Meet Jason Barrett, CEO Of Mondra

Tell us about the company

 

Mondra is an innovative ‘climate tech’ platform currently working with 85% of the UK grocery sector to achieve their decarbonisation targets. Our mission is to enable an economically prosperous and just transition to Net Zero. We enable actors across the food supply chain to achieve their environmental goals while driving social good and commercial results.

The biggest challenge these food companies face in getting to Net Zero is measuring and managing Scope 3 emissions, those created in their value chain. Scope 3 emissions are notoriously difficult to manage because the granular data required to take action is largely unavailable or low quality. Supply chains are complex and standards around carbon accounting are open to interpretation, which means that data, where it does exist, is impossible to compare.

Mondra addresses these challenges by delivering AI-powered technology that automates Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is a method used to understand the environmental impacts of a product throughout its entire life cycle, including carbon, water, and biodiversity impacts. We use prediction technology to deliver LCAs for all products in a retailer’s assortment in just a day, a job that, if undertaken manually, would take one person a century to complete.

Today, we are focused on retail private label products, and are working with the British Retail Consortium (BRC) to agree and roll out the industry standard on Mondra’s technology across 85% of the UK grocery sector.
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 

My professional background is data and analytics. I spent 20 years building software companies that help organisations make better financial decisions using data. I was motivated to see how these data-driven techniques might be used to address the big societal challenges we face, and none greater than the climate crisis.

With the food system accounting for over 30% of that crisis, and with the sheer complexity of this topic, given the dependencies and trade-offs that decarbonising the food system poses – across food security, nutrition, cost of living, etc – we knew that if it could be done in food, it could be done in any sector.

I came across a paper by Joseph Poore, a leading environmental scientist responsible for the Poore and Nemecek study, a landmark paper that harmonised hundreds of LCA studies. Looking at the methodology of LCA and all that it promises in terms of granular insight to support environmental action, we were convinced that if you could automate LCA this would unlock multiple value propositions from better reporting, the ability to deliver competitive products downstream, reduce business risk in an ever-regulated market, and potentially deliver robust and trustworthy environmental labelling for consumers. Four years on, and we are the definitive category leader in UK grocery. In many ways, we have delivered Mondra to market with and for the retailers who have guided its evolution, and for this, we are very grateful.

The thing that makes us unique is that our solution goes well beyond automated product assessment, enabling ‘collaborative decarbonisation’ – a system where individual actors in the supply chain can take ownership of their own impacts and work together, using Mondra’s scenario modelling and improvement tools, to reduce emissions, all aligned to a common standard and dynamically connected on a single platform. As one actor improves, all downstream actors have their impacts updated, and it’s this dynamic system of tracking and improving performance that is the step change for the industry.

No more static, outdated PDF environmental reports, siloed from the business. Instead, we have an ever-improving data feed – right down to product SKU (and even ingredient) level – that is piped into the systems that retailers are already using for category planning, to empower them to make climate-aware business decisions. And everyone within the chain is now empowered to fully understand and improve their own performance and achieve commercial results as we transition to a Net Zero economy.

 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 

The last couple of years have been a whirlwind experience, with some incredible milestones that have propelled the business forward. We won government funding to pilot the Mondra platform with Tesco and M&S and several of their key suppliers. The results were so compelling we were then able to present them to the broader retail community through the British Retail Consortium and it was this that led to the BRC Mondra Coalition, the vehicle through which we are defining and evolving the industry standard. This was a real turning point in our journey. We recently celebrated the two-year anniversary of the Coalition, and it was humbling to see how much support we continue to receive from the Industry, NGOs, and academia.

While there are government initiatives, (notably the Food Data Transparency Partnership), that exist to define the mandatory rules for product footprinting, labelling, and Scope 3 accounting in food, they are still some way off being finalised and we are working in consultation with them. In the meantime, we’re very proud to be at the centre of private sector efforts to level the playing field with a single standard and use advanced tech solutions to drive meaningful change in the race to Net Zero.

In terms of our own business development, I’m pleased to say that we’re well beyond piloting now and working to multi-year contracts with clients to integrate the system with their existing business decision-making tools and invite their suppliers to the platform so that they can play their part in the sector-wide movement.

We have grown to a headcount of 60 ‘Mondranaughts’: half technologists, half scientists and all united by a single mission. Going from start-up to scale-up in such a short time has certainly had its challenges. We often talk about ‘flying the plane while still building it!’ And it did feel like that only a year ago. Today, I am pleased to say that we’re flying a built plane, and everyone’s still on board!

 

What can we hope to see from Mondra in the future?

 

We’re looking forward to moving into new geographies. We know that there’s a lot of activity in Europe and we’re keen to be part of the conversation and support the agenda over there. Here in the UK, it’s about operationalising carbon accounting and we will be working with our clients to understand how this environmental data and insight can be used as part of their daily business operations, supporting them to make decisions to accelerate the progress towards an economically prosperous Net Zero future.