Food Companies Want More Visibility into Farm Resource Use

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Consumers are demanding more from food companies, especially when it comes to environmental, social, and governance issues otherwise known as ESG. In turn food companies are looking beyond the label, and wanting more data when it comes to the impact of their supply chain. Aquaoso’s core business is water analytics, but CEO Chris Peacock says more food companies want help analyzing resource use of the farms they purchase from.

Peacock… “If you look at the new administration, we're seeing a number of ESG reporting requirements, starting to come down the pipeline, both from the food supply company side, from the investor side, from the lending side as well. But there's also social pressure. There is a huge component of the public population that wants to have better insight into what's going on with the food that they're ingesting and making sure that it's sourced in sustainable ways. So a number of the companies that we're working with are looking at not just, is there a risk in their supply chain and where should they be allocating resources from an infrastructure perspective, but also ways in which they can incentivize better use of water or even the change to regenerative agriculture or organic agriculture and incentivizing those changes over time.”

This type of tracking of resource use will require quite a bit of data collection and sharing between farmers and the rest of the supply chain.