SAI Platform Dairy Working Group Advances Shared Pathways to Sustainability
24th April 2026
SAI Platform’s Dairy Working Group met in Vevey, Switzerland, from 14 to 16 April.
The SAI Platform Dairy Working Group convened its Spring 2026 meeting at Nestlé Suisse HQ in Vevey, Switzerland, bringing together 47 participants from 36 of the world’s leading dairy businesses. At the centre of the discussions was a shared challenge: how to translate ambition into measurable progress towards a more sustainable dairy future.
The group focused on several key themes, including: SAI Platform’s Sustainable Dairy Partnership (SPD), the dairy sector transition towards regenerative agriculture and preparation for future supply chain resilience in the sector.
SDP emerged as a central topic of discussion during the meeting, widely recognised as a “joining glue” for the sector by bringing greater coherence to sustainability reporting across dairy supply chains. Participants explored how evolving market expectations, regulatory developments, and industry needs are shaping the role of SDP. Discussions focused on how the framework can continue to evolve to remain aligned with these changes ensuring its ongoing relevance to the sector, sustaining engagement across stakeholders, and ultimately delivering on its purpose as a practical, trusted reporting tool.
As the dairy industry increasingly transitions towards regenerative agriculture, members presented case studies demonstrating tangible progress in on-farm implementation. Updates from collaborative initiatives, such as the Future Fit Dairy Initiative highlighted how the Regenerating Together Programme (RTP) is beginning to scale across dairy supply chains. Carbon accounting methodologies are known to be key enablers of on-farm investment, and work is underway to better understand how the dairy sector can better align on their use.
Looking further ahead, a “futures session” invited participants to test their assumptions against four plausible global scenarios. By examining how the dairy sector might respond under different conditions, the group identified a set of robust, actionable steps that can be taken now to build resilience, regardless of how the future unfolds.
The meeting concluded with the launch of the Dairy Working Group Competition, creating a platform for members to put forward innovative sustainability projects and accelerate shared learning across the network.
In a sustainability landscape shaped by shared challenges, progress increasingly depends on alignment of data, methodologies, and on‑farm practices. Over the course of the meeting, what emerged was not only a series of technical advances, but a clearer understanding of the central role collective action must play.
By convening competitors alongside partners, SAI Platform creates the conditions for that alignment to take hold, reducing fragmentation, building trust in common approaches, and accelerating convergence so that solutions can move more rapidly from pilot to scale across the dairy sector.