Olam Food Ingredients is using satellite tools, geospatial intelligence and AI data-crunching to monitor deforestation, while keeping field staff close to farmers to gather on-the-ground information. The company’s own sustainability chief says the whole setup exists to prove its environmental claims to regulators and customers. That’s the machinery of compliance, built to watch the people at the bottom while the buyers and bosses keep the paperwork clean.
Who Gets Watched
Roel van Poppel, chief sustainability officer of Olam Food Ingredients, said the company’s approach depends on having systems in place to prove its environmental claims and to support broader farming goals, not just forest monitoring. The Singapore-based agribusiness supplies cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts and spices, and has set a target of becoming “forest positive” by 2030. Van Poppel said that goal is “much more stringent than deforestation-free” because it commits the company to reverse forest loss, not just curb it.
According to the company’s Choices for Change Impact Report 2025, ofi has planted 16.9 million “beneficial trees” in and around its suppliers’ farms, exceeding its target by nearly 2 million trees. The numbers sound grand. The structure underneath is simpler: a global supplier, a compliance regime, and a chain of farmers whose land and labor get folded into corporate sustainability branding.
Van Poppel said regulators are increasingly interested too. Under the EU Deforestation Regulation, which comes into force at the end of 2026, large companies need to issue verifiable due diligence statements confirming the steps taken to identify and mitigate deforestation risks. As part of compliance documentation, companies must provide perimeter maps for plots larger than four hectares, with coordinates to at least six decimal places. Precision for the file. Surveillance for the field.
What the System Demands
Ofi works directly with farmers to establish the physical limits of their land using in-field polygon mapping, then monitors forest cover within those plots using satellite tools such as Google Earth Engine and Global Forest Watch. Van Poppel said, “By the end of this year, we will be able to give our customers all relevant geolocation data, documentation, traceability, so that they can fulfil their (EUDR) application.” The customers get the documents. The farmers get mapped.
He said the company’s focus is not only on deforestation but also on the long-term existence of its key supply chains and on improving the productivity of its 2.75 million farmer suppliers, whose livelihoods are, by the company’s own admission, “increasingly strained by market volatility and climate impacts”. Equipped with data on soil growth, crop species, yield volumes and farm dependents, ofi’s agronomists can offer advice on farm inputs, planting practices and other interventions. The language is gentle. The power imbalance isn’t.
Ofi said it has a suite of on-farm data collection tools that, together with its polygon mapping results, feed into centralized databases to provide a more holistic picture of its supply chains. Van Poppel said the company’s digital systems have made monitoring less time-intensive, with manual compliance needs dropping by over 70% since it digitized its deforestation monitoring processes, while the accuracy and reliability of its forest data have improved considerably.
He also said the system still has limits. Management oversight remains high, and each of the roughly 730,000 farms ofi has mapped typically takes a couple of hours to physically survey, plus several hours of travel there and back. Satellite systems are not perfect either, and false positives are relatively frequent, leading to on-the-ground follow-ups that add time and costs. The burden lands where it always does: in the field, on the people being measured.
The Digital Fix, and Its Limits
Van Poppel said technological advances should reduce those inefficiencies over time. He said there has been “a massive proliferation of companies offering services, and the maps are getting better and better, so you can get more insights out of the data.” He is also optimistic about artificial intelligence and said ofi has a tie-in with Google, which takes anonymized geolocation data from ofi’s coffee supply chain and uses machine learning to improve predictive modeling on sustainability issues, including deforestation.
AI, he said, can help analyze information when data is spread across multiple unconnected datasets, offering a “short-term opportunity” to companies that have not yet harmonized their information systems. But he warned that AI cannot manage anti-deforestation work alone and said regulators under the EU Deforestation Regulation would not accept AI-only results. With AI, he said, “you have to continue to verify and sense-check that all the time.” So even the machine needs a human checkpoint. The apparatus still wants a hand on the wheel.
Van Poppel said companies should first get farmers onside because nothing beats the insights gathered by having a “shared proximity” between field staff and farmers. He also said companies should avoid developing exclusive data systems for deforestation because that misses opportunities to source data that can also improve wider sustainable farming practices. Ofi has developed a comprehensive Farmer Information System that issues farmers electronic devices to collect data on a range of subjects, not just forest cover.
The system also allows ofi to provide customers with farm-level data they need to meet regulatory and other sustainability objectives through its AtSource platform, which it launched in 2018. In 2021, van Poppel made the case internally for an industry-wide tool to collect and share supplier-related data on sustainability topics. That led to TRACT, a standalone “one-stop platform” founded by ofi with Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, which last year raised 18.6 million euros in Series A funding. Van Poppel headed up the venture until stepping into his current CSO role two years ago and remains a TRACT board member.
Ofi said its deforestation data work is still far from complete. Its AI deployment is in its relative infancy, its mapping process has not yet covered many farms smaller than four hectares or those in low-risk regions, and work remains on finalizing a volume traceability system to determine the percentage of compliant versus non-compliant materials in mixed supply chains under official EU Deforestation Regulation guidance. Van Poppel said he would welcome more countries following the EU in developing comprehensive deforestation-free requirements, but warned that a lack of standardization would lead to data chaos. “If legislation or regulations that come into play can help create a common language and a level playing field, we would be massively supportive,” he said.