Mars reveals cocoa sourcing map in bid to tackle deforestation and boost transparency

10 Sep 2020 --- For the first time, Mars Wrigley has publicly revealed an interactive map detailing where it sources cocoa from to boost its supply chain strategy.

The confectionery giant pledges to achieve a 100 percent deforestation-free supply chain for cocoa by 2025 and says the new map boosts transparency.

Eliminating deforestation is at the heart of this Mars commitment and the company’s aim is for the cocoa it sources to be traceable from the farmer to the first point of purchase (the farmer organization, cooperative or licensed buying company our suppliers buy from) within the next five years.

“Sharing where and who we source our cocoa from gives consumers, customers, governments and other stakeholders, as well as our associates, the confidence to track where our cocoa comes from and the conditions under which it is grown,” says John Ament, global cocoa vice president at Mars.

The interactive map shows the names, locations and total number of farmers in each farmer group from which Mars sourced cocoa in the 2018/19 crop year as part of its Responsible Cocoa program. 

Tracing more than 350,000 family farms 
Knowing each farm’s location and boundary, and which farmer organization the farmer sells their cocoa to, helps Mars to better identify where its cocoa comes from. 

The interactive map shows the names, locations and total number of farmers in each farmer group from which Mars sourced cocoa in the 2018/19 crop year.The company expects its suppliers to go “above and beyond” providing a typical, single global positioning system (GPS) point on a map.

GPS polygons allow tracing of the entire boundary of each farm to verify the cocoa bought is grown within those boundaries and not in any nearby protected forests.  

Mars flags the challenge of tracing more than 350,000 farm plots in 13 countries, often in places with no roads, formal property boundaries or on-line land records. The company uses the boundary map alongside risk assessments and the country’s deforestation action plans to guide any further actions.

Based on data from its cocoa suppliers, Mars has now mapped one third of the farms in its supply chain.

Virtual mapping of supply chains is trending, as this visualization enables companies to get a clear picture of their supply chains. In this field, Unilever uses geospatial analytics for its “sophisticated” deforestation crackdown. 

Similarly, Bunge, Cargill, Mondelēz International, Nestlé and PepsiCo have partnered to fund a new, publicly available radar-based forest monitoring system, Radar Alerts for Detecting Deforestation (RADD). By using radar waves, the new system can penetrate cloud cover and gather forest change information without being affected by clouds or sunlight. 

Investing in provenance
Consumers are increasingly keen to learn more about the bean-to-bar journey of cocoa products, which ties into Innova Market Insights’ “Storytelling: Winning with Words” Top Trend for 2020. Provenance platforms that tell human stories are a popular method of conveying traceability.

Consumers are increasingly keen to learn more about the bean-to-bar journey of cocoa products.Large scale suppliers are actively investing in public data access, as Olam is doing with its B2B AtSource platform that reports the social and environmental footprints of a product’s journey. 

Blockchain is increasingly in use in this field, such as with OpenSC’s technology that enables businesses to track their products by assigning a unique ID to an individual product at its point of origin, such as the moment a fish is caught at sea.

The need for traceability has also been flagged in the coconut harvesting sector, which is now prioritizing zero monkey labor across supply chains. Theppadungporn Coconut Co. (TCC), a manufacturer and distributor of Chaokoh coconut milk is spearheading this initiative.

In other unique approaches, novel packaging solutions such as dynamic QR codes are enabling manufacturers to apply a dairy blockchain to their product’s packaging, which gives the consumer access to all relevant traceability and audit information in real time.

Meanwhile, cloud-based software is now being leveraged by Chemometric Brain, which uses near-infrared (NIR) technology to guarantee the traceability of its products, alongside the suitability and homogeneity of their ingredients.

By Benjamin Ferrer