Watershed now houses Henry Schein’s Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions as well as other indicators, with plans to expand coverage across the “S” and “G” in ESG.

“Technology is helping us move from vague goals to measurable assets,” Jennifer says.

That digitisation is already paying off. Henry Schein has cut assurance timelines roughly in half compared with manual spreadsheets. Centralised, traceable data has also enabled global enablement and real-time insights.

“Now we can see hotspots and trends during the year, not just in an annual snapshot,” Jennifer explains.

Investors, she notes, increasingly want metrics that show how environmental and social factors affect the balance sheet.

That means evidence that sustainability efforts improve margins or revenue resilience, such as reducing waste and packaging, enhancing workforce productivity or building supply chain resilience.

“Supplier diversification is a good example. COVID highlighted how vital that is,” Jennifer says.

Supplier standards, social impact and prevention

Beyond climate, Henry Schein is building supplier engagement programmes that raise environmental and social standards while remaining accessible to smaller vendors.

Again, the currently named Practice Green is a core vehicle, offering practical tools regardless of where suppliers are on their sustainability journey. Resources are designed to be useful for both large multinationals and sixth-generation family businesses.

On the social side, the Supply Chain Transparency Working Group monitors human rights and ethical standards across the supplier base. The group enhances monitoring and auditing practices and enforces Henry Schein’s global supplier code of conduct.

“We want to use our resources to take solutions to partners, not just ask them to keep up,” Jennifer explains.

She is candid that metrics around access to healthcare remain underdeveloped compared with climate data.

“There are no consistent metrics in access to care, which makes it hard to define meaningful measures,” Jennifer reflects.

She sees social impact metrics as still the weakest link in terms of measuring community health impact – that has not stopped Henry Schein from intensifying its focus on prevention.

“Wellness and prevention have always been a core focus area,” Jennifer says. “What has evolved is how we go about it, as the evidence between climate, oral health and overall health becomes better understood.”

In 2024, the company launched Prevention is Power, a campaign to help healthcare professionals connect oral health with systemic health and empower patients to prioritise wellness.

The aim is to strengthen preventive care, reduce chronic disease and ease pressure on health systems.

“Regular check-ups, healthy habits and early intervention lower risks and costs,” Jennifer notes.

Henry Schein has long advocated that oral health is overall health. The campaign highlights links between oral disease and conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“People do not always join the dots. The mouth is the gateway to your body, so medical – dental integration is critical,” Jennifer explains.

Globally, she sees innovative models emerging that more closely integrate dental and medical care. Henry Schein wants to equip practitioners with tools, technology and resources to make prevention possible in every exam room.

“We empower practitioners to make prevention possible, helping health happen in every exam room and community,” Jennifer says.