TSC Collaboration Drives Coca-Cola to Streamline Sustainability Reporting from Farm to Retail

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 agriculture 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.

"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." 

"Ingredion is pleased to offer our customers access to the sustainability data they need to meet their commodity goals. Using the TSC data translator within MyFarms enables us to respond to customer needs and ensure our supply chain is making progress on key sustainability issues," said Andrew Utterback, senior manager of sustainability for Ingredion Incorporated. 

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. TSC is jointly administered by Arizona State University and the U of A and has a European office at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. For more information visit www.sustainabilityconsortium.org. Read the full case study here.