Mondra, a leader in product foot printing and supply chain decarbonisation, has launched Sherpa, an AI-powered assistant designed to propel the food industry towards net zero emissions. Built using Microsoft Azure’s secure OpenAI platform, Sherpa reflects Microsoft’s continued role in AI innovations despite shifting focus on its Copilot offering. Sherpa utilizes Azure’s GPT-4o model to enable scalable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a vital capability for food retailers aiming to gauge and manage the environmental impact of their products.
Sherpa’s chatbot interface offers users a robust tool to analyze environmental data across the Mondra platform. Retailers can identify high-emission ingredients, list products with favourable environmental performance, and simulate “what-if” scenarios to reduce their ecological footprint. By harnessing this data, businesses gain insights for decision-making that can streamline resources, improve efficiency, and reduce their environmental impact.
Speaking with ERP Today at the Microsoft AI Tour in London, Mondra executives Jason Barrett, CEO, and Marco De Sanctis, CTO, underscored Sherpa’s capacity to tackle Scope 3 emissions—those produced within supply chains. “Sherpa empowers category teams to collaborate with suppliers, reduce Scope 3 emissions, and stay competitive in an increasingly regulated market,” said Barrett.
De Sanctis, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 13 consecutive years, highlighted Azure’s capability to track carbon footprints and keep compute costs down, aligning with Mondra’s own net-zero ambitions. Leveraging both neural network AI and Azure’s generative AI, Mondra’s platform categorizes ingredients and analyzes over 30,000 own-label products and one million unique ingredients, achieving what De Sanctis describes as a “completely different level” of environmental data analysis.
Mondra’s impact is clear: a UK retailer recently reformulated a lasagna recipe using Sherpa, reducing its carbon footprint by 18% with a single ingredient change—equivalent to powering 2,000 homes for a year. “Our platform can process LCA data of 30,000 products in under four hours daily—a task that once took over 100 years to complete manually,” Barrett added.
With Sherpa, Mondra and Microsoft’s partnership is driving an impactful transition to sustainable practices in the food sector, highlighting a continued commitment to innovation in AI-driven environmental solutions.