Most people assume food miles are the enemy of sustainable sourcing. They are wrong. Transportation and freight account for less than 10% of a food product's total environmental impact. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — is at the farm.
Defne Saral, Senior Vice President of Sales at ofi, one of the world's largest processors of cocoa, coffee, nuts, spices, and dairy ingredients, joins Mark Blackwell to explain how ofi is building a verified sustainability data infrastructure across 2 million hectares of land managed by millions of independent smallholder farmers in West Africa and beyond.
They discuss ofi's Choices for Change framework and what the 2025 Impact Report actually shows; how ofi's proprietary AtSource platform measures greenhouse gas emissions at farm level, independently verified by Carbon Trust; why Scope 3 emissions represent around 80% of most food companies' carbon footprint, and what that means for ingredient suppliers; the role of satellite polygon mapping, drone technology, and agronomic science in building a data graph without connected machinery; the EU deforestation directive and what compliance actually requires; and how AI could compress the sustainability reporting cycle and sharpen the signal-to-noise ratio in natural ingredient data.
Defne also makes the case for democratising sustainability data — making it affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized food companies, not just those with the scale to bear the compliance cost.
This episode follows directly from last week's conversation with Professor Venkat Venkatraman on Fusion Strategy and industrial AI. Together they form a two-part picture of what it looks like to design intelligence into a business model rather than paint it on top.
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