Usually evaluations are done based on KPIs like cost. But trust in a partnership is key, so you're trying to, as much as possible, gauge the trustworthiness of a potential partner.

Whether you're an entrepreneur or a multinational, you have to go and work with the people where the things are hitting the ground and where the action takes place.

As a company gets bigger, departments are working more and more independently and getting more and more specialised. It's always important to still realise we're one team, one company, and to have cross-functional collaboration.

Try to find a model where you can experiment on a small scale. Then you observe what's happening, you fine tune, you learn, and you keep tinkering until you feel that you’ve nailed it.

Pakistan is a huge country where a lot of people are still living in rural areas, we used to focus our sales mostly in the cities. Then we thought, we are buying the milk from small milk farmers,  our trucks pick up the milk twice a day but they go there empty and then they come back with milk. So we said, why don't we put some products on the truck from the factory to the villages and in between getting milk, they can do the distribution of our products and then the trucks come back full with milk.

It's about finding the right opportunities to introduce technology. You want to take out of people's roles what is not interesting, so that what is left is more innovation, more creativity, more productivity.

What the supply chain is supposed to do is deliver the goods to the customers in a reliable way and, for the modern trade at least, that is measured by the Advantage Report, which is survey results published by the Advantage Group. 

In a high-performance team, you have all sorts of hard productivity metrics that you want to measure. But the soft part is not to be ignored and needs to be looked at as well. I always try to bring it back to this holistic impact.

Communities are not necessarily served by getting handouts. We started to work on a creche for the working moms, and fencing around the fields to prevent the cows from getting stolen or lost. That's how you naturally build a whole community with more and more people getting involved. It’s not something like profit sharing, but it's incorporated in the way the company works.

We're working with a farmer in the George area to become carbon neutral and be the first net-zero dairy farm in Africa. This involves the installation of solar panels, changing how the cows are treated, different irrigation techniques  in the grazing fields and replacing artificial fertilisers with natural fertilisers such as chicken manure. This is a big operation with hundreds of cows, so the impact will be meaningful.