Sustainability and Strategic Market Intelligence

Sustainability is quickly becoming a license to operate, shaping the present and future of the dairy industry. The focus on sustainability is one of the key priorities for DeLaval in order to future-proof business and stay relevant for our customers.

During an internal webinar Nikolai Porkhov, Manager Strategic Market Intelligence, and Clara Secher, Market Intelligence Analyst at DeLaval shared insights about drivers that affect the whole dairy value chain, sustainability efforts, and how to use those insights when making strategic decisions.

“Understanding different sustainability drivers and how they affect dairy farmers’ investment decisions to become more sustainable is crucial for DeLaval. The changing business environment with impact from climate events, trade disputes, price volatility, rising inflation, new regulations and agricultural policies, and geopolitical disruptions as well as the technology shift in dairy farming are providing both challenges and opportunities for the industry,” says Nikolai.

“We see that all value chain stakeholders, including consumers, retailers, processors, farmers and regulators are increasing the demand for sustainable development and, most importantly, actions,” says Nikolai Porkhov.

The key challenges for dairy farmers regardless of size and country of operations are animal welfare, work efficiency, farm profitability, and food safety. At the same time, environmental sustainability is becoming more and more important. At DeLaval, we continuously look at dairy industry trends, farmer challenges as well as the sustainability drivers throughout the whole value chain. Different competitive insights and foresights on the dairy market are then analysed and turned into actionable conclusions to make sure the company is taking strategic decisions based on reliable facts and figures and not on assumptions and opinions.

“Sustainability has become the buzz word for the 2020’s and so it should be. We all need to live in a more sustainable way. However, we can still see that key purchasing decisions among consumers are mainly driven by cost, taste, food safety and origin,” says Clara.

“At DeLaval, we drive improvements internally within our supply chain, operations and product management as well as continuously work to demonstrate how our existing technologies, services and innovations support customers in becoming more sustainable,” Nikolai concludes.