General Mills partnered with Quantis and Regrow to advance regenerative agriculture and accurately measure Scope 3 emissions across its supply chain. With over 90% of the company’s emissions coming from agriculture, General Mills needed a scalable, credible way to track practice adoption and environmental outcomes. The collaboration used Regrow’s Sustainability Insights SaaS product, whose development was led by Jeff Butler, and applied Quantis’ sustainability consulting expertise to translate insights into Scope 3 accounting aligned with GHG Protocol standards (source).
This case study highlights Jeff’s time as a full-time employee at Regrow Ag.
General Mills, Inc. is the leading American producer of packaged consumer foods, especially flour, breakfast cereals, snacks, prepared mixes, and similar products. It is also one of the largest food service manufacturers in the world. Its headquarters are in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
General Mills committed to reducing absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across its full value chain by 30% by 2030, with over 90% of those emissions classified as Scope 3, primarily from upstream agricultural production (per General Mills Global Responsibility Report). Meeting this target required much more than traditional estimation methods, it called for a scientific, scalable, and dynamic system to measure the environmental outcomes of regenerative practices at the landscape level in alignment with GHG Protocol Scope 3 Category 1 standards (source).
Together with Quantis (a leader in sustainability consulting), Regrow Ag was selected as a technical partner to build the measurement and monitoring engine. The system had to deliver:
To meet these needs, Regrow deployed its Sustainability Insights platform, which became the central analytics and monitoring layer for General Mills’ regenerative agriculture program. This product integrates remote sensing, process-based modeling, and procurement logic into one seamless solution, helping sustainability teams track practice adoption and emissions reductions across supply sheds, even without full grower participation.
At the core of this solution was Jeff Butler, the architect and product lead for Sustainability Insights. Jeff was responsible for designing the architecture of Sustainability Insights to meet the demands of scientific validity, compliance, and business utility. His core insight was that food companies needed a platform that translated agronomic models and geospatial signals into digestible KPIs aligned with Scope 3 reporting and procurement decision-making.
He envisioned and delivered a system that could:
These outputs were embedded into Sustainability Insights dashboards, enabling seamless integration into ESG reports, investor disclosures, and internal OKR tracking.
The solution provided General Mills with field-level visibility, emissions modeling, and supply shed benchmarking—without requiring full grower reporting. This enabled the company to identify regions with high mitigation potential, target farmer incentives effectively, and report progress toward climate goals with confidence. The partnership demonstrated how advanced data science and sustainability strategy can work together to operationalize regenerative agriculture and climate-smart sourcing at scale.
Overall, the General Mills x Quantis x Regrow collaboration, anchored by Jeff’s work, delivered several critical achievements:
General Mills became one of the first global food companies to pair remote MRV systems with Scope 3 climate accounting, setting a new bar for measurement-based decarbonization.
