Mondra launches AI assistant Sherpa: Powering the food industry towards a net zero food system

LONDON, 23rd October 2024 - Product footprinting and supply chain decarbonization platform, Mondra, today announces the launch of Sherpa, a transformative AI-powered assistant, integrated into the Mondra platform, which revolutionizes sustainability data management in the food supply chain.

The biggest challenge food companies face in getting to net zero is measuring and managing Scope 3 emissions (those that occur in the supply chain). The Mondra platform enables this by automating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at scale, previously an impossible task, allowing food retailers to comprehend the environmental impacts of every product they sell.  Operating on secure Microsoft Azure servers, Sherpa leverages the best in class GPT-4o model to augment Mondra’s existing capabilities through a Chatbot interface, allowing users to query and analyze their own data in the Mondra platform. 

With its seamless integration into the Mondra platform, ability to analyze complex datasets on product ingredients and emissions, and advanced data retrieval capabilities, Sherpa is transformative for the industry in getting to net zero. It enables users to pinpoint high-impact areas, optimise resource usage, and model potential outcomes.  For example, it can list products with the best environmental performance or identify ingredients with the highest emissions. It can also run “what-if” scenarios to explore how changes in ingredient usage might affect their overall environmental impact, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions, reducing their environmental impact and improving operational efficiency.

Category teams can use this insight to collaborate with suppliers on performance improvement, accelerating reduction of Scope 3 emissions, reducing business risk in an ever-regulated market, and enabling competitive advantage. 

The Mondra platform is already used by 85% of UK grocery retail, suppliers and manufacturers. And together with NGO’s, Government and the British Retail Consortium, are all working collaboratively to see the establishment of a unified standard for measuring product level performance and farm data to ensure the most accurate and comparable data is collected in the most efficient way.   

Marco De Sanctis, Chief Technical Officer, Mondra comments: “The overlay of Sherpa onto the Mondra platform is game-changing for the industry.  Its querying ability will empower businesses to make data-driven decisions, reducing their environmental impact and improving operational efficiency.”

Jason Barrett, Founder & CEO, Mondra, comments: “Mondra’s approach to collaborative decarbonisation is ground-breaking.  We are essentially giving retailers the platform and tools to support planet-positive category evolution, whilst de-risking their business and taking advantage of the commercial opportunity presented by the net zero economy.  As a result, they are accelerating Scope 3 emissions reduction and reducing environmental impact more broadly across their supply chains. Retailers onboard their suppliers to Mondra, enabling and empowering them to respond to the category targets and accelerating net zero progress.”