FrieslandCampina’s Approach to Meeting ESG Data Requests with Passionfruit

The Situation

"We’re receiving more ESG questions from customers and aim to be consistent."
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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.
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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.

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:‍

1. ‍Volume of Requests: Managing hundreds of questionnaires with unique formats created bottlenecks for both experts (e.g., sustainability and quality) and sales teams.
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2. 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.
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3. 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.

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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

1. 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.
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2. 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.
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3. 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.

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The Results

"Consistent responses to ESG requests from customers."

We expected to reduce 75% of FrieslandCampina's compliance workload from the start, but the challenge grew as customers brought increasingly complex Excel files, PDFs, and online portals. It wasn’t easy, but we took the time to crack the code—and we’re there now!

Initially, we could manage around 50% of the questionnaires FrieslandCampina received. Today, we’re up to 80%, and with upcoming "secret" features, we’re confident we can handle nearly 100% of the formats and shapes they encounter.

FrieslandCampina has been an incredible partner on this journey. Together, we’ve achieved some outstanding results:

• 1,000+ Consistent Answers: Fast, accurate responses with contextual evidence for customers.
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• Increased Speed: Teams saved hours previously spent searching for and formatting answers.
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• Improved Control and Collaboration: A clear audit trail and approval flow between sales and sustainability experts have enhanced control over what data is shared externally.
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• Bonus - Analytics and Insights: Automating the process instead of managing it manually has enabled us to track customer questions over time and identify potential data gaps. Interestingly, most customer queries have centered around climate change and governance—valuable insights for future strategy.

Looking forward, FrieslandCampina and Passionfruit are extending their collaboration. Not only to save their teams massive time, but foremost to be transparent towards its customers in a better way, whilst learning from it internally.

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