Food, Beverage and Agriculture

How we help you manage your food, beverage and agriculture challenges

Operational risk and workforce disruption are increasingly intertwined. To address these complex challenges, you need a partner with knowledge in multiple disciplines. Our Food, Beverage and Agriculture industry team brings together specialists across:

• Insurance
• Risk
• Benefits
• Rewards
• Workforce strategy
• Data and analytics
• Multinational client service
• Policy wordings
• Claims

With this combined knowledge and expertise, we can help you:

• Understand your organization to mitigate your unique risks and operational needs
• Optimize employee pay benefits to meet the needs of employees and the organization
• Build resilience across your organization, from supply chains to workforce
• Manage the cyber risk and workforce skills that come with increasing automation
• Address emerging geopolitical challenges
• Protect against environmental and climate risks
• Reduce the overall cost of risk to your business
• Improve the efficiency and resilience of your operations

The food, beverage and agriculture businesses we serve

Our clients span the full supply chain. They include family-owned and private equity-backed businesses, cooperatives and publicly traded companies — from farm to fork, seed to supermarket shelf, including:

• Food producers and agribusiness
• Food manufacturers and processors
• Livestock and aquaculture
• Brewers, distillers and soft drink companies
• Bottlers
• Dairies
• Restaurants
• Vineyards
• Farmers
• Fruit producers and processors
• Distributors
• Wholesalers

How we address risk in the food, beverage and agriculture industry

We provide a service with traditional values, advice and relationships you can trust.

We combine our specialist industry knowledge with our data and analytics capabilities to design optimum, cost-efficient people and risk programs.

Our broking specialists then access the global insurance market, identifying the best partners to fit your risk management needs.

All of this is easily accessible to you through our client portal, ensuring instant access to information for efficient and proactive decision making.

Our global Food, Beverage and Agriculture practice brings our specialists from around the world together in one networked group. This enables us to find the most suitable risk management solutions anywhere in the world through our global hubs via a single point of access.

Advanced analytics and loss modeling

Analytics underpin everything we do. Our sophisticated loss modeling capabilities can help you predict likely risks years ahead and plan effective risk management strategies to deal with them.

Insights on emerging risks and trends

Our multidiscipline teams will give you regular, in-depth insights on emerging risks and trends affecting the food, beverage and agriculture industry. Our goal is to keep you ahead of events by looking beyond headlines to help you implement the right solutions for your organization.

Cost control

We use our evaluation and analysis of your risk exposures and operations to provide insights that help minimize your total cost of risk.

Managing climate risk

The food, beverage and agriculture industry is acutely affected by the changing climate. Extreme weather events, like droughts and floods, are already affecting property risks, and how and where food and beverage producers source raw materials. We offer a range of climate consulting services and tools that can help you get ahead of climate risk, including:

• Climate Quantified analyzes all your climate risks to show how they affect your operations, assets, supply chain partners and customers
• Climate Diagnostic can assess the likely risks at locations over time, based on future climate trends and scenarios
• Crop Risks and Opportunities Platform (CROP) uses layers of geodata to model the suitability of growing in a location in different time horizons and climate scenarios

Navigating supply chain disruption

Food, beverage and agriculture businesses face a growing number of disruptive challenges, from natural disasters to global conflicts and trade disputes, as well as traditional risks like product recalls, factory and warehouse fires. Our specialists can help you protect your business from the cascading impact of supply chain disruption through services such as:

• Marine insurance
• Transportation and logistics
• Pandemic response and resilience
• Non-damage business interruption

Addressing environmental exposures

Public and political awareness has increased pressure on the food, beverage and agriculture industry to improve environmental standards and reduce pollution. Our environmental risk specialists can help you understand the environmental impact of your operations, minimize pollution risks and mitigate the financial and reputational impact.

Protecting your automation from cyber risks

Automation and digitization continue to revolutionize the food, beverage and agriculture industry. But with increased automation comes new cyber risks, such as ransomware and cyberattacks that can disrupt your operations. Our cyber risk team can help you ensure your digital systems are resilient, whether through more effective cybersecurity tools or cyber insurance.

Addressing geopolitical risks

Conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have had a significant impact on global food, beverage and agriculture markets. Simultaneously, issues such as tariffs and trade barriers have added cost and complexity to business operations. Our team includes geopolitical risk specialists who can help you address these exposures and keep you aware of developments beyond the headlines.

Managing reputational risk

Food, beverage and agriculture businesses face unique reputational risks, including product contamination, recalls, labor issues, animal welfare and environmental stewardship. Our product recall and reputational risk teams can help you identify and prevent potential threats to your reputation and recover quickly if a crisis happens.

How can we support your sustainability strategy?

Our Food, Beverage and Agriculture team includes sustainability specialists who can help your organization address environmental issues and embed sustainability across your operations.

The adoption of sustainability standards in many countries has pushed environmental issues up the boardroom agenda. Our team can help your leaders and board develop a coherent strategy that addresses your role in environmental stewardship.

How we break through workforce challenges in food, beverage and agriculture

Food, beverage and agriculture companies are navigating persistent labor shortages, widening skills gaps and growing pressure to attract and retain talent in a market shaped by rising employee expectations and increasing benefit costs.

Automation and new operating models are reshaping the workforce and employers need bold strategies to outrun the pace of change.

We help organizations take action by strengthening rewards, employee experience, benefits operations and workforce strategy so they can attract the right talent, improve resilience and support long-term business performance.

1. Optimized total rewards: Attracting and retaining dedicated, qualified talent is critical to success in your industry. We provide the data, insights and strategies you need to compete effectively for scarce talent, improve employee resilience and keep your best people. Our services include:
   • Compensation strategy and design
   • Healthcare and wellbeing consulting
   • Retirement and financial resilience benefit strategy
   • Executive compensation reviews
   • Total rewards optimization surveys and analytics
2. Enhanced employee experience: Though pay and benefits are crucial, high-performing organizations recognize that a differentiated employee experience is equally important. We partner with you to design a high-performance employee experience that supports engagement, resilience and safety amid ongoing industry disruption. Our services include:
   • Employee engagement surveys and software to help organizations understand evolving employee needs and sentiment
   • Employee communication strategy and implementation
   • Pay equity and transparency analysis and design
   • An employee experience platform — Embark — that provides timely information at critical moments
3. Efficient benefits operations: Operational efficiency is critical to your organization’s ability to compete in a tight labor market. We can help you leverage resources and improve outcomes with services such as:
   • Global retirement management
   • Benefits harmonization
   • Merger and acquisition support and solutions
      
4. Workforce management: As consolidation and automation transform how work gets done, we provide a holistic view of all the skills your organization has today and will need tomorrow. Together, we’ll design a workforce strategy that improves performance, supports quality and strengthens financial resilience. Our services include:
   • Workforce Analytics Dashboard and workforce management strategy and solutions
   • Career analysis and design, job architecture and job leveling
   • Work transformation and a skills-first approach to work architecture
   • Talent intelligence reports and labor market insights
   • Collective bargaining strategy, design and tools
5. Transaction support: As companies increasingly pursue transactions to drive growth and innovation, we offer support across all people and risk aspects of a deal:
   • Pre-deal assessment and due diligence
   • Integration planning
   • Retention of critical talent
   • Total rewards integration
   • Culture and change management
   • Risk, insurance and financial protection

Effective use of capital

Mounting cost pressures and industry consolidation require organizations to adopt new capital management practices. We can help with investment advisory services and M&A solutions for any organization. Our services include:

• Outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO)
• Funds and strategies
• Retirement
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Endowment and foundation investment strategy