During GreenBiz’s VERGE 21 conference last week, conversations surrounding the food sector and its goal for reducing carbon emissions kept intersecting at one key point — the supply chain.

"All of these commitments are going to be cascaded into the suppliers," Julia Salant, head of sustainability innovation at EcoVadis, a sustainability ratings company, said during a VERGE 21 session on tracking carbon. "All of this will need to be translated into action within supply chains."

But supply chains for food products are inextricably complicated. Every ingredient in a food produced starts at an individual farm and can have many links until it gets to the retailer including passing through a processor, packaging middle man and a branded wholesaler. Knowing every input and output will be key to making the millions of tiny changes that lead to emissions savings.

"Some organizations don’t have transparency down to the farm gate, because of the commodity exchanges and how supply chains are organized," said Tim Faveri, vice president of sustainability and shared value at Maple Leaf Foods, a packaged meat company in Canada. "So collaborating with other partners is going to be really, really important."

He emphasized the importance of working with companies that are upstream of the farmer, such as a fertilizer company, to encourage meaningful change from both sides.

Food executives know that the key to reducing their companies’ emissions lies in the data, transparency of and improvement in their supply chains. But an audience member at VERGE 21 brought up how the many requests for data and formats are a huge burden on the suppliers.

Read the full article about lowering carbon emissions in food supply chains by Jesse Klein at GreenBiz.