Collaboration Drives Coca-Cola to Streamline Sustainability Reporting from Farm to Retail
May 17, 2021 – The Sustainability Consortium (TSC), alongside Field to Market, MyFarms, Ingredion, Coca-Cola and Walmart recently announced a unique partnership to help streamline field-level data on-farm through a combination of software and streamlining current sustainability assessments. Consumers are increasingly interested in knowing how their food is produced and where it comes from. Numerous platforms from across the food and agriculture supply chain are working to meet this demand – yet the challenges to translate farm performance data from field to fork remains a barrier to sustainability improvement.
Since many of the key supply chain impacts of consumer goods occur on the farm-level, TSC faced a challenge: how to connect sustainability systems from farm to retail. TSC partnered with Field to Market, a multi-stakeholder alliance representing more than 145 organizations across the food and ag value chain, to bring their robust, data driven Fieldprint Platform to document and demonstrate this impact alongside TSC. TSC and Field to Market created a “data translator” to enable farm supply chain transparency while removing some of the data reporting burden from growers, ingredient suppliers, and product manufacturers.
Christy Slay, TSC senior director of science and research applications states, “As the food and agriculture value chain looks to demonstrate credible sustainability progress, increased collaboration across platforms to scale sustainability data from the farm to the retailer is critical to reducing the data reporting burden.”
“From farmers to consumer-facing brands and retailers, the entire agricultural value chain is united in the understanding that you cannot manage what you do not measure,” said Rod Snyder, president of Field to Market. “The partnership between Field to Market and TSC helps to seamlessly connect science-based, field level metrics and data with broader supply chain sustainability reporting, advancing a shared goal of improved environmental outcomes.”
Coca-Cola currently reports annual farm measurements including greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, water use intensity, and yield to TSC’s THESIS Index. In earlier years, Coca-Cola reported by compiling spreadsheets of data from suppliers, costing days or even weeks of valuable staff time and assuming the risk of calculation errors that comes with a manual process. The solution to eliminate this costly process came by partnering with their ingredient supplier, Ingredion, and farm software platform, MyFarms.
The partnership between TSC, MyFarms software, and Field to Market saves valuable time for Ingredion and Coca-Cola and ensures the answers are calculated accurately.
“By streamlining field level data collection and analysis, we can more efficiently report results into Walmart’s sustainability platform while eliminating complexity for farmers and our suppliers,” said Jon Radtke, water sustainability program director for Coca-Cola North America. “This level of accuracy and transparency helps support Coca-Cola’s commitment to advancing the sustainability of our priority agricultural commodities.”
While TSC strives to completely automate the process for reporting into their THESIS platform on Supply Shift, this innovative partnership with Field to Market and MyFarms enables a huge step forward in meeting the largest challenge — automating the aggregation and reporting from farm to brand for retail reporting.
TSC translates the best sustainability science into business tools that are used all over the world to create more sustainable consumer products.
About TSC
The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) is a global non-profit organization transforming the consumer goods industry to deliver more sustainable consumer products. We work to enable a world where people can lead fulfilled lives in a way that decouples their impacts on people and the planet. Our members and partners include manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, service providers, NGOs, civil society organizations, governmental agencies and academics. TSC convenes our diverse stakeholders to work collaboratively to build science-based decision tools and solutions that address sustainability issues that are materially important throughout a product’s supply chain and lifecycle. TSC also offers a portfolio of services to help drive effective improvement and implementation. Formed in 2009, TSC is jointly administered by Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas and has a European office at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. For more information visit www.sustainabilityconsortium.org.
Press inquiries contact:
Erika Ferrin
TSC
Sr. Director of Marketing, Communication and Development
Erika.ferrin@sustainabilityconsortium.org
480-965-7752
