The Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Production Platform of the World Economic Forum brings together a diverse community to enable solutions to the greatest challenges facing multiple industries, accelerating the growth of advanced manufacturing while helping stakeholders fulfil their social responsibilities.

Led by Hernan Saenz, Bain teamed up with the WEF in 2020 to support the multi-year project focused on “Accelerating Sustainable Production through Digital Traceability.”  Its purpose: to build a global alliance of manufacturers, suppliers, consumers and regulators that leverages traceability technology to create visibility and productivity, and to drive resilience, sustainability and circularity in the world’s value chains.

Supply chains have always played a key role in driving customer satisfaction and fulfilling a company’s promise. Yet now supply chains must do more than simply deliver the product that customers want, when they want it. Today’s supply chains must be resilient to dynamically react to changes in the business environment, while also making the brand promise of sustainability a reality. In order to scale up efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle and remanufacture, stakeholders across entire supply chains must scale the adoption of digital traceability tools. This will provide businesses with valuable capabilities that they need to deliver the sustainable products and services customers and investors expect, while also providing better cost and operational outcomes.

We are generating learnings working with traceability pioneers and industry leaders through pilots in the consumer products, retail, electronics, and manufacturing sectors. We are combining these learnings with insights from workshops and primary research to develop a toolkit for companies who want to gain a competitive advantage by increasing their traceability capabilities to become more sustainable and more resilient. The toolkit focuses on the four  key enablers: Data and analytics, technology, operating model, and trusted validation, and will be made available to the public during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Singapore in May 2021.

The Food Action Alliance (FAA) is a coalition of organisations and initiatives, who through collective action, significantly strengthen the impact of agricultural value chains to produce food efficiently and sustainably, that is accessible to all, in support of a transition to healthier diets and improved environmental outcomes.  It lives within the Shaping the Future of Global Public Goods Platform of the World Economic Forum.

FAA’s mission is to deliver impact at scale on food value chains to achieve sustainable food systems and builds on a model of partnership for value chain action. Led by Vikki Tam, Bain joined forces with the Forum last year to accelerate knowledge exchange on food systems solutions and codify flagship initiatives for transforming food systems toward the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

Food systems are complex and currently unsustainable for both people and planet. Sustainably nourishing a global population of 9.7 billion by 2050, while meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will require food systems that are inclusive, sustainable, efficient, nutritious and healthy. The transformation of food systems requires better functioning value chains, and in turn, this requires more coordinated action.

Bain supports FAA with its 5 strategic priorities for 2021. Together with an ecosystem of 40+ world class food actors, we are crafting the platform strategy of the FAA, to become the #1 platform for food systems transformation. Secondly, we are identifying innovative flagship initiatives across Latin America, Africa, South East Asia and India that have the potential to significantly transform food systems. Thirdly, we are supporting these flagship initiatives to achieve impact at scale, by catalysing the assets, capabilities and networks of our partners. Furthermore, we are codifying the success recipe for multi-stakeholder partnerships in food systems transformation. And lastly, with the UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021 as an important milestone, we are setting the FAA up as an important delivery mechanism to demonstrate action with its balanced portfolio of flagships. During the UN Food Systems Summit, we will share a report how successful multi-stakeholder flagships can help to sustainably transform food systems.