Data-driven decision making across the agriculture and food value chains
ACRE is McKinsey’s agricultural advanced-analytics center, with a team of agronomists, data scientists, industry experts, and software engineers experienced in applying analytics to challenges across the food system.
Reduce unit cost and volatility of commodity categories with advanced analytics decision-support tools.
Our Approach
Advanced analytics
Our advanced analytics capability combines real-time access to multiple critical data sets, modern data science tools, and cloud infrastructure specifically designed for rapid predictive modeling.
Industry expertise
Our team of agronomists, data scientists, industry experts, and software engineers have broad and deep expertise that allows them to bring a fresh perspective to solving challenges across the agricultural value chain.
Our capabilities
Predictive analytics
We use modern machine-learning and artificial-intelligence methods to forecast movements in commodity yield, quality, and price.
Geospatial analytics
We combine multiple layers of agronomic, weather, and satellite data to identify opportunities at the micromarket level.
Cloud infrastructure
We collect millions of datapoints with an automated ingestion and processing engine to enable faster insight generation.
Digital deployment
We build custom applications that integrate with existing systems to enable sustainable, real-time decision making.
Our Data
Economic and trade
Real-time, global commodity prices, production costs, and other indicators; import and export flows—today and in the future....
Climate and weather
More than 117 high-resolution variables, including real-time weather and 2030 and 2050 climate scenarios.
Satellite
Global satellite-imagery coverage from multiple sources.
Agronomic
Global agronomic data, including yield, soil, and topography data.
Examples of our work
Our work spans 6 continents
We continue to expand our global reach, helping clients across the agriculture and food value chains.
$125 million in additional revenue identified
Supported an agricultural-input supplier looking to increase penetration into smallholder markets in India.
More than 95 percent accuracy in a crop-yield forecast
Helped a North American food company trying to make better ingredient-purchasing decisions.
40,000 highly suitable hectares identified
Used geospatial analytics to determine crop fit for a large-scale plantation owner in the Middle East.
Following an announcement by the White House several weeks earlier, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a waiver on April 29 to allow the sale of E15 gasoline this summer.
CFO David Lee believes the company’s continued success will depend heavily on its ability to create many more “craveable” products and to maintain its corporate culture.
Consumer interest in non-meat-based protein options is increasing globally. Food industry players that want to capture the opportunity must understand the evolving market dynamics and where to place their bets.