Agricultural Buyers Want the Data

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Technology that has been traditionally used for precision agriculture is starting to be adopted by food companies who want to know more about their supply chains. Hummingbird Technologies has started working with a beer brand to use their remote sensing platform to inform them about the carbon footprint of their products. Will Wells is the founder of Hummingbird.

Wells… “We target big businesses. We are a B2B software play. But often the end users are farmers. We're doing an amazing project in the UK with a business called Diageo.”

Diageo is the company behind several brands, including Guinness beer. They’re hoping to better understand the environmental impacts of their raw ingredients.

Wells… “And our goal is to try and measure carbon emissions across that entire barley supply chain in England, Scotland, Ireland. And they want to be able to quite literally measure how much carbon goes into a pint of Guinness. Now the vision in the long run is that maybe there'll be a carbon neutral beer brand, or maybe some of the barley farmers within that supply chain can get rewarded for doing things in a certain way. Each brand tends to have their own strategy and Hummingbird is just a backend audit to try and drive that

Buyers of agricultural products are becoming increasingly more interested in this data.