Photo by Starling

Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, has contracted the Airbus-developed Starling satellite monitoring service to prevent losses in its palm oil supply chain due to deforestation. Airbus will provide Nestlé with year-round monitoring, providing reports on forest cover disturbances. In a statement, Nestlé Executive Vice President Magdi Batato said that the Airbus partnership is part of his company’s “No Deforestation” pledge to eliminate deforestation across its global supply chain by 2020.

“Nestlé has always been committed to source the raw materials we need to make our products in a responsible manner,” said Batato. “In 2010, we made a No Deforestation commitment stating that all our products globally will not be associated with deforestation by 2020. In order to accelerate this journey, we have worked with Airbus and TFT since mid-2016 to embark on a pilot project over the Perak landscape in Malaysia. Starling satellite monitoring is a game changer to achieve transparency in our supply chain and we are pleased to extend this collaboration to cover 100 percent of Nestlé’s global palm oil supply chains by the end of the year.”

Developed in partnership with The Forest Trust, the Airbus Starling monitoring system uses the Spot 6 and Spot 7 satellites to collect high-resolution radar and imagery. Batato added that Nestlé has plans to extend the satellite monitoring program with Airbus to cover pulp and paper supply chains in 2019. Other supply chains, such as soybean, could follow shortly after. Financial details of the contract were not disclosed.