SAI Platform has completed a global pilot program for its Regenerating Together framework, a shared approach to regenerative agriculture backed by 40 major food and beverage companies including Nestlé, Diageo, Unilever, and Mondelez $MDLZ.
A joint declaration committing to the advancement and scaling of regenerative agriculture has been signed by the participating companies, according to SAI Platform. The signatories also include ADM, Carlsberg, McCormick, and McCain. The signatories acknowledged, according to Reuters, that transforming the sector at the scale needed is beyond the reach of any single company or approach acting alone.
Spanning 25 countries and 23 distinct production systems, the pilot phase encompassed more than 35 individual initiatives, SAI Platform said. Among the participants, 25 Canadian oat farms operated by Nestlé were put through the framework, and Wildfarmed brought 150 U.K. farms growing wheat, oats, and barley into the program. The framework is also being applied through multi-stakeholder projects in India for potato farming, in Denmark for arable growing, and in Argentina for peanut production.
Participants move through four structured steps: assessing the specific soil and environmental characteristics of a given farm, deciding which regenerative goals — such as gains in biodiversity or soil carbon — to prioritize, identifying the farming practices best suited to reaching those goals, and then measuring results on an ongoing basis. SAI Platform said the design is intended to give companies a coherent worldwide methodology without stripping away the flexibility that local farming conditions demand.
The pilot phase has been running since 2023. SAI Platform's director general, Dionys Forster, said the absence of a unified definition of regenerative agriculture has historically made it difficult to design programs that work at both scale and the farm level, according to AgFunder News. Forster noted that definitions of regenerative agriculture have varied widely across the industry, with the resulting claims running the gamut from overly cautious to misleading.
Rob Bray, Chief People & Sustainability Officer at Wildfarmed, said in a statement that the framework provides "a clear, actionable roadmap that cuts through the noise of what 'regenerative' means." Axelle Bodoy, Global Head of Regenerative Agriculture at Louis Dreyfus Company, said in a statement the pilot demonstrated that a common framework can help programs scale while remaining locally relevant.
Simon Boas Hoffmeyer, VP and Global Head of Sustainability & ESG at Carlsberg Group, said the effort requires "alignment and collaboration — not isolated efforts," according to Reuters.
SAI Platform said it will host the formal launch of the next phase of Regenerating Together in June 2026 at its annual event in Saskatoon, Canada. Priorities for the next phase include broader adoption of the framework and the incorporation of digital technologies — among them remote sensing and measurement, monitoring, and verification tools — according to AgFunder News.