Why Food Retail Needs Product-Level Digital Twins to Survive the Next Decade

The food retail sector is entering a period where traditional planning models simply cannot keep up. Climate volatility, regulatory pressure, supply chain fragility, and shifting consumer expectations are converging faster than businesses can respond. Most retailers are still working with partial visibility, and the truth is, the old tools were never designed for the world we’re now living in.

What we need is a new way of understanding supply chains: not as linear, siloed systems, but as dynamic, living networks. That requires intelligence at the product level, and that’s exactly where digital twins come in.

The value behind the digital twin

Today’s supply chains are too complex, too global, and too climate-exposed for static spreadsheets or manual LCAs to provide any real strategic value. Retailers need live intelligence that spans environmental impact, climate risk, operational continuity, and supplier performance, all tied back to individual products. A product-level digital twin changes everything.

With a digital twin, every product has a living model of its supply network.

Retailers gain:

• Visibility into real-time environmental impacts

• An understanding of supply chain bottlenecks and disruption risk

• Insights into climate-driven vulnerabilities across regions and commodities

• The realisation of financial implications of upstream shocks

• The instant ability to adapt category plans, procurement strategies, and supplier choices

Instead of reacting after disruptions hit, retailers can simulate, predict, and prepare for different scenarios, like a flood in Spain, a drought in Brazil or even a regulatory shift landing next quarter.

The digital twin shows how these events ripple across Tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers, and what actions protect margin, continuity, and carbon commitments.

This is the shift the industry needs: from static measurement to dynamic management.

Why this is now a strategic necessity

Retailers are already expected to report climate impact and ensure supply chain transparency. But, sustainability, risk, and commercial performance are no longer separate conversations. They’re the same thing.

• Carbon is now a cost of capital.

• Resilience is now a growth metric.

• Supply transparency is becoming a licensing requirement.

The winners of the next decade will be those who treat product-level intelligence as strategic infrastructure, not as a compliance overhead.

The role of Mondra

At Mondra, we’ve built the very first, live, product-level digital twin for external supply networks. This provides retailers the real-time intelligence they need to anticipate risk, protect availability, reduce emissions, strengthen supplier partnerships, and rebuild categories for a climate-impacted world.

This isn’t an ESG tool. It’s the operating system for network truth. Your ERP may run your enterprise, but Mondra runs your supply network.

The route towards a secure and resilient supply chain

If food retailers want to future-proof their business, they must see the supply chain for what it really is: a dynamic, interconnected system where environmental impact and operational resilience are inseparable.

Product-level digital twins are how we make that system manageable, understandable, predictable, and optimized.

Learn more about the Digital Twin