The scholarly foundation
The peer-reviewed work covers four connected problems: including smallholders in palm oil certification, how sustainable procurement develops under stakeholder pressure, what blocks analytics-based auditing, and how to price reputational risk into supplier selection.
Proposes a framework converting RSPO certification from punitive to preventive, enabling genuine smallholder inclusion.
Production Planning & Control
Bridging operations management theory with sustainable farming research opportunities.
Production and Operations Management
Identifies and maps barriers to adoption of BDA-based auditing systems using Interpretive Structural Modelling.
Computers & Industrial Engineering
Proposes a sourcing risk framework including reputational risk as a core variable in supplier selection decisions.
British Food Journal
The definitive academic text on why transformation fails and what it requires.
Dr Manish Shukla and Vickey Swami. Kogan Page.
Four studies across palm oil, dairy, rural value chains and SME logistics, each producing the constraints the published work then formalised.
Sponsored by P&G
Diagnosed structural constraints preventing RSPO certification. Designed a Big Data Analytics framework to convert the certification process from punitive to preventive, addressing the barriers that kept smallholder farmers outside a system designed in their name.
Palm oil
Sponsored by Innovate UK
Developed a modelling and assessment capability to optimize the design, production and supply of sustainable home and personal care consumer products and meet net zero carbon targets.
Consumer goods
Sponsored by CII & USAID
Assessed commodity value chains across Eastern India, identifying barriers and enablers for sustainable economic transformation, bridging policy, infrastructure, and supply chain design in a single research engagement.
Agri-food
Grant-funded · North East UK
Developed and deployed an AI routing application for SMEs in North East UK. Demonstrated that transformation does not require multinational resources. It requires the right technology, applied with precision to the right problem.
SME & fleet
Enquiries
The initiative conducts sponsored field research with brands, industry bodies and funders. Each of the four studies above began as a defined question.