Seeking Sustainable Solutions for Challenges Across the Food System
The key sustainability challenges the food system faces today span from people to the planet. Human rights and farmer livelihoods are topics the industry cannot ignore, with 60 percent of child laborers working in agriculture today1, and smallholder farmers – living on less than $2 a day2 – representing a significant portion of the world’s population.
At the same time, climate change, deforestation and water resources continue to be front-and-center challenges for the planet and our industry.
Food-system leaders are focusing their ambitions to meet these challenges head-on, seeking solutions to increase sustainably produced volumes and develop transparent and traceable supply chains across the food and beverage industry. However, leaders are also in need of solutions to make their sustainability commitments a reality.
Delivering a Differentiated Customer Proposition with AtSource
At ofi, our sustainability management system AtSource provides customers with enhanced traceability across their supply chains and increased transparency around their performance, adding brand value with data and metrics regardless of where they are in their sustainability journey.
AtSource enables users to receive and analyze more information than they previously had access to for a broad spectrum of indicators across 10 key areas:
- Safe and decent work
- Economic opportunity
- Education and skills
- Health and nutrition
- Diversity and inclusion
- Ecosystems and biodiversity
- Healthy soils
- Climate action
- Water
- Waste
Once key data has been collected, AtSource generates actionable insights, allowing for more effective interventions and partnerships to drive positive impact.
For example, AtSource can help our customers understand – and then reduce – their coffee’s carbon footprint. Through the tool’s digital footprint calculator, it would be possible to more accurately calculate greenhouse gas emissions for a specific coffee blend, and the data is then analyzed to develop tailored next steps to further drive carbon reduction, with solutions spanning from soil inputs to agroforestry.
While technology cannot solve all the challenges the industry faces, it can help companies unlock more meaningful solutions. By enhancing traceability, connecting systems and revealing data-backed insights, technology can be an essential driver of positive, sustainable change.
Today, there are more than 358,000 farmers across 25 different origins and 22 ofi products on the AtSource+ platform, allowing our customers to develop action plans, guide their decision-making and track and report their progress along up to 350 metrics – and this is just the beginning.
We plan to take the strategies and lessons learned not just from Reuters Transform Food USA 2022, but from our boots on the ground in origin, and continue to expand and build upon ofi’s purpose to be the change for good food and a healthy future.
If you are interested in working with ofi and AtSource, please reach out to us at www.ofi.com/contact-us.
2 World Bank, 2016
