4/25/2019, Santa Cruz, CA: The Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (SISC) continues to develop opportunities to support food industry collaboration towards greater natural resource management and accelerate improvements in productivity, environmental quality, and human well-being. As we face a growing world population and limited natural resources, the entire agricultural supply chain must work together to do more with less.
To support those goals, today, The Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (SISC) announces a new partnership with SupplyShift to create an online Stewardship metric calculator tool.
SupplyShift is a leading supplier management, responsible sourcing and supplier engagement technology platform. The SISC calculator will be available for the first time ever as a digital tool to measure on-farm sustainability metrics.
SISC is a coalition of growers, grower groups, buyers, and environmental NGO’s who collaborate to develop and maintain metrics that all parties agree are the most important indicators of stewardship.
“SISC’s objectives are to advance both optimal production and strong environmental protection by offering a suite of science-based, data driven metrics,” states SISC Director Alison Edwards. “After an evaluation of multiple technology providers, SISC chose SupplyShift as our technology partner because of their proven solution for collecting sustainability data at all levels of the supply chain right down to the farm level.”
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. By developing, refining, and promoting farmer-tested management tools that anyone can use to measure performance, SISC is aligned with many other initiatives globally in advocating for measuring specific outcomes rather than endorsing the use of less accountable ‘checklists of practices’ that many businesses have been asked to use.
“We are honored to have been chosen by SISC to support their mission,” added Jamie Barsimantov, Co-founder and COO of SupplyShift. “We fully support their approach to measure outcomes with specific metrics as implemented in their calculator. Their multi-stakeholder expertise combined with our sustainability technology platform will directly empower farmers and their industry partners to better assess and improve sustainability performance.”
The SupplyShift solution provides for streamlined data collection and ease of data sharing across all supply chain nodes. SupplyShift technology collects, analyzes, aggregates and reports data up and down the supply chain for all food industry partners. The SISC calculator will be available at no cost for growers to create a baseline of their stewardship and track continual improvement as they enact management changes. Aggregators, retailers, brands, and industry groups can also use the SISC calculator to baseline and help improve the on-farm sustainability practices of their suppliers.
“The SISC calculator on SupplyShift will give growers 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. “We had evaluated other sustainability solutions and found SupplyShift to be the most compelling solution for SISC’s users’ needs.”
SupplyShift will be the central software provider offering the SISC calculator in an online system, with the ability for agricultural software tools to easily plug into the platform and provide input data to calculate the metrics. The SupplyShift platform will be used to securely and privately share data with grower groups, packer/shippers, distributors, brands, and retailers.
To learn more about the Digital SISC Calculator, click 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. For more information, go to www.stewardshipindex.org
SupplyShift’s cloud-based technology enables supplier performance measurement, secure traceability for supply chain transparency, and improved collaboration throughout the entire supply chain. SupplyShift’s technology platform efficiently gathers and analyzes supplier data, connecting companies to de-risk and improve supply chains. 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.
Alison Edwards, SISC Director – aedwards@stewardshipindex.org
Bob Young, VP of Commercial – byoung@supplyshift.net
