Regenerative Agriculture at Scale: Data, Satellites, and Smallholder Farmers with Defne Saral, ofi

Most people assume food miles are the enemy of sustainable sourcing. They are wrong. Transportation and freight account for less than 10% of a food product's total environmental impact. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — is at the farm.

Defne Saral, Senior Vice President of Sales at ofi, one of the world's largest processors of cocoa, coffee, nuts, spices, and dairy ingredients, joins Mark Blackwell to explain how ofi is building a verified sustainability data infrastructure across 2 million hectares of land managed by millions of independent smallholder farmers in West Africa and beyond.

They discuss ofi's Choices for Change framework and what the 2025 Impact Report actually shows; how ofi's proprietary AtSource platform measures greenhouse gas emissions at farm level, independently verified by Carbon Trust; why Scope 3 emissions represent around 80% of most food companies' carbon footprint, and what that means for ingredient suppliers; the role of satellite polygon mapping, drone technology, and agronomic science in building a data graph without connected machinery; the EU deforestation directive and what compliance actually requires; and how AI could compress the sustainability reporting cycle and sharpen the signal-to-noise ratio in natural ingredient data.

Defne also makes the case for democratising sustainability data — making it affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized food companies, not just those with the scale to bear the compliance cost.

This episode follows directly from last week's conversation with Professor Venkat Venkatraman on Fusion Strategy and industrial AI. Together they form a two-part picture of what it looks like to design intelligence into a business model rather than paint it on top.

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Transcript

From AI Hype To Farms

Defne Saral 0:00

And uh the biggest is actually the farming of the product. Moving it is is less than 10% of its total impact. So it's more about doing something where we are, farming the products. That's the most important.

Mark Blackwell 0:16

Hello, welcome to the Arkaro Insights podcast. I'm your host, Mark Blackwell, and this is the show where we help busy B2B executives thrive in a complex adaptive world. So last week on the show, we had Professor Venkat Venkatraman and uh talking about his book Fusion Strategy. And he was giving us this concept that if you're treating data as some sort of fairy dust or digital paint, as you think about what to do with AI, your business is going to be in trouble. You need to be thinking about transforming the way your business model operates fundamentally and let an AI enable that to be head in the game. And he spoke about companies like John Deere, who've moved from being a manufacturer of tractors to being control of data on the farm to help farmers grow more property. So that's fine if you're in the Midwest and you've got a grid and you can control the data. But what if your assets aren't connected machines? What if your network consists of thousands of independent smallholder farmers in West Africa who are independent? They're not part of your organization, they're free to do what they want. How do you bring them into your system to orchestrate where you can control two million hectares of land under regenerative agriculture? Well, that's the answer we're going to discuss today because we have as our guest the senior vice president of sales at OFI, Daphne Surrell. Welcome to the show.

Defne Saral 1:55

It's wonderful to be on it. Thanks so much for having me, Mark. And I love how you talk about data and people. We always talk about people first, but they're so seamlessly connected. Yeah.

Mark Blackwell 2:04

Thanks. Well, it what you've got is a great story. As I was doing the podcast last week with the Venkat, I got even more excited about catching up here with you again after all of these years. Because I know you've got a deep passion for bringing sustainability to people and really making people understand what are the major drivers to make it work so that we can source our chocolate and other things sustainably.

Defne Saral 2:29

Yeah, absolutely. As you know, my background is uh in engineering, right? So we measure everything and want to be able to have flow charts for everything. And I learned a long time ago that if you want to improve the environment, you better have the data that goes with it. So economy and ecology go hand in hand. So happy to have this time with you and and uh happy to answer your questions.

Mark Blackwell 2:48

Well, I guess one of the things that I'm always a bit nervous about when I go to the supermarket for the weekly shop is the idea of food miles. Because, you know, I'm fortunate enough to live in France where we've got a lot of local produce that's supplied. And I've had it sort of belief that it's wrong to import foods from far, far away

Food Miles Myth And Real Impacts

Mark Blackwell 3:10

for some reason. Does that make real sense?

Defne Saral 3:13

So unfortunately, that's not the primary driver. You know, a lot of people think I shouldn't get product that is out of season from another continent. And if my supermarket is bringing it in, should I be buying it? But actually, transportation and freight is not the biggest environmental impact. Most people talk about environmental impact for climate as scope one, two, and three emissions. And the biggest is actually the farming of the product. Moving it is is less than 10% of its total impact. So it's more about doing something where we are, forming the products that's the most important.

Mark Blackwell 3:49

Well, I do work for a mining company from time to time, and that's exactly the same dynamic. Extracting material is the major part of the work. The shipping is less than 10%. So that's uh that's funny how that correlates with that. Bencat talked about this trap of AI fairy dust or digital paint, if just, you know, taking your existing business model and putting it on top and thinking that you solved your problem. But when you guys thought about your choices for change strategy, how did you think about what you needed to do differently? Maybe where were you? Where did you want to get you, and how you're how are you on that journey?

Defne Saral 4:31

Yeah, yeah. And choices for change is the name of the company's sustainability impact strategy, right? And we are focused on four areas within it. And maybe give you a bit of definition. Prosperous farmers is one of the areas for impact. And this is about ensuring living income, improving work choices, creating opportunities for women in farming communities. The second dimension is thriving communities, and this is about protecting human rights, children's rights, and also focusing on nutrition and health. So I call those two the blue. And in fact, they are colored blue in our strategy, and they're the human dimension of sustainability. And the other two are uh climate action. So we want to get to net zero by 2050, like many other big companies. And then we also are working on regenerating the living world. We talk about being forest positive, regenerative landscapes with regenerative farming. So those are the green objectives that we have. Choices for change is relatively young as a sustainability strategy. And I'm really pleased that last week we published our first impact report. So we made a strategy and goals till 2030, but

Choices For Change Strategy Explained

Defne Saral 5:35

then we have to measure every year where we're going. And so we just published our 2025 impact report. And you can see which KPIs we're ahead of, where we're behind, what's going on in a great amount of detail. But choices for change is a company strategy that is underpinned by product strategies. And if we talk about our cocoa business, Cocoa Compass, I think the first impact report came out in 2019. So actually many, many years ago, and we have those annual reports coming out. So each product has different challenges that it's facing. So the cocoa industry is different than the coffee industry, the nuts, the spices, and the dairy industry. And each of them has their own product strategy that then works together with choices for change to make it to 2030. So it's exciting stuff, and there's a lot of measurement that goes on.

Mark Blackwell 6:22

Well, can you give us some headline figures on the impact that you guys have already had?

Defne Saral 6:27

So if we look at, you know, what is our 2025 choices for impact report? And I'm just gonna pull it up because you know, it's always better to talk about what it is you're seeing. And the contents of it, you know, it begins with our CEO talking about our year in review, what impact we made. And you need to be aware, 2025 was a crazy year for both coffee and cocoa products. Commodities exchanges for those went berserk for a variety of reasons. There was fungus issues, climate change issues. So pricing went crazy. To be able to continue to have done this work while that was happening is really something that I'm very proud of that we were able to do. So let's get into some numbers. So, first of all, if you're doing anything with climate, it's really important that your climate figures are what we call SBTI verified, right? And so our science-based targets were verified externally by SBTI. So that's one of the dimensions. And having them validated is clear. The other thing we're doing is renewable energy use. We want to make sure that we surpassed 40% of total energy in our first level operations. We actually hit 41. So I'm really excited about that. We talk about 15 million beneficial trees. We wanted those to be distributed by 25 and we actually hit 16.9 million trees. So that's wonderful. And then we talk about living landscape partnerships. We wanted 10 to be established and we hit that number. Another big area in cocoa and coffee, particularly if we live in Europe, is we're expecting a directive on deforestation mitigation to come out. It's actually been delayed a couple of years. We're ready for it as one of the suppliers. And so we know that we were at 100% place with our deforestation mitigation actions and our high-risk supply chains. What else? We're establishing frameworks, transparent monitoring. You can read all of this.

Mark Blackwell 8:16

So I so I guess you know, that going the scope one, two versus scope three story that you were alluding to before, right? So I'm imagining you can show that the carbon emissions from shipping cocoa from West Africa to Holland or Western Europe is X. But the carbon savings that you get by planting the trees is Y, and Y is as much big a number. Can you talk to that in any way at all?

Defne Saral 8:44

So we have major programs in place with uh some of the big chocolate companies, right? So uh again, it's public that you would see that we're doing seedling and tree planting. But let's go back a step. Uh, when you want to care about your climate impact or greenhouse gas emissions impact, you first have to take a snapshot and say, well, what's my baseline? And most companies have said, oh, my baseline is 2018 or 2019 or 2020 operations. And they've gone through the process of like collecting all the data and saying, okay, this is the baseline, and then I have to reduce 10%, 20%, 30%, and get to net zero by 2050. So we enable a lot of food companies, they know what their tier one and uh scope one and scope two operations are. You know, that's their own transport, that's their own factories, their own distribution to retail. But most people's scope three emissions is about 88%. And it's necessary.

Mark Blackwell 9:34

Absolutely.

Defne Saral 9:36

And so, and it's all about the food ingredients where they're farmed. And so we go back and we say, yeah, that's also our scope three emissions as well. We all have the same. So when we're looking at that, we have used our proprietary system. We have something called at source, and it's based on a farming information system. We measure fertilizer, we measure a lot of inputs, we measure transportation, and we're able to give a uh greenhouse gas emissions level. And then if we work with a customer on a program, because we say we want to mitigate, we want to reduce, we can do all sorts of things like shade trees, changing the fertilizer types, the pesticide types, planting at different times. We've got agronomists. There's a lot of work that they can do, but it's not free. And measurable over multiple years to make sure that it's credible. So I'm very proud that our calculator has been verified by carbon test.

Mark Blackwell 10:29

So I guess the problem is data collection, because this is not John Deere sitting on a tractor with computers on a tractor. You're on a very different situation with smallholder farmers in Africa. How do you collect the data?

KPIs That Make Sustainability Credible

Defne Saral 10:45

So one of the unique features of OFI is we've got colleagues all around the world and these origin countries. So to give you some background, 70% of the world's cocoa comes from Africa. And most of it comes from Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and Nigeria. So that's a huge concentration. So it's not that I'm just sitting here in the Netherlands receiving the cocoa. I've got colleagues in all of those countries who are living there full-time, working with farmers full-time. Uh, we have heads of sustainability groups, training groups, agronomy teams. So when I say that they're collecting the data, is they're doing it sometimes with handheld devices, paper, you know, iPads, platforms, um, collecting it on regular cycles based on the season, based on the growing time. So there's a lot of information coming through our tool. Absolutely.

Mark Blackwell 11:32

So that's what Venkat would call a data graph. So how can you see this evolving in the future? Do you got any dreams where it might my this data collection might go?

Defne Saral 11:42

Well, so one of the challenges is it takes time to collect this information, and we put out our impact reports often a year or more after the year is closed, right? Because it has taken much time to pull it together, consolidate it, push it through. I really hope that AI helps us to speed up the analysis of it. Yeah. That would be one area. The other is, you know, we still want to be collecting the information in a way that's credible. That's part of our proprietary work. We, you know, count pods, we talk to farmers, uh, we work on programs. But it's also when you're working with natural ingredients, there's a lot of variation. You know, if the rains hit two weeks later, then sooner, you're gonna have a different carbon impact. And we go take that into account year on year. So when we make promises to our customers about reducing their carbon footprint, it can't just be for one cycle or one season. We have to be thinking three to five years. And we have to be aggregating the data and saying, yes, over three to five years we have made that impact. That's also really important.

Mark Blackwell 12:41

Yeah, indeed, that's what I was touching on with then cat is getting using AI to get the signal-to-noise ratio out, and so that you can be more c more confident of what you're doing through the analytics. So very much an opportunity for the way to go forward. So that's on the the first mile. What about the last mile? How do your customers, how have they received this, what you've done, been doing?

Defne Saral 13:06

Well, for most of our large customers, it's part and parcel of how they buy from us, right? So let me give you back into the value chain. That's what I thought.

Mark Blackwell 13:14

Yeah.

Defne Saral 13:14

So it's coming from West Africa, it could also come from Central America. But I'm in the Netherlands, where a lot of the world's cocoa comes to particular warehouses. It's graded, it's put into bags, and it goes to our factory. From the factory, we make things like cocoa powders and butters and liquores. Those are all the primary ingredients for the chocolate industry. From here, we ship it out to our customers' factories, and they're the ones making chocolates. So that's where we end, you know, and that's one of the differences between us and some of the other companies is we're cocoa cooked. So then what do they do? They want the information as well to be able to, if you spin the back of any chocolate bar,

Measuring Scope Three At Source

Defne Saral 13:50

you're going to see something like a cocoa plant. Nestle has one, Mondelez has one, Lint has one. Any major chocolate company on the back of their label would write out how they're doing it. And they call it usually sustainably procured cocoa. So they want a lot of data and information to make sure that that's true. And that's our job to be able to provide to them.

Mark Blackwell 14:11

And do you see that demand for data going even further than the Mondelises and Nestle's and Mars of this world? What about the supermarkets? What about the consumers? How do you see yourself fitting into the whole chain?

Defne Saral 14:24

Yes. So we get a lot of questions. Uh in Germany since 2023, there's something called the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act. So if you're in Germany, you have to be able to prove where products come from. You have to have a consumer helpline available and people can question you. So we work with a lot of retailers based in Germany. And we will get questions from them from time to time. This coffee came from this place. Was it sustainably procured? Was there a living income generated for the farmers? And we have to be able to answer those questions quickly. I hope that the German model becomes a EU directive, but we're seeing the EU Green Deal keeps getting slowed down and slowed down. I'm hoping that the EU deforestation directive, right, comes into effect December of this year. And that's also going to require everybody along the chain to be able to prove that the cocoa that they're using in their food products has not contributed to deforestation.

Mark Blackwell 15:21

So you've mentioned the EU a lot. Are you seeing any signs of other markets in the world seeing value for the sustainability data?

Defne Saral 15:31

So many of our customers are US headquartered and they continue to honor their commitments. Many of those companies have published, you know, what we call ESG goals. Yeah. And you're honoring them a little more quietly than they were maybe in previous years. When you're working with an administration that doesn't allow a lot of that conversation, they have turned their conversation to more governance, compliance, you know, kinds of wording, but they haven't changed their goals, which is lovely to see.

Mark Blackwell 15:59

So where do you see the future of this going and of the work that you've established? Do you have more ambition?

Defne Saral 16:07

Well, first, you know, how is the food industry going to get to net zero? Right. That's a I mean, 2050 sounded like a long time away when this goal was first set, but it's now less than 25 years. And if you look at, you know, overall climate change and the contribution of food and agriculture to it is significant. Right. So that's also one of the reasons. I mean, yes, people talk about transportation, energy for sure, but food and agriculture is a big contributor to climate. So if we can get to net zero for ourselves, for our major customers, and really get a majority of the population working that way, that would be a huge achievement. And the work is by far not done. I don't think we've invented the technologies to get us to net.

Mark Blackwell 16:49

But maybe AI can be the solution to that going forward or something like that. Do you see any other partnerships possibly? That's what Venkat was encouraging us to think of completely new ecosystems

Retailer Pressure And New Regulations

Mark Blackwell 17:00

and new relationships, new data collection partners to go going forward. Have you any thoughts on that?

Defne Saral 17:07

Well, for the deforestation directive, in order to comply to it, you know what you need is polygon maps. You actually need pictures of the forests and the areas that things are grown, and you need to be able to take the picture at regular intervals to be able to see how it was one year, the following year, and the next year. So I never would have guessed that my company needed to work with satellite providers, right, to get polygon maps in place. But it's one of the most critical and independent ways of finding out this information. So that's one example. We begin to see things like drone technology, right? So you can scan crops. You can either selectively fertilize or selectively use pesticide on a particular individual plant. That's also one of the new things is how do you get to individual tree pruning? How do you get to individual tree attention? It's not about giving everything the same amount, it's about being very selective in those. So technology has been really, really helpful.

Mark Blackwell 17:58

And so that you're talking a bit hinting of, I guess, what we haven't spoken about is regenerative agriculture and using ch technology to enable that with a minimum use of pesticides, if not zero, to and manage disease and using technology to identify which which trees have got disease and these treatments haven't, or weeds and the like. So that could be an exciting area in the future.

Defne Saral 18:19

Well, I'm lucky to work with some of our best agronomists on this area. And uh, we were at a major coffee customer, I'm not going to name them, and we were talking pruning at the right time of year. Because if we're expecting a super El Nino, right, that's some of the conversations coming up, is that there is an El Nino year ahead of us. There's going to be parts of the world where there's either too much rain or not enough at the wrong time. So in the areas where we expect it to be dry, if you prune the coffee tree in advance, you're going to create strength within it and it's going to need less water. But you get the timing critical. And in another area, it might be something completely different. So working with the farmers, with the growing regions and getting that information out there is going to be critical.

Mark Blackwell 19:02

And then this is a perfect example. It's just managing data along the whole supply chain, whole the value chain, so that ultimately the customer gets the coffee that they taste that they want, or the cocoa with the right regenerative agriculture background behind it, simply through the work that you're doing. Definitely, this is fabulous. I'm impressed, really impressed.

Defne Saral 19:22

It makes going to work fun every day and also very rewarding and purposeful. Yep.

Mark Blackwell 19:27

Exactly. So you have built something step by step, which is this marvelous network, and I can feel the energy about where you want to take it going forwards. Customer demands permitting, legislation enabling, and technology enabling. But there might be some other people who are just beginning to think about this journey and listening to this podcast, a little bit inspired but also nervous. What would you say?

Defne Saral 19:54

You know, my job is to work with very large food companies and food retailers, right? So these are people who have their own sustainability people on staff. But what if you're a mid-sized company, right? What if you're working on an interesting food formulation? I mean, we're beginning to see small startup companies where they're really nailing it, right? There was somebody who would come up with a meal replacement product and there's a group of 10 people. They don't have whether it's the resources or the money to be able to have sustainability people checking everything for them. So one of the elements is, you know, how do you make sustainability affordable and available for all? So when we have food ingredients, we want to make sure people have that info. And I would say that I'm not telling you

Satellites Drones And Smarter Consumer Choices

Defne Saral 20:35

only buy from large companies. You know, let's make sure the small and medium sites are also becoming more sustainable.

Mark Blackwell 20:42

But you see that be possible, enabled by technology, enabled by the path that you've created, creating the playbook?

Defne Saral 20:48

If the information is more democratized, right? Then people can see the choices that they're making. Uh we have a dairy business and we're able to look at uh dairy meat are usually one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. So if you know that you're buying dairy from a farm and a group of people that care about mitigating, and they could be doing all sorts of things, you know, it could be feeding the cows pellets so that they fart less, right? It could be using all lots of different technologies. Then you know what your emission is and you're able to calculate it. I knew someone who wanted to work on apps for retailers. So let's say you and I are going grocery shopping and you're picking up all the different groceries that you're buying. Don't you want to know your carbon footprint? And then don't you want to know alternatives that you can buy instead that would reduce your footprint? If you make it more of a game, people will participate.

Mark Blackwell 21:35

Absolutely. I mean, we've already got games which you can use on your phone, which tells you the source of origin for a country. And that's echoing an earlier conversation we we we had. But yeah, it'd be fun to do to get that information to give you that point of reference. You've already got these Amazon stores where you walk in, pick up what you want, and walk out without touching anything. But you could even imagine just glasses in front of you telling you what is your carbon footprint as a result of your choices.

Defne Saral 22:01

Each week you want, you might want to make different choices, right? And nutrition is one of the choices people make, taste and deliciousness is another choice that they make, and sustainability is another choice they make. And we know ourselves, we're not always making the same choice. But wouldn't it be great to have, you know, this is the week I'm going to be very sustainable in my choices. This is the week that I'm going to be very nutritious in my choices. And this is the week that I'm going to give myself a little bit more of indulgence and me products because, you know, I feel like I need it. So being able to balance between those three would be wonderful.

Mark Blackwell 22:30

Well, well done, definitely. Thank you so much. Uh, I think you made us all feel a little bit better as a result of that and to potentially be even better in our choices going forward in our weekly trip to the supermarket. Well done for all the work you've been creating. It's inspiring. Thank you so much.

Defne Saral 22:45

It's a pleasure. Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark Blackwell 22:47

Lovely to see you again. And uh thank you for being on the podcast. Goodbye.

Defne Saral 22:51

Fantastic.

Mark Blackwell 22:52

Cheers then. Bye bye, bye bye.