Unilever Uses Satellites, Phones to Track Sustainable Palm (1)

Unileveris planning to use new geo-location technology to make its palm oil supply chains more transparent and tackle a farm-to-table traceability problem that has plagued the industry for decades.

The maker of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Dove soap will use cell phone geo-location data to track palm oil moving across thousands of supply chains and to achieve the elusive “first-mile” traceability. After a pilot test in Indonesia, Unilever is scaling up that approach to cover all palm facilities in Southeast Asia, including farms, refineries and processing plants, and is looking into whether the technology can ...