Regenerating Together framework: overview
- Regenerative agriculture has lacked clear definitions and measurement standards, creating greenwashing concerns
- SAI Platform’s Regenerating Together framework provides consistent outcomes, metrics and verification
- The framework helps food and beverage companies track progress, build trust and scale adoption
Regenerative agriculture has long been big on promise but short on consistency and clear outcomes, leaving companies all the way up the supply chain open to accusations of greenwashing.
Now that will change with the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform’s new Regenerating Together (RT) framework. It’s great news for the food and beverage industry as it provides clarity, purpose and a clear way forward.
A shift to regenerative agriculture (regen ag) is becoming increasingly important for the food and beverage industry because it aims not just to reduce environmental harm, but to actively restore soil health, biodiversity, water systems and ecosystem resilience.
For an industry that depends on agricultural raw materials, healthier, more holistic farming practices can help secure supply chain resilience while meeting consumer and investor expectations on sustainability.
The new framework applies to all cultivated crops, dairy, and beef production systems globally, so it spans the food and beverage industry, and it’s “designed to support companies in operationalising and verifying their efforts in regenerative agriculture”, says SAI.
It can be put in place by single farms or several farms can work together in what the framework calls Implementation Groups.
A comprehensive, in-depth resource, it provides step-by-step instructions, supporting documents and tools to support implementation, and it’s already supported by more than 40 big food and agriculture businesses, including Nestlé, Louis Dreyfus Company, McCain Foods and Diageo.
“Regenerative agriculture shows great potential to strengthen supply chain resilience against climate change while improving farmers’ livelihoods,” says Pascal Chapot, VP head of agriculture at Nestlé. “We need practical and credible frameworks that can be consistently applied across the value chain, from farmers and cooperatives, to suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers.
“This alignment is essential for translating our ambitions into daily operations and for building trust and clarity in our engagement with farmers and suppliers. The SAI Platform’s Regenerating Together is a significant step forward.”
Five key takeaways that F&B needs to know
1) It provides a much-needed definition
The shift towards regen ag has been plagued by vague claims and lack of a clear definition of what it actually is. This framework defines it as “an outcome-based approach that improves soil health, biodiversity, climate, and water resources while supporting farmer livelihoods”.
By making the four pillars of environmental impact clear, the industry can start to align.
2) It provides measurable outcomes
A criticism of some companies is that they were simply counting practices carried out by farmers, but with no real indication of what that meant in terms of real-world impact.
The framework provides specific, measurable outcomes, including soil organic carbon, water-use efficiency and biodiversity indicators. By measuring these at baseline, farmers will be able to see how effective the practices really are and adapt and improve them if necessary.
3) Different farms can choose different pathways
The challenges facing farmers vary hugely between countries, regions and types of crop – what affects a Scottish dairy farmer will be very different to a cocoa producer in Ghana.
Now, farmers can identify the main challenges they face in a ‘context analysis’ and then select which regen ag practices are most likely to work for them and which outcomes to measure.
There are 16 practice categories, including cover crops, hedgerows, grazing management and nutrient management.
4) It allows for imperfection
Every initiative and practice introduced might face peaks and troughs of success, and it may also take time to cover all four pillars in the framework.
It builds this in by providing four tiers: Onboarding (a context analysis must have been completed and two outcomes must have been selected across at least two impact areas); engaging (a farm must have identified and begun implementing at least two practices to work towards the prioritised outcomes), and advancing (performance against the selected outcomes and their indicators must have been quantified over time and progress on practice roll out must have been demonstrated).
Finally, there’s the gold standard of leading (a minimum of four practices must be implemented, progress against practice roll out must be demonstrated, and performance against the minimum four prioritised outcomes and indicators must have been quantified over time).
On the way to the top, companies can use these tiers to say where suppliers are on the pathway, rather it being black and white ie regenerative or not regenerative.
5) It can’t be used for on-pack labelling
The framework has third-party verification requirements using Letters of Attestation, auditors and approved verification bodies and it’s designed to enable “business-to-business claims regarding the RT performance level of a stand-alone farm or a group of farms” and “demonstrate that agricultural raw materials are produced in accordance with defined requirements”. This can help companies counter claims of greenwashing.
However, the framework does not prescribe Chain of Custody requirements, which means that it does not dictate how products are tracked, segregated or verified through the supply chain after production. It’s therefore not designed for on-pack labelling.
This is something that F&B will want to work towards and it’s the responsibility of companies to tie together the whole journey of the product for solid future claims.
