SAP Helps Barry Callebaut Realize Sustainable Cocoa Farming

VIENNA, June 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Barry Callebaut, the world's leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products, chose SAP to help enable sustainable cocoa farming. With solutions from SAP, Barry Callebaut has already integrated 65,000 small-scale cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire and will include many more across the world. This will create a stronger, more sustainable supply chain and at the same time improve the livelihood of farmers, their families and their communities. This announcement was made at the SAPinsider event being held in Vienna, June 20-22.

SAP® Rural Sourcing Management is an integrated, cloud-based solution running on SAP HANA® Cloud Platform. It combines mobile and desktop access to track produce from farm to factory. The introduction of mobile business applications provides farmer organizations with access to important data immediately to help simplify and digitalize business processes. The solution currently covers farmer registration, surveys and e-procurement, and there are plans to extend it in the future with geo information. This will improve traceability and analysis for sustainable cocoa farming. SAP and Barry Callebaut collaborated on this custom-development project, and SAP intends to make the solution generally available in the near future.

"This is an essential step in our commitment to make cocoa more sustainable," said Nicko Debenham, vice president of Cocoa Sustainability at Barry Callebaut. "This tool will allow us to approach sustainability in an unprecedented way, providing the right advice to farmers, driving adoption of best practices and improving yields and livelihoods. It will help farmers better manage their farms and professionalize cocoa farming in order to sustain it into the future."

"Barry Callebaut is an excellent example of how digital transformation in the agribusiness industry can simplify business processes and improve people's lives," said Anja Strothkaemper, vice president, SAP Agribusiness and Commodity Management. "Working together, SAP and Barry Callebaut can help make agriculture easier for small-scale farmers, farmer cooperatives and cocoa buyers with a cloud-based solution that helps improve productivity, quality and transparency. Improved transparency is critical to consumer products companies to fulfill expectations of digitally empowered customers and consumers as well as for corporate social responsibility. Because this solution helps ensure that cocoa is sourced from participating farmers, Barry Callebaut is helping to ensure that chocolate lovers everywhere know that they are buying a quality product that supports a responsible source. This solution also demonstrates how technical innovation can contribute to UN Sustainable Development Goals — in this case, goal 1, "No poverty," and goal 8, "Decent work and economic growth."

Mobile Cloud Access for Farmers and Barry Callebaut SAP Rural Sourcing Management allows Barry Callebaut and cocoa farmer organizations in its network to manage business transactions with mobile devices — eliminating paper-based administration systems that are time-consuming and prone to mistakes. The cloud-based solution enables the entire cocoa production process, from the field to final processing, to be accurately traced.

A Sustainable and Traceable Cocoa Supply Chain Made EasierBarry Callebaut can access information efficiently as the solution works offline with all its functions and then can be synchronized and collected in networks with the limited bandwidth available in remote corners of Africa.

SAP HANA Cloud PlatformMobile services running on SAP HANA Cloud Platform help companies build and deploy native and hybrid mobile apps that integrate securely with on-premise or cloud-based systems. SAP Rural Sourcing Management will provide a global-scale cloud-based solution that can be implemented in a short amount of time and adapted to each enterprise's individual needs.

SAP Custom DevelopmentThe SAP Custom Development organization offers application development services that provide individual organizations with tailor-made, business-essential innovations that help them to extract the full value from their SAP investment by bringing their competitively differentiating processes to life in the digital economy.

The first implementation of SAP Rural Sourcing Management was completed in October 2015 in Côte d'Ivoire and covered 25,000 certified farmers; a second implementation went live on June 13, 2016. Barry Callebaut is currently targeting 65,000 farmers and plans to roll out the solution globally in the next three years.

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