Q&A with Jason Barrett, CEO of Climate Tech Platform Mondra

In the grocery sector, there is an urgent need for sustainability in food supply chains — which contribute around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

As consumers and regulators increasingly demand greater sustainability, the industry faces a growing pressure to measure and manage its environmental impact effectively. 

By leveraging advanced technologies, businesses — and the industry at large — can better understand Scope 3 emissions and collaborate across the supply chain, driving meaningful progress toward net zero targets and fostering a more sustainable food system.

Jason Barrett is CEO of Mondra, a software platform that records, monitors and shares environmental data throughout the food supply chain.

The company works with 90% of the UK grocery sector, with brands, suppliers and grocery retailers such as Sainsbury’s, ASDA, Waitrose and Samworth Brothers among its collaborators.

In this Q&A with ClimateTech Digital, Jason explores how Mondra’s AI-powered platform is revolutionising sustainability in the food industry.

Q. Hi, Jason! Please introduce yourself and your role

My professional background is data and analytics. I spent 20 years building software companies that help organisations make better financial decisions using data. 

I was motivated to see how these data-driven techniques might be used to address the big societal challenges we face, and none greater than the climate crisis. 

With the food system accounting for more than 30% of that crisis, and with the sheer complexity of this topic, I knew that if it could be done in food, it could be done in any sector.

I came across a paper by Joseph Poore, a leading environmental scientist responsible for the Poore and Nemecek study, a landmark paper that harmonised hundreds of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies. 

Looking at the methodology of LCA and all that it promises in terms of granular insight to support environmental action, I was convinced that if you could automate LCA this would unlock multiple value propositions from better reporting, the ability to deliver competitive products downstream, reduce business risk in an ever-regulated market and potentially deliver robust and trustworthy environmental labelling for consumers. 

Four years on from launch in 2020, Mondra is the definitive category leader in UK grocery and we have delivered Mondra to market with and for the retailers who have guided its evolution. 

Q. In your own words, 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. 

Q. 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.

Q. 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. 

Q. 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. 

Q. 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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