Ingredion partners with HowGood to sustainably source 99 percent of crops by 2025

Ingredion Incorporated, a leading global provider of specialty ingredient solutions to the food and beverage manufacturing industry, has announced a new partnership with HowGood, a SaaS data platform with the world’s largest database on food and personal care product sustainability, to meet and surpass customer demands for sustainable ingredients.

This partnership will deliver data transparency on Ingredion’s top products and new product innovations which, along with Ingredion’s goals of having 99 percent of its global supply of crops sustainably sourced by 2025, will provide customers with sustainable solutions that consumers prefer.

“Our customers need holistic, sustainable ingredient solutions to meet consumer and regulatory demands for greater transparency,” says Brian Nash, vice president of corporate sustainability at Ingredion. “Partnering with HowGood provides third-party validation of the sustainability impact of our ingredients and enables our customers to confidently make informed decisions.”

By the end of 2022, the environmental and human impact of 50 Ingredion strategic growth platform ingredients will be made available to the industry via HowGood’s easy-to-read scorecard. HowGood measures eight sustainability attributes using globally accepted measurement methodologies: GHG emissions, processing, water usage, soil health, working conditions, labor risk exposure, biodiversity and animal welfare.

“The scorecards include a full-lifecycle carbon footprint, an overview of eligible sustainability claims customers could make and the holistic social and environmental impact assessment they need to make formulation decisions and meet disclosure requirements,” says Alexander Gillett, president of HowGood.

This tool is helping Ingredion meet the company’s target of aligning new product development with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to drive the sustainable innovation their customers and their consumers seek.

Additionally, the company is making progress toward its milestone of having 99 percent of all crops and 100 percent of the company’s Tier 1 crops (corn, tapioca, potato, stevia and pulses) sustainably sourced by 2025. Two recent product launches showcase how Ingredion’s innovation is helping to meet this goal:

• Next Generation Tapiocas: Following 10 years of agricultural innovation, Ingredion unveiled a type of tapioca starch that addresses extreme food manufacturing requirements and supports sustainability trends.
• Waxy Rice: In collaboration with the Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP), Ingredion was the first food ingredient company to enter the sustainably grown waxy rice space with rice starches and flours.

To drive environmental and social impact in its agriculture supply chain, the company uses the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform’s (SAI Platform) Farm Sustainability Assessment (FSA), which benchmarks performance against 90 global standards to identify the greatest needs of growers in specific geographic regions. With this data, Ingredion’s local agricultural teams develop programs with growers to drive continuous improvements in their operations. Recent examples of this work include regenerative agriculture practice partnerships, most piloted with PepsiCo last year in the Midwestern United States, drip-fed irrigation to improve water usage in Pakistan and the Yara fertilizer reduction project with Unilever in China. Additionally, Ingredion has committed to the Ceres-led WFF AgWater Challenge, putting one-third of the company’s global sourcing under regenerative agriculture practices by 2030.