FrieslandCampina’s Approach to Meeting ESG Data Requests with Passionfruit
FrieslandCampina faced a major challenge managing numerous ESG questionnaires from customers, NGOs, and certification bodies. Although many questions were similar, each customer demanded answers in different formats like Excel, PDFs, or online portals. This created a heavy administrative burden on their sustainability and quality teams. They struggled with inconsistent data sharing, limited visibility into questionnaire volumes, and inefficient manual workflows — until they started using Passionfruit.
1000+
Consistent answers to customers and stakeholders
Saving hours
Previously spent digging through reports and formatting answers.
In control
Of what data gets shared with whom.
The Situation
"We’re receiving more ESG questions from customers and aim to be consistent."
FrieslandCampina, a global leader in dairy, faced increasing demands from customers and auditors to share ESG-related information. Each year, they handle hundreds of questions and questionnaires from customers, NGOs, and certification bodies. While 80% of the questions are similar, nearly every customer requests the answers in a different format, such as Excel, PDFs, or online portals.
FrieslandCampina places a high value on transparency and seeks ways to meet customer requirements without overburdening their sustainability and quality teams with more extra work, where they have no core expertise.
Additionally, management wanted better visibility into the volume and types of questions received from customers. Until now, it was sometimes unclear which data was shared with whom and how approval flows should be managed within the company. The need for a transparent, organized, and scalable solution became critical.
"With Passionfruit, we can serve our customers consistent responses to their ESG requests"
Sustainability Corporate, at Friesland Campina Simone
The Challenge
"How to answer ESG questionnaires and questions with speed, reliability, and right governance?"
The growing number of compliance questionnaires significantly increased the workload for Sustainability, QA, and Sales teams. Much of the work involved manually filling out various formats—Excel, PDFs, and online portals—with similar types of data and questions. Hours were spent retyping, reformatting, and tracking down the same information across different policies, reports, and previously submitted answers. This manual approach not only consumed more time but also heightened the risk of errors.
Moreover, FrieslandCampina recognized that this was not merely a “sustainability” challenge but an organization-wide issue involving sales and experts in sustainability and quality. Managing customer and NGO requests required a coordinated effort, highlighting three key challenges:
Volume of Requests: Managing hundreds of questionnaires with unique formats created bottlenecks for both experts (e.g., sustainability and quality) and sales teams.
Inefficient Processes: Manually answering questionnaires was time-consuming and error-prone. Teams often had to sift through extensive policies, reports, and previously approved answers to find small pieces of relevant information. Additionally, responses submitted through certain portals, like Google Forms, were sometimes lost after submission—an extremely frustrating experience.
Governance Risks: Despite everyone's best efforts, it was often unclear how many questions and questionnaires were being received and answered. Ensuring consistent and accurate responses across different layers of the organization was challenging with a manual process.
"Passionfruit saves me the hassle of figuring out where to find information and who approved it"
Sustainability Corporate, at Friesland Campina Simone
The Solution
"Automate answering ESG questionnaires and questions"
FrieslandCampina partnered with Passionfruit to streamline and automate its compliance workflows. The goal is to automate up to 90% of tasks, allowing experts and sales teams to focus on delivering value to customers.
Over two pilot phases, now extend into further collaboration, the work focused on
Automating Repetitive Tasks: Leveraging AI to analyze existing policies, reports, and past responses, Passionfruit generates the most relevant answers for each request in the required customer format, whether it’s Excel, PDF, or an online portal.
Centralizing Knowledge: Developing a centralized evidence library that houses previously approved answers and supporting knowledge. This library is automated and becomes smarter over time, making it easier to locate accurate and consistent information.
Building Confidence and Enhancing Collaboration: Passionfruit ensures transparency by showing exactly which document or previous response generated an answer. It includes a confidence score for each answer and will soon offer built-in approval and sharing workflows to streamline internal collaboration.
