Food Safety & Quality

As well as helping smallholder farmers to improve their yields we advise on quality and reducing post-harvest losses. This is critical because good quality means they can command a premium, whilst preventing wastage means they improve their incomes. In addition to training farmers in Good Agricultural Practices, we invest in farmer resource centres, warehouses, drying floors to prevent soil contamination and solar dryers.

Smallholders live in some of the most remote parts of the world where often roads are nothing more than dirt tracks. Collecting a sack of cocoa or coffee from every farmer is highly inefficient. We therefore work with farmers to help them form groups or cooperatives where they bring their crop to a central warehouse. Here the crop is weighed and stamped, ready for collection by Olam. This is supported by numerous advances in technology.

On our own plantations, and with our large-scale farmers, we develop biodiversity action plans to maintain and monitor the environmental balance between pests and a healthy crop. Products are routinely tested for residues to ensure food safety standards are met. Through our sustainabiliy programmes and our Supplier Code, we educate smallholders on the same factors. We are also strong advocates of maximising the methods supplied by nature to help reduce pesticide use – Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

The University of California, Davis, describes IPM as focusing “on long-term prevention of pests or their damage by managing the ecosystem. With IPM, you take actions to keep pests from becoming a problem, such as by growing a healthy crop that can withstand pest attacks, using disease-resistant plants, or caulking cracks to keep insects or rodents from entering a building. Rather than simply eliminating the pests you see right now, using IPM means you’ll look at environmental factors that affect the pest and its ability to thrive. Armed with this information, you can create conditions that are unfavourable for the pest.”