FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Santa Cruz, 4/27/2020: Following last April’s news of their partnership and initiative to develop an on-line sustainability management tool, today, 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.”
SupplyShift and SISC are now accepting registrants for the SISC Stewardship Calculator. Growers and aggregators can learn more and sign up here.
SISC is a multi-stakeholder initiative with growers, grower groups, brands, buyers and NGOs dedicated to developing tools for measuring on farm stewardship performance across the specialty crop supply chain. SISC offers a suite of outcome-focused metrics enabling operators to benchmark, compare, and communicate their sustainability performance.
www.stewardshipindex.org
SupplyShift provides a comprehensive platform to seamlessly gather and analyze supplier networks, connecting companies to de-risk and improve supply chains. SupplyShift’s cloud-based platform allows for reliable data management and performance measurement, secure traceability for supply chain transparency, and improved collaboration throughout the entire supply chain. The platform is built with the belief that, when properly managed, a company’s supplier network can deliver incredible value for the company, the greater economy, and can play an important role in changing our world for the better. The SupplyShift platform makes it seamless to gain the insight needed to create a more responsive, responsible supplier network that makes the entire supply chain more productive.
www.supplyshift.net
Alison Edwards, SISC Director
aedwards@stewardshipindex.org
Matt Gottron, Marketing Manager
mgottron@supplyshift.net
