Miller Magazine Issue: 119 November 2019

44 NEWS MILLER / NOVEMBER 2019 Demand for supply chain information transforming the food companies The cocoa that Mondelez International Inc. used to make the last Oreo you ate might have come from a farm about the size of a football field about 5 miles southwest of a wildlife sanctuary in Ghana. It is possib- le to know this because Mondelez publishes online re- latively granular data about its cocoa supply chain. On a company website, a map with satellite views pinpo- ints the locations of more than 93,000 farms in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Indonesia that it tapped last year, th- rough suppliers, to get some of the raw material it ne- eds to make chocolate products. “What the consumer really wants to understand is that we have provenance of our supply,” says Jonathan Horrell, global director of sustainability at Mondelez. Big food companies, from Mondelez and General Mills Inc. to Unilever PLC and Nestlé SA, face rising pressure to address problems across agricultural regi- ons as shoppers pay more attention to where their food comes from and how it is produced. As huge buyers of ingredients like cocoa, palm oil and coffee, food com- panies must do more, for example, to stop deforesta- tion carried out by suppliers and encourage farmers to stop using child labor, regulators, advocacy groups and consumers say. Companies are responding in part by serving up new information online about the commodities they buy around the world. The data, once the domain of pur- chasing specialists and transportation planners, is star- ting to give investors and the public a glimpse into the sprawling supply chains the companies have spent ye- ars developing. For advocacy groups, the information is welcome, even if they lament that it took this long and that it isn’t enough. “It’s a first step that should have been taken a long time ago,” says Diana Ruiz, senior Big food companies, fromMondelez and General Mills Inc. to Unilever PLC and Nestlé SA, face rising pressure to address problems across agricultural regions as shoppers pay more attention to where their food comes from and how it is produced, The Wall Street Journal reports.