The Spirit of the Entrepreneur
Olam, a relative youngster in the food and agriculture industry, has become a global player in just over 30 years. Its secret? A focus on entrepreneurial thinking.
When you consider the history and complexity of the food and agriculture industry, Olam’s 30-plus years of success is simultaneously quite predictable, and really one of the most unpredictable shifts in the space in centuries.
First started in 1989, Singapore-based Olam has rapidly evolved from a humble single-country export business to become one of the industry’s most diversified and innovative food supply institutions. In just over three decades, the organization has progressed from merely exporting Nigerian cashews to now owning supply chain and production capabilities across some of the world’s most critical crops—coffee, cotton, rice, even cocoa.
It’s tempting to think of Olam’s journey as the kind of disruption story we’ve grown accustomed to in today’s fast-moving, tech-centric economy; through that lens, Olam’s meteoric rise makes a certain degree of sense. But food and agriculture, unlike many industries, isn’t so easily disrupted—consider that many of the major players in this space predate the American Civil War, sporting supply chains that took centuries to hone. Through that lens, Olam’s rapid evolution is much harder to fathom: How did such a localized and specialized startup manage to dethrone global institutions with 200-year head starts?
At some level, the answer might be deceptively simple: a relentlessly entrepreneurial spirit.
"We pride ourselves on really picking entrepreneurial spirit as Olam’s defining DNA," said Suresh Sundararajan, co-founder and director for Mindsprint, and CEO for Nupo Ventures (two of Olam’s business units). "This entrepreneurial spirit always encourages experimentation at all levels. It encourages a feeling of insurgency, not incumbency. How can you challenge the status quo?"
That entrepreneurial spirit is what could make Olam’s story more than one of just industry disruption: It could rewrite the future of tens of millions of farmers. And it might just help stop climate change while it’s at it.
A view to expansion
Understanding how Olam can eventually impact the global fight against climate change requires an understanding of how its entrepreneurial spirit first pushed it beyond just the cashew trade: a collision of ingenuity and opportunity.
When Olam first took root in Nigeria, trade for many commodities in Africa were regulated by specially appointed governmental boards, allowing the largest multinational corporations to conduct trade processes all over the world with minimal presence in any one country. But by the early 1990s, pressure from global financial institutions had seen most of those governmental boards dismantled or de-emphasized. In many countries, a select few organizations like Olam—which had invested heavily in its Nigerian supply chain presence—were suddenly the only ones with the combination of expertise and local knowledge to step into the vacuum.
That’s where Olam’s entrepreneurial spirit took over: Once it had mastered its Nigerian supply chain, that blueprint for local presence quickly carried over to similar successes in places like Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, and Ghana. Wide swaths of Asia would follow a few years later. While Olam has made its fair share of missteps along the way—"We've made mistakes, but it's all about what we can learn from those mistakes,” said Sundararajan—its continued growth and evolution has largely followed the formula of local presence + entrepreneurial thinking = logical regional expansion.
That’s what brings us to Olam’s biggest goals to date—those that transcend commodity supply chains or regional logistics.
Back in 2020, Olam underwent a restructuring to better align its portfolio of various commodities and appetites; this incidentally led to the creation of a profit-with-purpose venture-building business unit and technology services business unit that, fueled by Olam’s thirst for entrepreneurial thinking, have stretched Olam to fascinating new offerings.
One such initiative is called Jiva, a digital platform for farmers that stemmed from Olam’s deep experience in originating commodities and strong on-the-ground presence in producing countries. Supported by BCG X—Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) tech and venture-building arm—Jiva evolved from Olam’s network of local buying agents and, in some cases, direct engagement with farmers. Direct buying is notoriously difficult due to financial and digital literacy problems, but Olam found, in 2017, that it was possible—and profitable—to engage with farmers directly if you put in informed effort. Jiva was the endgame of that effort, an app-based platform that paired the buying-and-selling interface with three critical services: crop advisory, input sales, and financing options. Together, it represented a revolutionary digital service offering for farmers in some of the most remote parts of the world. Imagine how a local farmer in Indonesia benefits from scanning pictures of a sick plant and having an image recognition algorithm diagnose its ailment.
Jiva now operates across much of Indonesia—transacting with nearly 60,000 farmers and bringing in almost $75 million in revenue—with a wide variety of services still in the development pipeline. Its potential is limitless, if for no other reason than no other organization has really tried something like it before. And Olam has a wide appetite for its usage.
“You will not be able to create value or make an impact by just dealing with 100,000 farmers,” said Sundararajan. “You have to take it to millions of farmers, and the only way you can do that … is to scale the platform.”
Why serve only a million smallholder farmers, however, when you could serve billions? Olam’s entrepreneurial thinking has now led the company to what seems a natural issue for a food and agriculture business to tackle: sustainability and carbon footprint.
As most sustainability experts will tell you, supply chains are simultaneously large companies’ biggest carbon footprint and most complex problems to address. The sheer number of hands, engines, and vendors that handle a commodity—especially in the food and agriculture industry—across a global supply chain make its carbon impact difficult to measure. Tracing carbon footprint upstream from those intermediaries has traditionally been basically impossible. Even for forward-thinking Olam, the process was painful.
“We were investing lots of time and money in measuring our footprint five years back,” said Sundararajan. “The [complexity] was immense … It was taking several months, we had to engage ESG-specific consultants, and it was costing a lot of money.”
So once again, Olam’s entrepreneurial spirit took over.
“The co-founder asked me, ‘If we are facing such a problem in measuring for Olam, why don’t we invest some time and effort in building a SaaS platform to help measure, manage, and offset the entire spectrum of a decarbonization journey for a large company like us?’” said Sundararajan. “And that in itself can be a separate enterprise that provides these services not only to Olam, but to our customers as well.”
Supported by BCG’s expertise in building and training machine learning models, that’s exactly the platform Olam built: Terrascope, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool designed to guide companies across the full spectrum of decarbonization efforts. Now sporting customers across diverse industries like retail, hospitality, and technology, Terrascope has evolved from a series of measurement models in 2022 to now offering future-forward analytics with deep emissions insights that allow companies to run advanced decarbonization simulations—some of the most critical and complex work required for our society to accelerate its fight against the effects of climate change.
Humble beginnings
Much like Olam’s more macro journey to organizational growth, its granular path to producing advanced digital platforms is an eye-opening success story—after all, that path started just seven years ago with a single focused team.
“It all started with our digital transformation journey around the end of 2016,” said Sundararajan. “In 2016, we never had anything called ‘digital’ within Olam. I put in place a group of people as a task force mandated to look at opportunities in the Olam supply chain to digitize or find ideas that can be disruptive in nature that can end up creating a new multi-billion enterprise for Olam.”
The work coming from Olam’s profit-with-purpose and technology arm may not quite have reached those revenue levels yet, but the possibility is readily apparent—and the impact of platforms like Jiva and Terrascope echoes beyond the profit-and-loss sheet. Millions of smallholder farmers will benefit from Jiva’s digital services. Enterprises across the world are accelerating their decarbonization journey through Terrascope. They signify real change in an industry that, until just a few years ago, was dominated by companies that originated centuries ago.
It was an industry in need of a little entrepreneurial thinking. Olam, like always, delivered.
This article was produced by WIRED Brand Lab on behalf of Boston Consulting Group.
