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Your host Dr. Darin Detwiler interviews Chris Allison, a My Trusted Source advisory board member, about the role of consultants in helping organizations integrate ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) practices into their operations. Topics include: choosing the best standards and frameworks, collecting and managing data, using consultants for validation, and how technology companies can align their supply chain management with ESG goals. Transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement are key aspects to building trust in the food industry, or any other.
This podcast is presented by My Trusted Source.
Produced by Joe Diaco Podcasting Support.
- (00:17) - Introduction and Guest Welcome
- (00:39) - Role of Consultants in ESG Integration
- (02:29) - Types of Consultants and Their Impact
- (06:57) - The Importance of External Validation
- (08:47) - Challenges in Technology Supply Chains
- (12:22) - The Future of ESG and Continuous Improvement
- (14:05) - Conclusion and Farewell
This podcast is presented by My Trusted Source.
Produced by Joe Diaco Podcasting Support.
Creators & Guests
What is Trust Bites?
Hosted by food safety industry leader and consumer advocate Dr. Darin Detwiler, "Trust Bites" examines the challenges of ensuring food safety in a complex global marketplace and maintaining brand reputation.
With the rise of global food trade, consumers, retailers, and producers alike are increasingly concerned about the safety and quality of the food they buy. Many existing validation systems are outdated, bureaucratic, and expensive, creating inefficiency and allowing vital information to slip through the cracks.
"Trust Bites" delves into the validation process, discussing the challenges and limitations of current systems and exploring fair and equitable solutions.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: Hello, welcome to Trust Bites. I'm your host, Dr. Darin Detwiler.
As always, Trust Bites is brought to you by the fine people at My Trusted Source, your source for digital solutions within the global food supply chain.
We are here today with one of our board members, Chris Allison. Chris, welcome.
Chris Allison: Thank you, Darin. Pleasure to be here.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: We have talked already about trust.
We've talked about ESG and technology, and I want to get into a very specific conversation about the role that consultants play in helping organizations integrate ESG practices into their operations. What do you see as the role of consultants, and how can they effectively communicate, whether it's their recommendations or the like, to industry?
Chris Allison: Yeah, thanks. So, I think ESG is moving so quickly in terms of requirements on firms to report in terms of standards. There are many standards out there. There are many data sources out there. So, I think the first thing I'd say is just helping people pick the right standards, the right frameworks and understand what the right level of data to collect is. And do that based on your obligations, either immediate or the obligations that we see coming down the road for you in two or three years, depending on where you are in the supply chain, or just based on your values as a firm or the values within your industry.
The first thing I'd say is, getting through that minefield of frameworks, standards, reporting obligations, data sets, that kind of thing. And then from the back of that, building a data plan. So, what data am I collecting myself? What data do I need from my supply chain? And how do I manage that? Is that something that I have to do myself? Is there a SaaS solution in the industry that will allow me to take the results, but have somebody else manage the difficult pieces around data management and data quality in the middle of that? Am I building my own insights from it? And if I am building my own insights, which I probably want to, how do I cost efficiently exploit AI to get the best out of that data that's available to me?
Those are the three components I would look at.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: Well, if I were to have a textbook about being a consultant in front of me, I would probably be able to read (and I'm going to kind of predict certain things here) that there's different types of consultants, right?
You may have a technology consultant. You may have a regulatory compliance consultant. You may have a consultant who has such extensive background knowledge, having worked with other similar companies or even unrelated companies, but the overall experience allows the transfer of know-how and experience into the conversation. I know that there are consultants that focus on efficiency and, you know, more of the economics.
So, we're talking about a lot of different types of reasons for having a consultant and different types of consultants themselves in order to, elevate the work around ESG collection data collection and reporting and performance improvement.
What are some other areas or some gaps that you see why a company would want ESG performance and reporting?
Chris Allison: Yeah, you're right. It's a very broad spectrum. And I think this very much depends on two things: where you are in the stage of addressing ESG and what scale you're at.
So, if you're a large, listed corporation, you will have the luxury, if you want to think of it like that, of putting your own team together. And you may bring in your favorite management consultant to get you on the road and then construct your team and execute the plan from there.
If you're a very small firm, or firm that doesn't spend a lot of money on technology, then it may be that you need a much lighter touch, but you can't afford to have your own team sitting there and you need to draw on the expertise of externals to do that.
And maybe that's in a fractional way. So there's a growing market for fractional hires. So, maybe there's a fractional ESG expert or a fractional Chief Technology Officer or something like that that you can draw on to help you.
But I'd say that scale makes a big impact and the position you're at in your cycle makes a big impact.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: Well, one of the things I'm seeing happening more and more is, and I recently had some of my grad students interview consultants, and they were saying that historically you don't see companies advertise that they use Consultant X, Consultant Y. But I'm seeing a growth in that. I'm seeing a growth in companies that are showing their maturity in going down this road by revealing that we consult with this group, we consult with this person, we consult with these type of experts along our way, thus to add credibility, if you will, to the work that they're doing. Do you see this as a trend? Okay.
Chris Allison: I'm smiling because I guess I've, forget about ESG for a second, I've seen that in my whole life. And having built a small consultancy that had a very good reputation, we were dealing with very large banks. But you constantly saw people that wanted to offload, give credibility to their own decisions by putting a Big Four or a management consulting brand behind their decisions.
So they would go to the board with a presentation and say, " Here's McKinsey," or Gartner or whatever it was. And the people that were more likely to put their own name behind those decisions were the ones that would use the specialist outfits where they thought they were getting more specialist expertise. So I have a little bit of cynicism around that.
However, having said that, particularly looking at the Big Four, there are a couple of firms that really stand out right now who have a genuine, really strong commitment through their values to sustainability and CSR and ESG and not just taking the profits from it, but also giving a lot back.
So, there are certain firms out there --not just the big ones, there are some smaller ones too-- that I think have a lot of credibility behind them. And you're coming out of that with a very good, reliable understanding of where regulations and reporting are going, and you're not going to go around in circles on that.
So the big fear would be that you adopt one set of practices and then two years later, I have to redo the whole thing. Going with the right firm gives you that credibility that you're probably not going to end up doing that.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: And I think it's important to make sure we clarify this. We talked previously about how we should not outsource our responsibility and outsource our accountability. But in doing that, it is, I believe, a rather healthy practice to use outside validation efforts through consultants to make sure that you're not just telling yourself that you're going down the right direction or that you're collecting the right data or that you're acting quickly upon that data, but that there are experts outside of your company that are agreeing with you based on their own independent, external analysis that, yes, you are, in fact, achieving what you're trying to achieve.
Chris Allison: Yeah, I think you're right. It helps you be honest with yourself, right? So you may say, it's too difficult to collect that data. These firms lower down the supply chain, there's no way they're going to give me that data, or there's no way that data is available, so let's ignore that, right?
Let's just accept we can't do that. Or, we may say, "I don't see any point in trying to correlate these things together, so let's not bother." And having somebody in that's done it before, or done it before many times, can show you ways of doing things that you didn't know existed and help you be honest about the things that you can achieve and can't achieve. So, I think it can save you a lot of time and money by doing things that you shouldn't do, but also show you where you can invest time where you thought that, actually, things weren't possible.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: One last question here. When we look at things such as social responsibility, ethical sourcing, even reducing carbon emissions, these are some of the bigger goals that are out there. I mean, there's many, but these are some of the big goals you hear about a great deal when you're looking at ESD/ESG objectives. What recommendations do you have for technology companies looking to align their supply chain management with goals like these?
Chris Allison: Think about what's at the bottom of technology supply chains. What's the first layer? It's kind of chips, right? Semiconductors.
And then the next layer is data centers. What we see at the moment in the news every day is the latest artificial intelligence. What's Elon Musk done today with Grok? What's the latest thing from Open AI?
It's A) fascinating, B) we're starting to understand the impact that AI can have in particular on productivity. And so we're all very excited about economic growth coming from these things and how it can transform industries.
You go back down to those first layers, the semiconductor industry and data centers and the networks around data centers. It's not a pretty story, unfortunately. At all. And there is no credible plan. I'd love someone to show me one, but I don't see any credible plan for net zero in the semiconductor industry.
What we're worried about in the semiconductor industry right now are two things. We're worried about getting enough supply, especially of GPUs, to feed the AI industry. And we're worried about what happens in supply chains with China and Taiwan. So, we have massive dependency on Taiwan, right?
So, we are rapidly trying to build the semiconductor fabrication facilities in different parts of the US right now, to take away the risks in the supply chain, and we're trying to do that in a way that is as sustainable as possible. But the reality is it's nowhere near net zero, and I think the chip industry itself is something like half a percent of greenhouse gases right now. And the worrying thing is that, especially with GPUs or other chips that are being designed specifically for AI that may not be classed as GPUs, water cooling is becoming the thing because these things are very dense in terms of the number of chips per cabinet you'll end up with in a data center. So then you end up talking about water cooling, which we talked about water management practices before. So, what used to be air cooling and data centers is now becoming water cooling. And so that has an impact on where you can put these data centers and what you're doing to water supplies.
And then that's before talking about the amount of energy you're using in these things as well. AI, as wonderful as it is, is directly driving big issues down the supply chain around ESG. Sadly.
I'd love to tell a better story than that. And of course, the positive spin to that is that we have a much faster innovation cycle with AI, and so AI's ability to help us come up with better practices for ESG and better designs is something to be very positive around and think that in the future we will get better and better because of AI.
But right now, I think we're in this kind of middle ground where that hasn't really realized yet. And meanwhile, we are busy killing the planet trying to feed the AI wave.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: RIght. I mean, there has to be a balance. We realize that, you know, we're going to be creating things. Whether it's food or conductors or, you know, car parts, right? That these things are going to be a part of our world, part of society, and part of that impact on, you know, again, whether it's social responsibility or carbon emissions. But are there other areas where we can find ways to minimize some of these impacts to improve some of these areas?
And I guess, perhaps, an ending note is the fact that there's never going to be a solution and then we find it and we stick with it and that solved all our problems. It's always going to be an ongoing effort, an ongoing evolution of how we improve, how we understand new challenges, how we continue to improve, how we understand new challenges, how we continue to improve, and how we ultimately treat this as a, again, like a continuous improvement rather than just waiting around for one silver bullet that's going to solve all our problems.
Chris Allison: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. And just reinforce that the breakthroughs in generative AI and the breakthroughs that are coming in robotics accelerate that cycle, right? Massively accelerate that cycle.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: Well, and all this is not happening behind some magical curtain or whatever. There's so much more transparency. There's so much more demand from consumers, whether it's for food or for automobiles or for computers and technology, there's so much more demand for the social responsibility and the carbon emissions reduction and ethical sourcing that it can't be ignored anymore.
This is not a world where we can just do whatever we want and get away with it and people will still buy it no matter what. This is part of that decision making process, beyond government accountability.
Chris Allison: Exactly. And I think, you know, if you fast forward probably 10 years, we start to see some heavy regulatory reporting requirements. If you fast forward 10 years, I would expect as a consumer that we will have a much, much better set of transparency into everything we buy.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: It's all vital in terms of building and maintaining that trust with consumers.
Well, Chris, thank you very much. This has been a great delight to talk with you about these issues, and I hope that we can continue to talk about other issues in the future.
Again, thank you very, very much.
Chris Allison: You too, Darin. Thank you. My pleasure.
Dr. Darin Detwiler: For TrustBites, this is your host, Dr. Darin Detwiler. Trust Bites is presented by My Trusted Source. Thank you very much.