Selection is based on a set of criteria: demonstrated innovativeness, sustainable and responsible operations, activity in international markets, and evidence of well-run business overall. T
What Green, Creative, Smart actually means
The name of the campaign accentuates the three main qualities companies need to show off. Green refers to environmental and social responsibility. Creative covers the ability to build value from knowledge and innovation, rather than scale alone. Smart is about technological maturity — solutions advanced enough to make a measurable operational difference, not just marketed as innovative.
How Nektar Natura reflects the qualities of Green, Creative and Smart
Green, in our case, is measurable rather than declarative. Our dispensing systems reduce packaging waste by roughly 80% compared to serving the same volume from 1-litre bottles. Transport-related CO₂ emissions are around 94% lower, since concentrate ships in a fraction of the volume that ready-to-drink beverages require, and our dispensing systems run on close to 85% less energy than earlier generations. In 2024, this was reflected in a CDP »B« rating for our environmental performance — an external assessment, not a self-reported figure.
Creative shows up mostly in how products get developed. Creation of IQ Tap, our newest dispensing system, began with a conducting a Life Cycle Assessment of the previous generation of dispensing system. That assessment identified specific weaknesses — material use, energy consumption, maintenance complexity — and became the development brief we worked on from with design partner at Wilsonic Design. The result was independently recognised with the 2026 Red Dot Award for Product Design and, the F&B@Sea award for Best New Product in beverage dispensing solutions.
Smart is the least outward visible quality of the three, but arguably brings the most operational benefits. It covers things like POS integration, remote diagnostics, and a service model built around 24/7 support across more than 40 countries where our systems run. None of that is flashy on its own. What it adds up to is consistency across the World: a hotel in Ljubljana and one in Dubai working with the same product, the same reliability standards, and the same support structure.
What it signals to hotels and hospitality operators evaluating suppliers
For F&B managers and procurement teams comparing suppliers, individual claims about sustainability or innovation are hard to verify from the outside. Third-party recognitions, whether a design award, a certification, or in this case a national ambassador title, serve a specific function: they move a claim from something a company says about itself to something an outside body has actually assessed. None of these are perfect predictors of day-to-day reliability, but together they build a more complete picture than any single claim can.
For Nektar Natura, this recognition sits alongside the other markers we already work with, our CDP rating, IFS certification, EcoVadis assessment and product-level design awards, as one more reference point for anyone deciding whether a supplier’s claims about sustainability and innovation are grounded in something real.