How can teams reduce carbon emissions while delivering strong financial results? Team LINDT 1 explored this challenge in the TFC Global PRO Challenge 2026. In a follow-up interview with PMI, Paula Vaske and Judith Friess shared the experiences and insights that stayed with them.
During the challenge, participants take responsibility for a virtual fruit juice manufacturer in the business simulation “The Fresh Connection.” Working across Purchasing, Operations, Sales and Supply Chain, they make decisions and experience how those decisions interact. The 2026 focus was to reduce the company’s carbon footprint while maintaining a positive return on investment.
For Team LINDT 1, the challenge offered an opportunity to build on previous experience, try different roles and refine their decisions over several rounds.
Returning with Experience and Ambition
The team members had already experienced The Fresh Connection in an earlier competition. At the time, they had attributed some of their difficulties to time pressure. This time, they wanted to discover how their results would change with more time for analysis and discussion.
There was also some friendly internal competition: they wanted to outperform the other Lindt teams. They succeeded, finishing as the strongest of the three LINDT teams.
Moving from Intuition to Evidence
One of the biggest challenges came at the beginning: making decisions before the team had results from its own simulation rounds.
Paula Vaske explained that some initial settings were based on intuition. Discussing different views within a team can be difficult when there is little shared evidence to support them.
Once results became available, the discussions became more focused. The team could analyse outcomes, test assumptions and make targeted adjustments. Each round created another opportunity to decide, review and improve.
Excess Inventory Has a Carbon Footprint
A particularly memorable insight for Paula and Judith was the connection between inventory, obsolescence and emissions. Both work in planning and supply chain and are familiar with the financial consequences of overproduction and write-offs.
The simulation also made the carbon impact of discarded products visible. When products are manufactured and subsequently thrown away, the resources used to produce them are wasted alongside their financial value.
Seeing this relationship expressed in numbers added another dimension to the team’s understanding of inventory. It connected familiar planning decisions with their environmental consequences.
Carbon Reduction Requires a Longer-Term View
Another lesson concerned the timing of costs and benefits. Carbon reduction projects in the simulation required upfront investment, with benefits becoming apparent over subsequent rounds.
The team therefore had to weigh immediate financial effects against later improvements. Considering financial performance and environmental objectives together became an essential part of its decision-making.
Changing Roles Builds Understanding
For this challenge, the team members took on different functions from those they had held previously. The roles were allocated by drawing lots—a choice that proved to have an additional learning benefit.
Working in a different role helped them understand further responsibilities and dependencies. Paula felt that the broader knowledge across the team made it easier to understand what was happening in other functions and reduced the need for coordination.
For returning participants, this offers a useful idea: taking on a new role can reveal a different side of a familiar challenge and deepen cross-functional understanding.
Learning That Extends Beyond the Competition
Team LINDT 1’s reflections illustrate the learning opportunities a business simulation can create. Assumptions can be tested, trade-offs become measurable, and the effects of decisions become visible across functional boundaries.
Thank you to Paula Vaske and Judith Friess for sharing their experiences and insights from the TFC Global PRO Challenge 2026!
Find out more about the TFC Global PRO Challenge
