Mondra on AI's Sustainable Supply Chain Revolution

Jason Barrett, CEO of Mondra, blends data-driven expertise with a passion for sustainability.

With more than two decades of experience in data analytics, he has a knack for using technology to solve complex challenges. Inspired by the global climate crisis, where the food system plays a significant role, Jason saw potential in applying Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies to tackle environmental issues.

Mondra, launched in 2020, leverages AI to help brands, suppliers and retailers like Sainsbury’s, ASDA and Waitrose map and reduce their environmental impact. Collaborating with 90% of the UK grocery sector, Mondra enables businesses to track Scope 3 emissions, improve product sustainability and navigate growing regulatory pressures.

Four years in, Mondra stands as a leader in revolutionising sustainability, driving progress towards net zero in the grocery industry.

Here, Scope 3 Magazine speaks to Jason about Mondra’s AI-powered platform and how it's revolutionising supply chain sustainability in the food industry. 

What is Mondra and how does it positively contribute to net zero?

The biggest challenge food companies face in getting to net zero is measuring and managing Scope 3 emissions, which are notoriously difficult to address because the granular data required to take action is largely unavailable or low quality.

Supply chains are complex and standards around carbon accounting are open to interpretation, which means that data, where it does exist, is impossible to compare. 

Mondra is an AI-powered, climate tech SaaS solution designed to enable the transition to a net zero food system. 

It does so by automating LCA at scale, allowing food retailers to comprehend the environmental impacts of every product they sell and empowering their category teams to collaborate with suppliers on performance improvement, accelerating reduction of Scope 3 emissions — those that occur in the supply chain — reducing business risk in an ever-regulated market and enabling competitive advantage.

Mondra is spearheading the BRC Mondra Coalition, which today includes 85% of UK grocery, government bodies and NGOs, working collaboratively to agree and adopt a new industry standard which is informing inbound policy in this space. 

How does Mondra's AI-powered technology overcome the challenges of measuring and managing Scope 3 emissions in complex food supply chains?

The challenges arise from various shared industry pain points, such as the lack of representative data for supply chains, including farms, commodity supply chains, manufacturing and logistics. 

Additionally, there is a lack of comparability due to the use of different data sources, farm tools and footprinting platforms, which employ varying methods of quantification.

Furthermore, data handling poses challenges in terms of managing the volume of information, ensuring datasets align and distinguishing between real changes and re-baselining.

The first challenge Mondra is tackling is automating LCA. 

LCA is a method used to understand the environmental impacts of a product throughout its entire life cycle, including carbon, water and biodiversity impacts. 

Mondra uses prediction technology to deliver LCAs for all products in a retailer’s assortment in just a day, a job that, if undertaken manually, would take a century to complete.  

The output of this prediction tech is high resolution digital twins of the unique lifecycle of a product, recognising every change event in the chain and assessing it for environmental performance. 

This digital twinning tech provides the means for better data to be ingested at any point on the chain and automatically reflected downstream. 

In this way, food retailers are crowdsourcing better data from the supply chain and removing reliance on guesswork, which powers better decarbonisation decisions.

What are the key benefits of automating LCAs for retailers and suppliers in the grocery sector?

Automated LCA provides the granular data needed to support effective decision making.

With this granular data, we are giving retailers the platform and tools to support planet-positive category evolution, while de-risking their business and taking advantage of the commercial opportunity presented by the net zero economy. 

Making business decisions from product reformulations, to category level changes, to pricing and promotion strategies that balance commercial objectives with carbon reduction ambitions.

As a result, they are accelerating Scope 3 emissions reduction and reducing environmental impact more broadly across their supply chains. 

Retailers onboard their suppliers to Mondra, empowering them with tools to contribute to the net zero transition. It's this retailer-initiated, supplier-empowered system that is accelerating net zero progress, driving decarbonisation outcomes that are in the commercial interests of the user. 

The thing that makes us unique is that our solution goes well beyond automated product assessment, enabling ‘collaborative decarbonisation’. 

As one actor improves, all downstream actors have their impacts updated, and it’s this dynamic system of tracking and improving performance that is the step change for the industry.

No more static, outdated PDF environmental reports, siloed from the business. Instead, we have an ever-improving data feed right down to product SKU, and even ingredient, level. 

How is Mondra collaborating with industry partners, government bodies and NGOs to establish standardised carbon accounting practices in the food industry?

Having solved the Scope 3 data challenge, Mondra sought the support of the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and established an industry coalition to evolve and agree a prescriptive industry standard for LCA and data sharing through the chain, scaled on Mondra technology. 

This pre-competitive effort by 85% of UK Grocery Retailers and their suppliers alongside NGOs and government bodies offers a step change for the sector as a whole.

The standard enables comparability and establishes the level playing field for competition to breed, accelerating Scope 3 progress. 

What role do you see farm-level data playing in achieving a net zero food system? How is Mondra working to improve data collection at this crucial stage of the supply chain?

Farming and agriculture are often pointed to as a major contributor to the climate crisis, but they are also the biggest opportunity we have to fix it.

It’s not just about carbon, it’s also soil health, food security and biodiversity. 

There is a need to bring together efforts on standardising and scaling, unifying and standardising data at both ends of the supply chain including farm data and to create a solution that enables data flows along the supply chain and the basis for a mechanism to incentivise and reward change at farm level.

The BRC Mondra Coalition, together with representatives from farming organisations and in step with government initiatives, is currently working together to solve many of the issues related to farm data. 

This includes the collection of data to agreed and unified industry standards that can then be used to inform the whole supply chain to trying to solve the challenges around removals accounting. 

Farmers are rightly concerned that counting emissions from farms, not removals doesn’t give an accurate (net) carbon position. 

If farmers can understand their net carbon position and be rewarded for the public good of improving their performance, it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

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