Engaging Organic Valley’s supply chain to improve environmental performance

Organic Valley has deep roots in finding more sustainable ways to produce organic dairy products, soy milk, produce, and healthy snacks. The cooperative saw an opportunity to build on that legacy by reaching across its supply chain and encouraging continuous improvement in environmental and social performance.

Organic Valley aimed to engage its network of contract processors, milk haulers, and over 2,000 family farmers producing milk, meat, produce, and other crops to improve supply chain connectivity, collect sustainability data for customers and to drive continuous improvement efforts. Pure Strategies supported this aim by helping Organic Valley define the program direction and create surveys that serve as the foundation for the initiative.

Engaging with suppliers

Organic Valley manufactures some of its products in owned facilities and collects detailed information about environmental performance. However, external partners process most of Organic Valley’s products and milk haulers connect the farm to the processing plants, making up critical components of the organization’s infrastructure.  However, the cooperative lacked in-depth insight on environmental performance at this level in their supply chain. 

Pure Strategies helped Organic Valley develop a program to understand the starting point for this part of their supply chain’s sustainability performance and to guide improvement. This included determining focus areas for engaging co-manufacturers and milk haulers and building a set of survey questions to collect data, identify best practices, and drive improvements for energy/fuels, water, waste, and packaging, including detailed energy information.

A key focus was creating questions and responses that align with Organic Valley’s customer requests and the company’s own program needs, while providing enough information to identify improvement opportunities, including a clearer view of the carbon footprint of their products. Our team then helped the cooperative select a right-sized survey tool for the program and implemented the survey.

For the first time, Organic Valley has a full view to the environmental impact of its product processing and can drive greater greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, waste, and water use reductions.

Reaching the farm

The cooperative members are the heart of Organic Valley and, as with most food companies, these producers are also a key source of environmental impacts and improvement opportunities. As a result, the implementation of the organization’s sustainability mission “to reach a fully sustainable operation, from our farms to our offices, and through every step of our supply chain” emphasizes farm-level environmental and social improvement.

Pure Strategies helped shape a program to engage the cooperatives’ farmers in sustainability. The first step involved identifying and prioritizing topics that would provide the most value to the cooperative and its members.  A critical piece was including Organic Valley’s stakeholders, including many member producers, throughout the process. 

We developed a survey aligned with industry best practices and customer expectations, while also pushing for leadership-level performance in key priorities for the cooperative such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy, water, soil health, animal welfare, and farm wellbeing.  The survey embedded learning opportunities through the process of answering the questions, while also supporting information collection needs for answering customer requests and driving improvement.

Pure Strategies then worked with stakeholders to identify ways to encourage participation in the program and helped design the overall program, determining if payment for participation would be needed and what grants, training, and support programs would help the success of the effort. 

Through this combination of supply chain engagement efforts, Organic Valley has improved information to better communicate progress, deepen relationships, and continue its quest to make its products more sustainably.