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Hellmann's Mayonnaise is about as basic a product as you'll find in your average supermarket. It's made from a few simple ingredients—egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar—and it's got a pedigree that dates back to a turn-of-the-20th-century New York deli. Since 1912, it has been packed in standard glass jars bedecked with a simple blue-ribbon label; the single largest word on the jar aside from the brand name is the word "REAL." If you're the guardian of a brand with a legacy this proud, you treat it like a delicate heirloom. And if you're a brand manager at Unilever Canada—the current owner of the brand and one of the largest purveyors of packaged goods on the planet—and you need to remind yourself why, you simply mumble "New Coke" under your breath like a mantra.

Which is why the new, environmentally friendlier Hellmann's packaging that recently debuted in grocery stores across Canada, incidental as it might seem beneath the average harried shopper's momentary gaze, represents a fundamental and potentially enormous change in direction for the world of everyday consumer products. It's also why Marc Stoiber, whose new-fangled Change consulting firm helped guide Unilever's shift, finds himself riding a mounting wave of corporate interest in selling green products that may sweep over the entirety of the supermarket—every supermarket—before it crests.

First, though, to the new Hellmann's jar, which, for very practical reasons of supply-chain efficiency, is now made of plastic instead of glass. Unilever has been a keen acolyte in the cult of efficiency since the early 1990s, beginning with an ambitious water stewardship initiative that eventually morphed into a broader sustainability program. The company built its efficiency measures on the idea that going green was good for the bottom line as well as the planet—a notion that was far outside the boardroom norm until recently. From that angle, those nostalgically correct Hellmann's jars were simply too heavy. There was money to be saved all along the supply chain, and so Unilever's mayo would move, after nearly a century, to lightweight plastic. Initially, the label on the new package was supposed to remain the same. The idea that you could make such efficiency efforts part of the brand, that you could brag about it right on the supermarket shelf, was uncharted retail territory. Which is where Stoiber came in.

"They've been doing this since the '90s—leading the world in saving water, saving energy, all that stuff," says Stoiber. "But they never connected the dots between that and the brands. So the corporation, the mothership, would be doing all the good stuff, but the brands never really said, 'We come from a company that does good stuff.' "

Stoiber convinced the Hellmann's brand team that the environmental benefits of a new package were not only consistent with the product's core attributes—its authenticity, its natural ingredients and its old-fashioned basicness—but that celebrating the environmental benefits on the new package was an easy way to add some brand value. And so when those plastic Hellmann's jars hit Canadian supermarket shelves in March, they bore not only the familiar blue ribbon but also a folded tag dangling from the lid that read "Environmentally Friendlier packaging." Under the fold, the tag detailed how the new plastic jars reduced Unilever's greenhouse gas emissions by one million kilograms per year, equivalent to removing 400 transport trucks from the company's supply chain.

In essence, what Stoiber talked Unilever into was a green-themed "New and Improved!" banner, and there is probably no mainstay of point-of-purchase marketing more banal than "New and Improved!" But this was no empty boast. The new package represents not a minor tweak born of some fleeting trend but a fundamental, emissions-reducing change in the way the product is manufactured and shipped. Cautious, ubiquitous Unilever has not only embraced sustainability but made it an intrinsic part of a century-old brand's identity—as clear a signal as any that the green business movement has conquered the very heart of the mainstream. Which would suggest, moreover, that the seemingly reckless gamble Marc Stoiber took on when he left the world of big business in 2005 was in fact a prescient leap ahead of the defining paradigm shift in 21st-century business.

Stoiber, for his part, is no stranger to the glib version of the "New and Improved!" banner. Indeed, the first 17 years of his career were mostly devoted to dressing up business-as-usual in funky new duds. As a star copywriter and creative director, he's played pitchman for Budweiser, McDonald's and Mr. Clean at corporate advertising agencies from Hong Kong to Toronto. He was a key player on the creative team at Palmer Jarvis during its reign as one of Canada's most celebrated agencies, scooping up Strategy Magazine's Agency of the Year honours for three straight years and raking in Clios as well as Cannes's coveted gold lions. Then, he moved on to a more senior position (and further laurels) at Grey Worldwide.

But Stoiber had also just witnessed the birth of his son, and he'd begun to notice, as he puts it, the way the summers were getting a little too hot. Like many new parents in this anxious young century, he worried about what kind of climate nightmare waited on the horizon for his children. The job, as fun as it was, no longer seemed all that rewarding. "I saw no real innovation in anything that I was doing," he says. "And I looked at the cleaning products I was selling, and all they did was come up with new flavours or, you know, this fabric softener now has a spout. That's it? That's as good as it gets?"

Around the same time, he crossed paths with the founders of a company that was mining compost out of landfills. Stoiber thought it sounded like silk purses from sows' ears. "Now there's something I can sell," he thought. "It's so easy; all I'll have to do is tell people about the product and it'll sell itself." In late 2005, he founded a boutique agency in Vancouver with a simple, audacious name—Change—and the seemingly oxymoronic goal of "making sustainability sexy." His old ad-world colleagues reckoned he'd gone "off to pasture."

The landfill miners (the International Composting Corp., based in Victoria), became Change's first client. For the next year and a half, Change built a modest business on such fledgling green enterprises: Triton Logging, for example, is a B.C.-based company that turns the trees drowned behind old dams into luxury hardwood, and Aspenware, which makes disposable cutlery from the province's timber waste. Stoiber ran these young, mission-driven companies through the basics of brand identity, often wondering if southwestern B.C. might have enough of them to bloom into some sort of green-economy hub and, along the way, propel his agency into long-term viability. Resistance to Stoiber's corporate charms, however, remained widespread; sustainability's pioneers weren't so sure they wanted to play the branding game, especially by the hardball rules of some guy whose most recent triumph was the revitalization of toxic Mr. Clean.

Meanwhile, in a boardroom in faraway Arkansas, a decision was made that would soon hurl Stoiber's boutique agency into the supermarket mainstream. In the fall of 2005, Wal-Mart announced an improbably ambitious sustainability program. The initiative dedicated the largest retailer on the planet to such long-term goals as the complete elimination of waste and the reduction of unsustainable products from its voluminous shelves. That soon precipitated the creation of a "sustainability scorecard" that obliged Wal-Mart's 60,000-plus suppliers to reduce their packaging by at least 5% by 2013. Alongside the broader buy-green trend, Wal-Mart's sustainability initiative has reverberated through almost every corner of North America's consumer-goods industry, remaking the entire retail landscape.

"It's a perfect storm," says Sharon MacLeod, marketing director at Unilever Canada. "The consumers are saying that they want it, responsible companies who have been making these kinds of initiatives happen are coming [to them] with that answer, and then the retailers are also supporting those initiatives. We're finally getting to the point where we're seeing a real shift that's going to make a real difference in retail."

MacLeod, for her part, found herself chatting with Marc Stoiber just as the storm began to break, and soon he was teaching the Hellmann's brand team how to navigate this uncharted and potentially treacherous landscape. "If anything ever looked like green-washing, he would challenge us on that," says MacLeod. "And he would say, 'No, you have to do things with integrity, and you have to do it the right way.' "

In the end, Unilever's mayo made only modest claims to greenness—"we're doing our part," the Hellmann's tag reads. The real significance, though, is in the way the conversation about climate change and sustainability has moved deep inside head offices. The presence of even a few voices like Stoiber's inside the boardroom may ultimately prove more persuasive than a vast chorus of chanting activists on the streets below. "He's like a translator," says Nancy Vonk, an executive at Ogilvy Toronto, who has worked on numerous marketing campaigns for Unilever, including the groundbreaking "Campaign for Real Beauty" for Dove soap. "A lot of companies are already doing good things, and Marc can come in and fan the flames."

What's more, because Stoiber's an ad guy at heart, he knows how to talk about going green in the familiar corporate language of revenue growth and strategic advantage—no small comfort to companies even less familiar with the art and practice of sustainability than Unilever is. "It's gone from being risk management to being a business opportunity," Stoiber says. "And that's the fence that a lot of the big companies are hung on right now."

Case in point: Stephen Gould Corp., North America's largest privately held packaging company, which recently signed on as a Change client to figure out how it might turn the consumer goods industry's increasing obsession with reducing package size, weight and volume—less packaging, in other words—into a brand advantage. Traditionally, these were technical problems to be solved in the operations department, but Change's mission, Stoiber says, is to shatter the barriers that currently exist between corporate divisions and get the whole company thinking sustainably.

"Where we find we're adding the most value," he says, "is just by getting folks connected. And that's where I see it going. Folks are having a little stab at it here and there, but we're helping them tie it all together and do something in every area. And make money on it." He pauses.

"Make sure you write that in bold."