Finding out more about your supply chain
There was also a lot of interest in last month's story about how BioMar asked commodity supply chains risk assessment provider, NEPCon, to scrutinize its soy value chain in Brazil, as part of the Danish company’s source-to-market rating process of its raw material portfolio – Sustainable Solutions Steering.
Erik Olav Gracey, global sustainability analyst, BioMar, told us why the company saw fit to commission the NEPCon review of soy production in Brazil.
“Brazilian soy has always been a hotspot feed ingredient for us. We have been in a dialogue with the Rainforest Foundation Norway about it as well. It is hot topic in Norway. We just wanted to learn more. We are a fish feed producer, not an environment assessment consultancy, yet we understand that we have a responsibility to have as much knowledge as possible about our value chain, about our raw materials. We decided to make Brazilian soy a case study for how we should go in depth in the triple S - Sustainable Solutions Steering – assessment.
“We are not in Brazil, we are not on the ground. We wanted to contact a third party that is impartial, that is expert in performing a risk assessment on these kind of commodities and that either has been in Brazil itself or has partners on the ground."
“I think the biggest takeaway for us [from this report] was more or less realizing that, in essence, we were a little too reliant on the standard and finding that there were a lot of aspects of Brazilian soy production that we weren’t completely aware of, and that could potentially lead to us having new risk assessment criteria when we perform audits, [and also] maybe some of our risk assessment scores will change depending on how we intend to use the results of this report.
“But I think, overall, it has just really increased our understanding of that specific part of our value chain and how we can incorporate that knowledge into audits so we can be really sure the soy we are sourcing and claiming as responsible through a standard actually is.”