Why Tradin Organic wants supplement makers off spot buying for key ingredients

Warm nights in Peru this year kept mango trees from flowering, and the season came up short. Mexico's did too. Patrick Wilhelmy, a sales specialist at organic ingredient supplier Tradin Organic, used those mangoes at SupplySide Global 2026 to describe what he called a "super El Niño" that hit crops across the tropical belt, with banana, dragon fruit and cocoa also taking damage.

His advice, reported by Erin McEvoy in Nutritional Outlook, was aimed at whoever signs the ingredient contracts: move as much buying as possible away from transactional spot purchasing and toward supplier partnerships. The session, moderated by SupplySide Journal managing editor Duffy Hayes, paired him with Sarah Vito, who leads North American business development at FairWild, the Switzerland-based nonprofit that certifies wild-harvested ingredients. Vito covered wild sourcing, and Wilhelmy covered cultivated supply chains.

For a procurement director at a supplement or packaged-goods maker, the useful part is the decision framework. Wilhelmy treated climate exposure as a question of how each ingredient is bought, and he laid out three ways to buy it.

A hard year for farmed and wild crops

Wilhelmy listed the weather events doing the damage: early blooms, late frosts, heavy rain and drought, all cutting yields and making them harder to predict. Manufacturers meet that while customers keep asking for organic, clean-label, functional and affordable products, and while geopolitical and fuel-cost risks stack on top. When supply breaks, he said, the costs show up as misproduced or missed launches, quality and regulatory problems, and higher prices on the spot market.

When warm nights stop mango trees in Peru from flowering, the spot market can tell a buyer what scarce fruit costs, but it cannot grow any more of it.

Cocoa got a special mention as a crop carrying extra pressures. That pressure has a recent history: Food Technology magazine, published by the Institute of Food Technologists, reported in 2024 that cocoa prices had climbed 136% over two years, citing the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and linking the rise to heat waves and intense rain on West African plantations. The same piece described erratic weather in Vietnam pushing coffee growers from arabica toward the more weather-resistant but more bitter robusta. For a formulator, that is the less obvious cost: weather can change the ingredient itself, not just its price.

FoodNavigator's Deniz Ataman heard the same theme at a Climate Week panel in New York in September, where Chiara Cecchini of Savor described price swings in cocoa butter and palm oil tied to El Niño and other shocks as a standing feature of the supply chain. She also described a change in motive. "We have seen a big shift in the conversation from sustainability-centric topics and discussions to resiliency-centric ones," she said, adding that people care because their business otherwise suffers. That lines up with Wilhelmy's list of costs: missed launches and spot premiums land in the operating budget.

The wild side behaves the same way, with fewer buffers. Vito explained that many ingredients are gathered from the wild because they can't be cultivated, or because communities have long traditions of collecting them. Her examples were baobab, now moving into food, gum arabic, and shea for cosmetics. In the session video posted by SupplySide, she added that gum arabic is already the subject of heated conversations because of civil unrest in Sudan, a reminder that weather is not the only pressure on these chains.

Drought and major flooding can wipe out harvest areas, and she put it plainly: whatever goes wrong in cultivation is probably going wrong in wild harvesting too. Deserts and tropical rainforests face particular pressure, she said, though many landscapes are affected. Collectors in rural areas face greater exposure, since they often lack a wider community to lean on when a devastating loss hits.

She also warned that climate-driven pressure can heighten tension and push people toward desperate acts, raising the risk that both people and land are exploited. That suggests supply could be at risk well before it reaches a broker, and that a brand's exposure could be ethical as well as volumetric. Hayes had opened with a point from the American Botanical Council's HerbalGram: ecosystems are already shifting under 1 to 2 degrees of warming.

Spot, partnership or ownership

Wilhelmy described three supply models, each a step further from the open market:

1. Independent, transactional purchasing, bought as needed at the going price.
2. Partnerships that pair volume commitments with technical services for the supplier.
3. Fully integrated arrangements involving asset ownership, investment and committed volumes.

He was candid that "strategic supply ecosystem" is buzzword territory, and said the point underneath it is simply partnership. The middle tier is where most of the mechanics sit. Tradin Organic runs development finance and technical services arms, sometimes alongside NGOs and development banks, to help suppliers improve practices and grow. He said development banks take part because, from their side, the work is a standard business loan, and it also counts toward their sustainability goals.

That detail matters for budgeting. If upstream farm work is financed as credit, it doesn't have to come out of a brand's marketing or sustainability budget; what the brand contributes is the commitment to buy. FoodNavigator's Climate Week coverage describes the same logic one link further down the chain. Michelle Zackin of Round River Provisions said retailer purchase commitments give suppliers the bankable signal to scale, and that an equity investment alone doesn't guarantee an ingredient lands on shelf.

Put the two accounts together and committed volume looks like the thing that makes a supplier investable, whether the buyer is a grocery chain or a supplement brand.

Peru, Sierra Leone and Indonesia at field scale

Wilhelmy's case studies show what the partnership tier involves on the ground. A project in Peru is moving cocoa, citrus and ginger growers off slash-and-burn farming and onto agroforestry. In Sierra Leone, a cocoa project aims to reach roughly 5,000 farmers across about 2,000 hectares. In Indonesia, a three-year coconut sugar project is adding dwarf coconut trees and more efficient cook stoves, and US brand Purely Elizabeth is telling that story in its marketing.

Large buyers run the same play at bigger scale. Food Technology's 2024 report described ofi (olam food ingredients) working with the U.S. Agency for International Development and Hershey on the Landscape Approach to Sustainable and Climate Change Resilient Cocoa and Coffee Agroforestry (LASCARCOCO) in Indonesia. Kamesh Ellajosyula, ofi's president and chief innovation and quality officer, explained the appeal in terms Wilhelmy would recognize: "We seek partnership because it offers multiple things. One is commitment." Hershey future-proofs its supply, Indonesia's government protects its farmers, and partners bring growing know-how, the same mix of buyer commitment, public money and technical help that Tradin Organic describes.

The wild-harvest equivalent is certification. FairWild's standard has been in place for 20 years and rests on seven principles spanning ecology, fair treatment of people and legal business practice, Vito said in the session. The ecological side looks at harvest impact on plant populations and the species around them, and the legality side targets illegal harvesting and trafficking. Certified ingredients come from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America.

Brands certified under it can say their supply chain treats collectors fairly and can tell the story of the community's relationship with the land. She added that consumers are interested in the story behind a product and that a good one can tip a purchase, though economics drives buyers too.

Zackin offered the retail-side check on that. In her account, retailers first ask whether a product fits the category, meets demand and hits the price, and the sustainability claim comes last, as the cherry on top. Read alongside Wilhelmy, the order of value is clear: supply security is the reason to sign the partnership, and the marketing story is a bonus that arrives with it.

Where partnership is the wrong tool

Committed volume is still a commitment. A brand that locks in tonnage for an ingredient with many interchangeable origins could be giving up flexibility it doesn't need to give up. The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport UK's Appetite for Change report frames resilience as a balance, with food and drink companies moving from pure just-in-time toward just-in-case approaches alongside supplier diversification, while Cecchini argued that resilience comes from widening sourcing options. For broadly traded inputs, mapping and qualified backups may do most of the work, and the deeper partnership tiers make most sense for ingredients with few viable origins.

Food Technology's reporting fills in what that backup work looks like. Christy Slay, CEO of The Sustainability Consortium, described buffering through inventory, lead time and capacity: warehousing more product than before, and keeping a capacity buffer of pre-vetted suppliers and countries to turn to when something breaks. Conagra is among the companies co-sourcing or dual sourcing key ingredients. Ellajosyula added one more buffer, reformulation, for when an ingredient or origin becomes unavailable or simply too costly.

Those tools map neatly onto Wilhelmy's spot tier. They are how a transactional buyer stays covered without signing a volume commitment.

The commitment also has to work for the party making it. Mohan Valluri, EVP of co-manufacturer Alamance Foods, told the Climate Week panel that retailer engagement gives manufacturers confidence an innovation has long-term support, as long as the volumes make sense for the manufacturer. A brand sizing a pledge to a farm project could reasonably run the same test from the buyer's side.

Wilhelmy acknowledged the scale problem himself. Most supplement and packaged-goods brands can't realistically build a financing arm, so he suggested working through suppliers that already have one. Quality teams should also note that FairWild audits best practices and works with operators to improve their systems, but leaves analytical methods for harvest consistency to the operators.

There is one more payoff that procurement and sustainability teams could share. The CILT report puts the food and beverage sector's Scope 3 emissions at, on average, 45 times its Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and Valluri told the Climate Week panel that retailers and foodservice operators increasingly ask for reporting across all three scopes. General Mills, for one, says most of its emissions occur outside its own operations, with agriculture the largest contributor.

A contributor from Planet Farms writes in the CILT report that regulatory scrutiny, from supply chain due diligence requirements to Scope 3 reporting, will demand a level of traceability most supply chains cannot currently provide. A supplier relationship with technical services attached is also a route to the farm-level data those requests depend on.

Sorting ingredients by tier

Wilhelmy laid out three practical steps. First, map ingredients and supply chains to see where climate, geopolitical and tariff risk are concentrated. Second, qualify backup origins and varieties. Third, work with upstream partners on the key ingredients. He was blunt about what happens if companies skip this work: buying on a purely transactional basis raises the odds that a given ingredient won't be available in a given year. He ended on the upside. In his view, the industry has a huge opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the world, and to do it in ways that are material to each company's own business.

The mapping exercise will sort most portfolios quickly. The hard calls come with ingredients like cocoa, mango or wild-gathered botanicals, where origins are few and this year's weather has already shown what a short season looks like. Those are the ones where a volume commitment buys something the spot market can't sell.