Member Spotlights
Member Spotlight: Kellogg Company
Kellogg Company strives every day to help ensure there is enough food for everyone. The company is fighting hunger and feeding the potential of people around the world. Importantly, this includes the advancement of farmers, who are critical to creating longer-term solutions to these challenges. Kellogg deeply cares about how its ingredients are grown and about the people who grow and consume them.
“It’s our task to make food people love. That’s more than food that tastes great. There’s interest from our consumers and stakeholders to know more about where their food comes from, who makes it, and how it comes from us to your bowl and table,” explained Amy Braun, Sustainability Director at Kellogg Company. “Sustainable agriculture initiatives are demonstrating what our farmers and Kellogg are doing to make sure we’re putting the right things in our food across the food journey and doing the right things for our communities.”
In 2014, Kellogg launched its Global Sustainability Commitments, which include responsible sourcing and natural resource conversation goals. The responsible sourcing commitments demonstrate the company’s dedication to sustainable agriculture. Kellogg aims to support 500,000 farmers through climate smart agriculture to improve livelihoods by 2025; help improve livelihoods for 15,000 smallholder farmers in regions where it sources, which was achieved four years ahead of schedule in 2016; identify and support women in the value chain; and responsibly source its priority agricultural ingredients by 2020.
Meeting these commitments requires extraordinary efforts by Kellogg, but also imperative is engagement and collective action with its employees, communities, suppliers and partners, including Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture.
“As we work to execute against our 2020 commitments, Field to Market is essential and engrained in how we conduct business on a global and local level,” said Amy. “We are really focused on understanding our impacts on agriculture. We’re integrating climate smart agriculture practices into our supply chain to help farmers maximize yields, equipping farms to be resilient to climate impacts, such as severe weather, and measuring greenhouse gas emissions so we can make improvements over time. Field to Market has experience in many of these areas, and their knowledge and tools assist us in connecting and guiding farmers toward sustainable practices.”
Amy Braun, pictured second from the right, middle, joins Field to Market's president and members for a White House roundtable on sustainable agriculture.
Kellogg uses Field to Market’s Fieldprint® Platform, which the company helped develop, to measure continuous improvement of agricultural practices in the places where its priority ingredients are grown in the United States. Having a science-based tool gives Kellogg the ability to partner with growers and the supply chain to evaluate sustainability performance, make ongoing improvements, and validate progress.
“Having a standardized metric facilitates our engagement with our supply chain. With the Fieldprint Platform, we’re all reading from same page on what constitutes improvement,” said Amy. “It also helps us align with our peers so we’re asking suppliers similar questions and reporting to our retailers in a similar way. It’s a really effective way of communicating what we’re trying to measure and improve.”
In 2015, Kellogg Company launched the Kellogg’s OriginsTM Great Lakes Wheat Program to track continuous improvement for key environmental sustainability indicators in Kellogg’s soft white winter wheat supply chain within the Saginaw Bay region of Michigan. That’s where they work with Mike Milligan, a 24-year old farmer, who is trying to advance his family’s sustainability legacy.
While conservation has long played a role in the Milligan’s farming practices, Mike wanted to do more. He joined the Kellogg’s Origins Great Lakes Wheat program and began using the Fieldprint® Platform, which enables him to track continuous improvement on sustainability indicators and monitor the efficiency of these practices. This program is just one of six Fieldprint Projects Kellogg has underway.
Amy Braun
Sustainability Director, Kellogg Company
“Field to Market isn’t about one specific outcome. It’s about driving transparency and sharing what’s happening in the supply chain and how we can influence environmental outcomes. Everyone in the food and agriculture industry needs to be involved.”
Amy Braun
Sustainability Director
Kellogg Company
