Tell us about yourself, your background and what it is you currently do
I’ve spent my career translating complex sustainability topics into business decisions. I started in large organizations, working on environmental strategy, and saw a consistent gap: companies could measure impact, but they couldn’t act on it in real time.
Today I’m co-founder of NuvioPlanet. We work with the animal protein and feed industry to close that gap. The goal is simple: move sustainability out of reports and into the core of how businesses operate.
Many companies invest heavily in sustainability reporting. Why do you believe reporting alone doesn’t move outcomes?
Because it happens too late. Reporting tells you what already happened, but it doesn’t change what you do next.
I’ve sat in rooms where a company celebrated a beautifully produced sustainability report while their procurement team was buying the same high-emissions inputs they bought the year before. The data existed. The intent was genuine. But the data wasn’t where the decision happened, so it didn’t matter.
Where do sustainability efforts typically break down inside organizations?
At the handover between teams.
Sustainability teams measure and report. Procurement and operations teams make decisions based on cost, availability, and performance. These worlds rarely connect.
The result is that good data gets produced, circulated, and ignored, because it arrives too late and in the wrong format. This is a systematic problem.
What needs to change for sustainability to become part of everyday business decisions?
It has to compete on the same terms as cost.
That means putting environmental data directly into the tools and workflows people already use. And it has to be simple enough to act on. The moment you put environmental impact in the same view as cost and performance and not in a separate dashboard or in a report six months later, the decision changes. Once teams can see cost and environmental impact side by side, they can start making better trade-offs in real time.
You often say “follow the money, follow the CO₂.” Where do cost and emissions actually intersect in the food value chain?
Feed. Almost always feed.
In most animal protein systems, feed accounts for somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of both cost and emissions. The same decisions – which raw materials you source, from where, at what specification – drive both numbers simultaneously. That’s a huge lever. And it’s also, historically, the part of the system where environmental data has been least integrated.
When I say follow the money, I mean: don’t look for the sustainability problem in the abstract. Look at where the money goes. That’s almost certainly where the emissions are concentrated too.
Closing that gap is where the real leverage sits.
What happens when companies start using environmental data in procurement and production decisions?
Decisions become more informed and more precise. We see companies identify more than 30% reduction potential in key raw materials, not through radical innovation, but through smarter sourcing choices that were already available to them.
They can reduce impact while maintaining or even improving economic performance. In some product lines, relatively targeted changes in formulation have reduced CO₂e per ton by close to 20%. And these aren’t hypothetical scenarios, but decisions companies can make in the next procurement cycle.
It turns sustainability from a constraint into a lever.
Can you share examples of how better environmental intelligence translates into tangible business impact?
We regularly see companies identify significant reduction potential – often above 30% – just by making smarter sourcing and production choices. In some cases, this translates into double-digit improvements per product line.
What matters is that these are not abstract targets. They come from concrete decisions companies can act on immediately.
You describe Nuvio Planet as “decision-grade environmental intelligence.” What does that mean in practice?
It means data that is actually usable in day-to-day decisions.
Decision-grade means consistent enough to compare across suppliers. Fast enough to use in a negotiation. Granular enough to identify where the real problem is.
At Nuvio Planet, we bring environmental impact into the same space where companies already evaluate cost and performance. Teams can compare options, run scenarios, and understand trade-offs instantly.
It’s not about generating more data. It’s about making the right data usable.
What differentiates your approach from traditional sustainability platforms?
Most platforms were built to satisfy a reporting requirement. We built our platform to support a business decision. Those are fundamentally different design briefs.
While reporting tools ask how to capture and present what happened, decision tools ask what the options are and what happens when choosing differently. The second question requires a live, connected model of the full system – feed, farm, product – not a static assessment run once a year.
We also care deeply about consistency across teams. If procurement sees one number and sustainability sees another, the organization can’t function. Our goal is one shared data layer that everyone works from.
Why is it critical to connect the full system—from input to end product—instead of optimizing isolated parts?
Because the system doesn’t respect your org chart.
A decision made in feed formulation ripples through to farm performance, which ripples through to product-level footprint. If you optimize one part in isolation, you often improve one metric while making another worse. We’ve seen this happen. A company reduces cost in sourcing, and their emissions per ton go up. Nobody intended that. Nobody saw it coming because they were only looking at part of the picture.
Real leverage comes from seeing the whole system and understanding which decisions actually move the needle.
There’s increasing talk about “ESG fatigue.” How do you interpret this shift?
Honestly? I think some of it is warranted.
The last decade produced an enormous amount of sustainability activity, from reports, commitments, frameworks to pledges, but a relatively small amount of measurable change. People are tired of the narrative. And they should be. What I find encouraging is that the conversation is shifting. Companies aren’t asking “what should we report?” anymore. They’re asking “what actually works?” That’s a better question. And it’s the question we were built to answer.
What distinguishes companies that will lead in this new environment from those that won’t?
Leaders integrate sustainability into how they run the business.
They’re not investing in sustainability because it looks good, but because they’ve understood that supply chain transparency is coming, that access to certain markets and capital will increasingly depend on it, and that the companies who build the capability now will have a structural advantage over the ones who scramble to catch up in three years.
Why is the Middle East a strategically important region for the future of food systems and sustainability?
Because urgency and ambition are both genuinely present here.
I also think the region is underestimated as a driver of food system transformation globally. That’s starting to change.
Food security, resource efficiency, and resilience are critical topics here. That creates a strong focus on solutions that work at system level.
At the same time, there is speed. Decisions can move faster, and there is openness to new approaches. That combination makes the entire region highly relevant.
That’s the pattern I expect to see more of here.
What has been one of the most challenging decisions you’ve had to make as a founder?
Choosing what not to build.
In the early days, we could have gone in a dozen directions. Adjacent markets. Additional features. Broader scope. The pressure to expand is constant and a lot of it comes from well-meaning people who genuinely see the opportunity.
But building something that works means staying focused on one problem long enough to actually solve it. We made a deliberate choice to go deep on animal protein and feed, even when that meant walking away from other conversations. It was uncomfortable. And I think it was right.
What principle has guided you when building in a complex, technical market?
Make complexity usable. If you can’t explain the output simply, the product isn’t finished.
The underlying models we work with are genuinely complex. with multiple data sources, different methodologies, a lot of scientific nuances. None of that should be visible to the person making a procurement decision at 9am on a Tuesday. Their question is simple: which option is better, and by how much? Our job is to make that answer clear, fast, and trustworthy.
Complexity is our problem to solve, not theirs to manage.
Looking ahead 3–5 years, how will decision-making in food and agriculture fundamentally change?
Environmental impact will become a standard business variable – alongside cost and performance.
The companies building that capability now are not just reducing their footprint. They’re building a different kind of competitive advantage that compounds over time as transparency requirements increase and the cost of not knowing goes up.
What will companies that fail to adapt miss?
Speed, mostly.The regulatory direction is clear. Customer expectations are moving. Capital is increasingly flowing toward companies that can demonstrate real performance, not just good intentions.
The window to build this capability proactively is still open. It won’t stay open indefinitely.
Where can readers connect with you and find out more?
LinkedIn is the best place to find me. I share thinking there regularly on where food systems and business strategy intersect. And if you want to go deeper on what we’re building, our website is the place to start: www.nuvioplanet.com
