That connection matters because this program isn't running alongside the business — it's wired directly into a specific supply chain, addressing a specific ingredient, with farmers learning soil health management, drip irrigation improvements, cover cropping, and composting through field sessions organized with Earthworm Foundation and The Regen Academy.
"Our main goal is for farmers to see tangible results in their crops and surroundings," said Clara Labaste, Field Work Coordinator at Earthworm Foundation. Second-year participants are deepening their practice rather than repeating the basics, which signals the program is producing outcomes farmers find worth continuing. That's the part most corporate agricultural programs never get to.
VivaOliva sits inside a much larger commitment. As of May 2025, PepsiCo updated its sustainability goals, expanding its regenerative agriculture target to 10 million acres by 2030. The company has been running programs across oats in Iowa, canola wheat in Australia, and potatoes in Vietnam, and in February 2026 announced new research grants with the National Geographic Society to fund on-farm science in climate-stressed production regions.
The numbers behind those programs are starting to add up in ways that are hard to dismiss. In 2024 alone, PepsiCo supported approximately 20,000 farmers to plant cover crops and implement regenerative practices, resulting in roughly 1.6 million metric tons of net reduction in on-farm greenhouse gas emissions, including soil carbon sequestration. These are reported outcomes, not projections.
PepsiCo is further along than most, but the direction is consistent across its peer group, and the reasoning is the same everywhere you look. Unilever has committed to implementing regenerative agriculture practices across 1 million hectares by 2030, targeting crops with the largest land footprint in its supply chain including soybean, rapeseed, vegetables, and rice, and had reached 130,000 hectares globally by the end of 2024.
Nestlé's Nescafé brand surpassed its 2025 regenerative agriculture sourcing goal a full year early, with 32% of its coffee coming from farmers implementing regenerative practices in 2024. General Mills has been running farmer-to-farmer mentorship programs with the Rodale Institute for regenerative transitions across organic wheat, oat, and tomato supply chains.
None of these companies are doing this primarily for sustainability credentials. Water scarcity, soil degradation, and climate variability are creating genuine ingredient security risk for food companies that depend on consistent agricultural output. Farmers practicing regenerative methods tend to produce more reliably under stressed conditions. For procurement teams managing multi-year ingredient sourcing, that reliability is the point.
The companies building those farmer relationships now are doing it because they've already seen what sourcing from degraded agricultural systems costs. The ones that haven't started yet are running out of time to get ahead of it.
