case study
Protecting Cocoa Farmer Living Incomes to Ensure Social Sustainability
Nómadas' productized a large scale data model to cleanse and calculate key indicators of farmer economic conditions to empower the client's supply chain transparency, traceability, and sustainable action.
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about the client
Olam Food Ingredients, now ofi, is a global leader in food and beverage ingredients and solutions based on raw ingredients such as cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts, and spices.
OFI Cocoa generates 12% of the world's cocoa from a direct supplier network across Africa, Asia and South America for products produced by Blommer Chocolate Company, Costco, Fazer, Ferrero, Fuji Oil, General Mills, Guittard, Lindt & Sprüngli, Mars Inc, Mondelēz International, Nestlé, Orkla, Puratos, Ritter Sport, Starbucks, The Hershey Company.
overview
The ofi Cocoa Compass strategy sets and tracks challenging goals to tackle the key issues facing the cocoa supply chain. It's goal is to efficiently improve performance and impact in supply chains through verified and data-based insights.
Through this strategy and other recent efforts ofi has achieved important milestones of 100% traceability and 100% deforestation monitoring in the direct supply chain along with child labor monitoring in the managed sustainability programs.
Our project built on this work and narrowed in on social sustainability to provide transparency into farmer living incomes and traceability of the factors that influence these earnings. With hundreds of thousands of cocoa farmers across several countries, the data that powers these insights are broad and deep.
Our task began by utilizing predefined business rules and domain logic to implement code which brought the model to live through productization and automation. Our algorithms brought in enrichment data sets and calculated the key metrics critical to sustainability commitments as well as ensure rigorous data accuracy and enforce data governance standards to maintain the model's credence.
Using several data sources, including AtSource, the client's internal award-winning sustainability management system, and direct farmer surveys which are stored in the client's OFIS tool (OLAM Farmer Information System), we set in motion an automated and trusted model. It immediately provides insights from the global view through to country and farmer level views and enable context on region-specific standards and economic conditions.
We were able to identify the current biggest cost and income contributors for each farmer group and country, to give the team focus areas. This foundational farmer income model now serves as the blueprint for future phases of advanced statistical data science such as sensitivity analysis and propensity modeling with clear data-driven recommended action. Now ofi can predict the potential impact on the farmer's income level with each change or improvement further reinforcing the commitment to a sustainable cocoa supply chain.
approach
TRUSTED
Sustainability data brings value through trust. We knew for this project to make a difference in farmer's lives, we had to get the data right. Significant energy was put into auditing and adapting to outliers and gaps in raw data. An audit log was maintained for future iteration of the model to ensure consistency and avoid future duplicate efforts.
TRANSPARENT
Each of the 80 key indicators that serve as outputs of the farmer income model are composites of several data points themselves (e.g., yield, cost, revenue). In our ongoing spirit of demystification, each of these functions, within the model itself, are detailed and described for future iterations and investigations.
FUTURE PROOF
Staying true to data model standards and clear documentation produced a model that will stand the test of time. The tidy and descriptive code that was used prevents the model from becoming an archaic black box. Any client resource can pick it up without prior knowledge and be able to immediately move forward.
solutions
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Aggregation of multiple raw data sources and enrichment with fixed factors
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Rigorous data accuracy audit to build trust of raw data
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Architect model logic in line with business expertise
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Democratize and empower the client through document and handoff outputs of model to client
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Collaborative testing and iteration against historical data and subject matter expertise
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List of biggest contributing factors to farmer income
results
325,000
Cocoa Farmers
in Olam Farmer Information System (OFIS)
9
Countries
100%
Transparency & Traceability
“Brilliant.”
- XXXX XXXXXXXX, Head of Things