Following last April’s news of their partnership and initiative to develop an on-line sustainability management tool, the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (SISC) and SupplyShift announced the soft launch of the new SISC Stewardship Calculator. The SISC calculator is now available for use in a digital platform and will continue to be enhanced through the coming months.
The SISC Stewardship Calculator allows food industry partners to measure on-farm sustainability metrics for all fruits, nuts, and vegetables more efficiently than ever before. Growers can register at no cost to create a baseline of their stewardship and track continual improvement as they enact management changes. Aggregators, retailers, brands, and industry groups can also register to baseline and help improve the on-farm sustainability practices of their suppliers.
“SISC’s objectives are to advance optimal production and strong environmental protection by offering a suite of science-based, data driven sustainability metrics,” states SISC Director Alison Edwards. “In support of these goals, we are thrilled to announce that SISC’s new calculator is now launched and available for use by growers, grower groups, buyers, and brands.”
The SISC Stewardship Calculator aims to support food industry collaboration and accelerate progress in both productivity and social and environmental sustainability. Three major food industry organizations, Campbell’s Soup Company, JM Smucker, and Western Growers, are set to deploy the soft launch version of the calculator to their growers this year.
Metric data give consumers, food buyers, and producers a common language for assessing the impact and continual improvement of farming practices – and the meaningful stewardship activities of farmers around the world. “Food brands and buyers are looking for tools to build supply chain sustainability programs. Using data to concretely illustrate improvements over time is essential to understand and mitigate risk, support improvements, and make sustainability claims more transparent.” Dan Sonke, Director of Sustainable Agriculture, Campbell’s Soup Company.
“The SISC calculator on SupplyShift gives growers and industry groups the opportunity to better understand their footprint, benchmark with their peers, and share data in a secure way with their customers." Added Hank Giclas at Western Growers. “This tool will help us work directly with our members to support continual improvement on the ground, and allow us to show industry improvement, backed up with real data.”
SupplyShift, a supply chain transparency network, is the central software platform offering the digital SISC Stewardship Calculator. Using the calculator, food industry partners will be able to collect, analyze, aggregate and report data at any level of the specialty crop supply chain. The calculator also supports the ability to plug agricultural software tools directly into the platform to provide input data and seamlessly calculate metrics.
“Our strategy is centered around collaboration. We fully support SISC’s science-based methodology and are excited about this latest development in our partnership,” said Jamie Barsimantov, COO of SupplyShift. “By pairing our technology with SISC’s expertise, we’ve created an opportunity for greater collaboration within agricultural supply chains, allowing food industry partners to improve productivity, manage risk, and drive sustainability performance more efficiently than ever before.”
For more information:
Alison Edwards
SISC
Email: aedwards@stewardshipindex.org
www.stewardshipindex.org