Ingredion aims to make the world a better place for all using powerful sustainability data

A passion for sustainability

For Eric Aaviku, Senior Manager of Environment and Climate for Ingredion, sustainability is more than just a focus of his work, it’s a personal passion. “I have two kids, and I want to be a role model for them,” he says. “We’ll be passing their generation the keys to the world in a few years, and I want to leave them in a good situation. We have finite resources on this planet, and we need to make the most of everything.”

Aaviku’s colleague Brian Nash, Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at Ingredion, shares that passionate desire to provide his children—and the rest of the world’s population—with a healthy and sustainable future. That goal is tied to the company’s continued health as well.

“At a very basic level, sustainability means doing business today in a way that doesn’t inhibit our ability to do business in the future,” says Nash. “For example, 95 percent of our global sourcing is corn as a raw material for our products. If we didn’t look at soil health and sustainable agriculture, we could easily be destroying the farmland our growers depend on. That directly impacts the viability of our business.”

Ingredion provides an extensive portfolio of plant-based ingredients to companies that create products ranging from food and beverages to paper and pharmaceuticals. The company has a longstanding commitment to sustainability, and it is pursuing aggressive sustainability goals as part of its All Life 2030 plan. The plan takes a broad approach to sustainability across 13 areas, including industrial safety, human rights, environmental impact, biodiversity, and sustainable agriculture. Environmental targets include a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a 100 percent avoidance of landfill waste, and a commitment to draw 50 percent of purchased electricity from renewable sources.

A robust tool for gathering and analyzing sustainability data

To track and analyze both its current sustainability profile and progress toward its 2030 goals, Ingredion built a collection of databases that are centralized but not standardized. The company has approximately 70 global facilities and offices, each with its own process for data collection and entry, all heavily reliant on manual effort. This is not only time consuming, but it also presents opportunities for human error.

“We’ve had instances where the emissions at a particular facility have suddenly appeared to increase tenfold, but it turned out someone just accidentally put a decimal point in the wrong place,” explains Nash. “We really wanted a solution that would help us standardize and automate data collection and provide better, faster capabilities for manipulating and analyzing that data.”

Ingredion is meeting those needs with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, which brings together a set of environmental, social, and governance capabilities from across the Microsoft cloud portfolio and extends them with solutions from the global ecosystem of Microsoft partners. Available tools include Microsoft Sustainability Manager to centralize emissions-related data and help streamline data ingestion, sharing, and reporting.

“In the sustainability space, data is critically important to decision making,” says Larry Fernandes, Senior Vice President, Chief Commercial and Sustainability Officer at Ingredion. “We need to be able to gather the right data, manipulate it, move it into different formats, and cross-reference it on demand because there are so many ways that people want us to report that data. What’s most exciting about Cloud for Sustainability is the power it gives us over our data.”

For its first venture into Sustainability Manager, Ingredion loaded in data from its operations in the United States to look at decisions the company made based on past sustainability metrics for scope 1 and 2 emissions. The aim was to determine whether the analytics from Sustainability Manager might have led to a different outcome. “One of the things that impressed me right away is how quickly we get helpful information out of Cloud for Sustainability,” says Nash. “That has a lot of value for us, and it could have led to different decisions being made in the past, or to decisions being made much sooner. Moving forward, Cloud for Sustainability will help us develop better strategies, quickly spot areas for improvement, act on them, and evaluate the results against our sustainability targets.”

A journey that benefits everyone

While Ingredion expands its use of Cloud for Sustainability, Aaviku looks forward to the way it will accelerate and streamline data collection by connecting directly to information sources like utility providers and IoT sensors. “Cloud for Sustainability will help facilitate those connections and improve reporting accuracy,” he says. “And once the connections are made, they can update automatically, with built-in governance, so we don’t need to constantly vet the quality and accuracy of the data.”

As the data becomes more accurate and available, Aaviku believes Ingredion will realize direct benefits for its own operations, and the company can pass on those benefits to its customers and suppliers, boosting sustainability across the entire value chain. “More and more of our customers are asking for information about product sustainability because their customers are asking them,” says Aaviku. “An essential part of our sustainability efforts is collaboration, so we’re excited to be able to share our advances.”

Nash agrees that collaboration is key, and he sees Microsoft playing a valuable role for Ingredion and its stakeholders. “Our All Life 2030 plan is just part of a longer journey,” he says. “It’s important that we all have the same destination in mind. When we can travel the road to sustainability together with a valuable collaborator like Microsoft, which has similar ambitions and values, it makes the journey much better.”

Ultimately, that shared journey will benefit everyone involved, and the planet as well. “We want to help our customers’ brands grow so that we can grow along with them—it’s about mutual value creation,” says Fernandes. “We’re not going to solve these challenges alone. By working with Microsoft and Cloud for Sustainability, we’re well positioned to improve our business in innovative ways that positively impact the world for decades to come.”

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