Digitizing the hazelnut value chain

A deep-dive into how Loacker drives quality hazelnut farming and builds a transparent farm monitoring process

The challenge - perfectly balancing our contract and farmer collaboration

Loacker kick-started the "Italian hazelnut groves" project focusing on three elements: Quality, Italian Origin, and Sustainability. The company invested in 240 hectares having two self-owned estates, namely Corte Migliorina and Collelungo, located in the province of Grosseto. In addition, Loacker started a contract farming program that also hoped to provide a concrete income alternative and diversification possibility to farmers. The hazelnut project targeted complete control over the hazelnut chain in terms of traceability, processing and quality. Soon enough, the brand came face-to-face with numerous tangible and intangible challenges, such as:

• The inability to provide technical advice to farmers and monitor farms.
• Poor visibility into farmers’ cultivation processes and demarcation of their plots.
• Inherent quality issues of the hazelnut crop. While hazelnut is among the most sustainable crops requiring few interventions during cultivation, infestations of the stink bug from the North to the South can destroy the fruit and, therefore, must be tackled.