13 March 2026
We’re proud to announce that Tilda has been named Winner of the Supply Chain Sustainability Project of the Year at the prestigious edie Awards. This recognition belongs first and foremost to the farmers in our supply chain and to our teams in India who walk the fields alongside them every season, working together to reduce the climate impact of rice cultivation while strengthening farmer livelihoods.
edie Award Transcript
edie Awards: SUPPLY CHAIN SUSTAINABILITY PROJECT OF THE YEAR 2026
WINNER: TILDA: REDUCING THE CLIMATE IMPACTS OF GROWING RICE
AT A GLANCE:
Who: Basmati rice brand Tilda
What: A farm-level sustainability initiative
Where: India
Why: To cut greenhouse gas emissions and resource use in rice cultivation while strengthening farmer resilience and income
When: 2021, ongoing
Tilda won edie’s award for supply chain sustainability for a farm-level basmati programme that tackles the biggest source of emissions in its upstream value chain while improving farmer livelihoods.
The challenge
Rice cultivation is both emissions intensive and highly resource dependent, with flooded fields driving methane emissions, fertiliser use contributing to nitrous oxide emissions, and pumping and input production increasing energy demand. For Tilda, these impacts are concentrated at farm level, creating a hard-to abate emissions profile in which downstream efficiencies alone cannot deliver a credible reduction pathway.
The company also faced the practical challenge common to agricultural decarbonisation: changes must be adopted by thousands of independent farmers, each balancing cost, yield risk and pest pressures, often with limited access to trusted agronomic support.
The solution
Tilda built a science-based, evidence-led farm programme that supports farmers to adopt lower-impact practices without undermining productivity. The initiative combines regular advisory visits with practical interventions, including Alternate Wet and Dry irrigation to reduce continuous flooding, and Integrated Pest Management measures that reduce reliance on chemical pesticides.
Participation is voluntary each year, with farmers agreeing to meet defined standards in return for advice, inputs and equipment designed to lower costs and improve outcomes. The model also recognises the particular risks of basmati cultivation through a price premium when farmers sell rice to Tilda, while explicitly not requiring sales to Tilda as a condition of receiving support, which helps build trust and reduce perceptions of lock-in.
How the project works
The programme is delivered through a farm extension network that provides ongoing guidance and helps farmers implement new techniques in-field. Tilda measures progress through structured data collection from representative samples of farms within the programme and a separate sample using traditional practices, enabling benchmarking of input use, yields and production methods. This data is analysed independently by an agricultural economist and used to estimate emissions outcomes through a widely used farm-level greenhouse gas calculator, the Cool Farm Tool.
The results
By 2025, the initiative was operational across 70% of Tilda’s Indian basmati farm supply base, scaling from a 50-farmer pilot in 2021 to more than 3,000 farmers by 2024. Compared with farms outside the scheme, participating farms used 24% less fertiliser and 24% less irrigation water per tonne of rice grown, alongside 27% lower energy use. These changes translated into materially lower climate impact, with participating farms generating around one-third less CO2e per tonne of rice.
The programme also strengthened farm economics, with evidence indicating higher yields and improved income per hectare, helping to drive retention and expansion by demonstrating that lower-impact cultivation can be commercially beneficial.
THE JUDGES SAID…
“Great programme showing how good environmental management can help deliver economic benefits also.”