ofi, a leading supplier of naturally good food and beverage ingredients, unveiled a new sustainability strategy – ‘Choices for Change’ and ambitious 2030 targets. 

Global food brands and retailers are facing growing consumer demand for sustainable products, with increasing weather related and other challenges in the food supply chain and significant new sustainability linked legislation coming up. With ‘Choices for Change’, ofi will provide these companies and their consumers with specific choices to deliver long-term impact across four critical pillars: Prosperous Farmers, Thriving Communities, Climate Action, and Regenerating the Living World. 

Every 2030 target in the Choices for Change strategy delivers on key customer needs, including:

• Delivering enhanced livelihood support to one million farmers, helping them to be more productive and deliver better quality ingredients.

• Cutting scope 3 emissions by 30% to offer customers verifiable, low-carbon products and ingredients and contribute to net-zero commitments.

• Bringing 2 million hectares of land under regenerative farming practices to create long-term farm resilience and products with verified positive natural impact.

To give customers more rigorous, verifiable data for sustainability decision-making and reporting, the strategy incorporates a focus on supply chain excellence. This brings traceability, data insights, risk mitigation, verification, and in-depth supplier engagement together to enable the right choices and includes ofi’s suite of award-winning tech tools like AtSource - the sustainability management system and its built in Carbon Scenario Planner for planning and costing climate action.

Launching Choices for Change on UN Sustainable Gastronomy Day, Roel van Poppel, chief sustainability officer, ofi, said, “Choices for Change is the next phase in our journey, building upon and reinforcing years of experience in managing sustainability programs spanning hundreds of farming communities. Our team of over 500 sustainability experts from Côte d’Ivoire to Brazil, from Vietnam to Ghana, bring a deep understanding of and capability to solve some of the key environmental and humanitarian challenges in the food system. We offer our customers and partners the traceability, insights, capability, and choices to drive positive change.” 

ofi’s leading global product platforms - cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts, and spices - already have specific strategies or programs to address the challenges and opportunities of each product supply chain. These strategies will be integral to delivering the targets under Choices for Change which seeks to consolidate a single set of ambitions to be implemented globally, with universal metrics and definitions for all of ofi’s operations across ~50 countries. It will be delivered in partnership with farmers, governments, civil society and ofi’s customers – including many of the world’s largest food retailers, brands, and manufacturers. ofi has a long history of partnering with customers to deliver shared sustainability goals and scale impact, with over 130 collaborative programs active today. 

Chief executive officer of ofi, A. Shekhar, said, “We know that doing what’s right for communities and the planet is even more critical to our long-term commercial imperative to deliver the highest quality of food ingredients and solutions to our customers. It equips them with a powerful provenance narrative for their consumers, the people who enjoy delicious, high-quality and sustainable food and beverage products every day around the world.”

Today, ofi will be joined by Mars, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Sustainable Food Lab at an Innovation Forum event ‘Making Choices for Change in the global food system’ to discuss how the food value chain can work together to make better choices at every stage from plant to palate.