Building Durable Growth in Food Systems

Keira Lombardo, Chief Strategy Officer, Cal-Maine Foods Inc

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. Cal-Maine Foods is the largest egg company in the United States and a leading player in the egg-based food industry. With a strong national footprint, Cal-Maine Foods provides nutritious, affordable and sustainable protein to millions of households every day.

When I think about sustainability in a large, complex food system, I don’t start with targets or reports. I start with how the business makes decisions and how value is created over time. After spending my career inside vertically integrated protein platforms, I’ve learned that strategy lives in the operating system—how capital is deployed, how biological risk is absorbed, how assets perform across cycles and how consistently the organization executes. If sustainability is not embedded into those same systems, it will always remain peripheral. The real work is translating sustainability ambition into operating behavior, capital choices and governance discipline that strengthen the enterprise.

At Cal-Maine, that translation connects directly to how we are evolving the portfolio. Our core shell-egg platform is durable, proven and built through decades of careful execution. We are now intentionally expanding specialty eggs and prepared foods—businesses that offer more stable margins, deeper customer partnerships and stronger alignment with how consumers are eating today. Demand for complete, high-quality protein continues to grow, driven by wellness trends, convenience behavior and consumers seeking simple, nutrient-dense foods. Eggs sit squarely at that intersection. Our strategy is a progression, taking a strong base business and deliberately building a more diversified growth engine across the full egg value ladder, from conventional eggs to specialty eggs to fully prepared egg-based formats.

Sustainability matters in this context only if it is built into the operating system and ultimately differentiates our products and partnerships in the marketplace. When sustainability metrics live inside the same operating and financial frameworks the business already uses, they become part of everyday execution rather than a separate agenda. The strongest investments improve sustainability performance while also strengthening reliability, execution consistency and earnings durability, reinforcing the quality of growth we are targeting.

“The real work is translating sustainability ambition into operating behavior, capital choices and governance discipline that strengthen the enterprise.”

That integration requires a different kind of leadership than the traditional sustainability model. Leaders must be comfortable operating across technical complexity, operational reality, and strategic capital logic—able to engage credibly on the farm and plant floor while translating complexity into investment cases that stand up in the boardroom. Sustainability initiatives need to be framed in terms of stability, asset longevity, risk management and growth durability. Sequencing is critical. In biologically intensive networks, even strong ideas can introduce unintended risk if they move faster than the operating system can absorb. Testing thoughtfully, standardizing deliberately and scaling methodically is what converts ambition into durable performance.

Several challenges over time have shaped how I think about long-term impact. Agricultural systems behave nonlinearly. Weather variability, disease pressure and shifting input dynamics make static targets and linear planning insufficient, favoring adaptive systems built for resilience rather than narrow optimization. Capital is always scarce. Sustainability investments compete directly within the capital allocation hierarchy, which forces rigor around return pathways and reinforces that purpose and performance must remain aligned. Organizational inertia is real in large asset networks. Legacy infrastructure and distributed decision-making can slow change even when the economics are compelling, reinforcing the importance of embedding sustainability into governance rather than relying on individual champions.

None of this works without strong cross-functional leadership. Sustainability touches how the enterprise operates, allocates capital, manages risk and serves customers. At Cal-Maine, aligning teams around shared outcomes ensures that sustainability reinforces our scale advantages as we expand specialty and value-added platforms. Clear data, consistent definitions, and transparent tradeoffs allow decisions to reflect full system awareness. External partnerships further accelerate learning and reduce execution risk as new technologies and process innovations are introduced.

For organizations seeking to embed sustainability into everyday decision-making, the shift is structural. Sustainability must be explicitly linked to value creation and risk management. Leadership teams should concentrate on a small number of material levers where execution can scale, supported by strong measurement discipline and clear accountability. A pilot-and-scale mindset allows economics to be validated before broad rollout. Most importantly, organizations must develop leaders who can seamlessly connect operations, strategy and capital allocation.

The companies that compound value over time are not the ones with the loudest sustainability messaging, but the ones that quietly redesign their operating systems so that sustainability discipline strengthens reliability, improves capital efficiency and reinforces trust. When sustainability works this way, it becomes inseparable from how the business grows and how durable shareholder value is created.