8. April 2022
Julia Kriegel

Interview with Alyssa
Jade McDonald-Bärtl

Lyss comes from Oceania – her family were tropical fruit and cattle farmers in Papua New Guinea. After studying in Australia, she found her start in international corporate work ENERGEX and then Deutsche Telekom. In 2009 she left the corporate world behind and founded her own social enterprise, BLYSS GmbH. Here she focused on the sustainable cultivation and harvesting of cocoa in Ecuador, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, enabling her to produce high-quality tree-to-bar chocolate. She realised after some years, that the world does not need another chocolate bar, rather, the farmers need better infrastructure and enablement to improve their livelihoods and health. Today, her socent BLYSS focuses on sustainability and supports smallholder farmers in the cocoa value chain via research on farmer livelihoods and collaborating on farmer education with the FCCI Cacao Academy. Beyond this, she advises the European Union and German government on sustainable finance, eco-innovation and social innovation. In light of this, Lyss is board member of the German Federation of Sustainable Business (BNW) and the CGIAR, the world’s largest public agri research organisation, in pursuit of food security in a climate insecure world.

Since 2020, Lyss has joined us on our VAST GREEN journey. In one of our monthly Lunch & Learn in April 2020, Lyss brought the VAST FORWARD team closer to the topic of sustainability. In doing so, she talked about personal actions in the context of sustainability and more importantly, actions we can take as a company. The L&L with Lyss was also the starting point for the development as well as implementation of our sustainability strategy – the VAST GREEN strategy. We still have a lot of things planned together, and we are happy to have Lyss on board as she keeps us up to date with legislation changes regarding sustainability, climate science and social innovation.