Summary
Discover how Danone México, global food and beverage leader, is accelerating its water strategy by partnering with Waterplan to streamline and enhance basin prioritization, find vetted partners for implementation projects by estimating pre-project volumetric water benefits (VWB), and tracking progress towards VWB targets. Danone leverages Waterplan's advanced technology and expert support to track progress, manage projects, and achieve its ambitious water positive goals.
Before Waterplan
Danone is committed to its water positive strategy, aiming to replenish more water than it consumes in high-water-risk areas. The Danone Impact Journey has set the target of improving water access for 20 million people by 2025 and is developing plans to preserve and restore watersheds in high-water stressed areas where they operate by 2030. Danone employs a 4R approach – reduce, reduce, recycle, reclaim – in all their production sites.
To advance this strategy further, Danone México partnered with Waterplan to address key challenges in managing and validating water replenishment projects.
The partnership addresses the following challenges:
Unstandardized and complex data: Gathering and standardizing data for each basin can be highly complex. Each location is unique and requires different types of data to quantify and report impact.
Time-consuming partner search: Managers use to take significant time finding the right partners and collecting their information. Danone needed to streamline the sourcing and validation of water replenishment projects within prioritized basins to ensure accurate Volumetric Water Benefit (VWB) claims.
Unclear project progress tracking: Tracking and understanding progress towards water stewardship targets is difficult, as it requires a robust and transparent monitoring system. Efficiently managing and tracking numerous projects across different basins and with various partners demanded a centralized platform.
Centralizing & Standardizing Basin Data
Danone works with diverse types of water data, including spatial data, which previously required multiple methodologies to analyze—making it difficult to communicate progress and slowing decision-making. Relying on manual spreadsheets made it especially challenging and time-intensive to estimate project impact and track progress with accuracy.
With Waterplan’s platform, Danone now benefits from centralized access to high-quality, up-to-date global and local water data. This enables the team to gain actionable insights into water risk and better understand the dynamics of each basin and the communities that depend on it. By deeply understanding local context, Danone can identify and select replenishment projects that directly address shared water challenges in a meaningful, locally relevant way—ensuring initiatives have a real, lasting impact.
Sources and data include global coverage, such as GRACE satellite imagery, ERA 5 climate models, GloFAS forecasts and monitoring, World Bank report
Counting with high-quality data ensures that Danone will have a detailed understanding of their sites water risks, eliminating risks for false positives or negatives, and therefore allowing them to be efficient with resource allocation. This data helps Danone enhance risk understanding and make informed decisions on prioritization.
Streamlined Partner & Project Sourcing
Waterplan’s water expert team helped Danone define their ideal partner profile and, through Waterplan’s network of vetted local implementation partners, match with organizations to help Danone fund replenishment initiatives for target fulfillment.
Waterplan’s water advisors guide Danone through project selection, helping them maximize the impact of their investments and efforts by evaluating pre-project VWB estimations to validate proposals. By engaging with local partners to evaluate potential projects, Waterplan helped Danone:
Connect with 22 organizations, hosting multiple discussions to understand local challenges and how to best address them
Explore projects in 5 basins
Receive 15 tailored project proposals within these basins, each screened by Waterplan’s water advisory team to understand VWB and scaling potential
Waterplan’s partner scouting was successful, and Danone began working towards fulfilling their replenishment target.
Seamless Project Monitoring
Whereas Danone used to work with manual spreadsheets to measure project progress, Waterplan’s platform automates monitoring and standardizes methodologies for tracking and reporting, ensuring that Danone’s ongoing projects are backed by reliable data and robust methodologies, providing confidence in the accuracy of VWB estimations.
The platform creates clear and concise project factsheets for all projects to support strategic decision-making, including the geographic information system that helps easily identify the connection between watersheds according to the level of HydroBASIN. By storing data and analyses from a single source of truth platform, Danone can easily track progress to replenishment targets and identify gaps, simulating project addition to manage them.
Target Tracking
Before partnering with Waterplan, Danone relied on manual spreadsheets to track project progress—an approach that often limited visibility and slowed response times. By adopting Waterplan’s platform, Danone can now monitor replenishment targets with greater clarity, proactively identify the needs of Volumetric Water Benefit (VWB) projects, and foster stronger collaboration across teams.
The platform streamlines target tracking and enables rapid simulations of replenishment gaps and timelines, empowering Danone to manage water resources more efficiently. In the context of water stewardship—where precision and adaptability are critical—these real-time simulations help the company quickly spot shortfalls and dynamically adjust its strategies to ensure optimal resource allocation and progress toward sustainability goals.
Takeaways
This case study highlights how Danone uses Waterplan’s technology and expert support to enhance its water stewardship efforts, streamlining project management, improving data transparency, and enabling informed decision-making. With a centralized system that standardizes and validates water data, Danone is accelerating its Water Positive Strategy and making a significant, measurable impact on water stewardship. Danone utilizes Waterplan's platform to centralize water targets, project portfolios, and progress against targets. The partnership includes continuous support, project sourcing for new projects, project validation, and annual project monitoring.
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