A Conversation with Raphaelle Hemmerlin, Chief Innovation Officer for Sucafina. 

Good morning, Raphaelle, and welcome to Commodity Conversations. First, could you tell me a little about your career so far? 

I’m French and have been in the commodity business for twenty years.

When I was young, I always wanted to do something where I would speak different languages.  I found a course on transport and logistics in an international school based in Paris and began my career with Bolloré, one of the largest French forwarding companies. I enjoyed it, but they did not pay me much, and I was keen to progress.

In 2006, when I was 22, I visited Geneva and said, “Oh, this is a great place to live, and the salaries are much higher than in France!”

I interviewed with Sucafina and joined the company as a logistics officer, overseeing East African export logistics. Five years later, the company appointed me to a position as senior logistic coordinator.

I felt the company at that time lacked vision, and there was little opportunity for me to grow in my career. I decided to widen my horizons and joined BNP Paribas in their commodity trade finance department. I spent three years with them in their front office, discovering the world of soft commodity finance. It was a tremendous experience, and I built a great network, but I didn’t like the bank’s environment. It excluded all aspects of entrepreneurship.

I had kept in touch with Sucafina, who, during this time, had developed a vision, a culture, and a growth strategy. I came back to them. I have gone from senior logistics coordination to heading group logistics and operational efficiency in the ten years since then. I have been responsible for technology and innovation for the past six months.

What does your current role entail?

It mainly entails project coordination. Sucafina fosters entrepreneurship as one of the company’s core values. We don’t have a single person leading innovation. Every employee comes up with ideas, and my job is to implement those ideas.

I love it, as we have an immense capacity for brainstorming, trying, failing, and learning. We have an escalation guide and an organization that can bet on the ideas with the most potential at the group level. My role is to bring project management together, align the strategy in the innovation pilots, meet with partners, decide whether to invest in start-ups and lead the teams that can scale from piloting to implementation.

You mentioned that you invest in start-ups. Would these be external to Sucafina?

Both external and internal. I don’t do the financial analysis and due diligence, but we invest in start-ups external to Sucafina. We have also taken an internally generated idea, scaled it, and spun it off as a start-up.

Could you describe Sucafina to people that don’t know the company? 

Sucafina is a family-owned coffee merchant which aims to be the world’s leading sustainable farm-to-roaster coffee company.

How does your experience in logistics and finance help you in your current role? 

My experience has given me a 360° view of coffee and soft commodities. It helps me listen to people in the supply chain and understand their needs, dependencies, and pain points. My network allows me to discuss ideas, leverage and scale them.

Working with the bank expanded my network. It helps to have counterparties with whom you can brainstorm – to say, “Hey, I have this idea; what do you think on your side? Is it a pain point for you? Shall we try it together?”

Logistics present an immense opportunity for innovation. Many people are still doing things the way they always did them. The number of actors in the chain is crazy – from the people loading the trucks, stuffing the containers, processing the customs forms, signing the bill of lading etc. There are so many steps.  Having this experience helps me to speak the language and understand a project.

Is it usual for companies to have a designated head of innovation? 

The head of a research department could potentially have the same role, but I haven’t seen that specific title in any commodities trading company. It’s new even for Sucafina; the company created the position just six months ago.

But I stress that I don’t aim to be the person who is doing the innovation. My objective is to be the enabler for the company’s innovation strategy. My role is to create value for our clients, our suppliers, and our ecosystem in general.

It is slightly different in logistics because of my background in them. I have a pool of opportunities for innovation that I pilot and develop with the team. I’m deeply involved in all the innovations, ideas, proposals, and pilots that touch the logistics aspect of the company. But in other areas of innovation, I am more involved with finding the winners and scaling them up.

Do you find resistance within the company from people who say, “We’ve always done it this way; why should we change?”

We can find resistance to change, sometimes because of a fear of the unknown, sometimes because people are too busy.

But even when people were busy with Covid, we still managed to implement and scale innovation in document handling. Even though there was freight squeeze, COVID, and many other issues, the team managed to pilot, validate, and implement a tool that enabled us, together with custom brokers and trucking companies, to create digital documents in ten different origins of the group.

I recently interviewed the CEO of Covantis. Are you involved in Covantis? 

No. Covantis tackles soft commodities from a grain perspective. Grains move mainly in breakbulk, whereas coffee moves in containers. You might imagine these are the same, but the processes and actors differ. We use Cargoo, a different platform. It is better suited to our needs.

Cargoo was my first experience of leading innovation at Sucafina, starting in 2017 when the platform was at its beginning. We wanted to innovate in the sector and supported Cargoo as a partner. It was an amazing experience.

But document handling is not the only area for innovation in logistics.  There are many more.

Such as smart containers?  

Smart containers help when you need help. They can make a difference in specific cases, for example, in the case of theft. You don’t need smart containers when everything goes well. Their use case is rather limited, but they don’t cost much. You gain a lot of data, but we have not yet learned how to compute and leverage that data. We are working on it.

Are you duplicating Farmer Connect with your smart containers? 

For the sea voyage, potentially, yes.

But the Farmer Connect story is different. Farmer Connect is the spin-off of an idea from Dave Behrends, Sucafina’s head of trading. I participated in it from the very beginning.

The use case is to provide farm-to-roaster traceability. Farmer Connect puts the miles before and after the container into a tangible form. You can attach information about the farmers, soil analysis, deforestation, and carbon emissions. Smart containers just tell you if your goods are inside the container and what happens to them while they are in it.

I read you moved Vietnamese coffee to Europe in breakbulk at one stage. It was innovation going in reverse. How did it work out?

It worked out well, but, as you say, it was going back to how merchants transported coffee 50-70 years ago.

There was a freight squeeze at the time, and instead of paying $1,000 to ship a container from Asia to Europe, we were suddenly paying $13,000 per container. It didn’t make sense for a low-margin business like coffee. We decided to try breakbulk whilst ensuring we maintained food safety and traceability. We had to relearn everything. It was stressful, but we learned a lot. We could do it again if the situation arises.

Innovation covers so many different things. Could you give some examples of where you’re currently innovating along the supply chain?

We are working on waste and water management in coffee washing stations to reduce carbon emissions and create value for farmers.  We operate two pilot plants that take the water, clean it, and reuse it in a closed cycle. Up until today, it was not something you could do in coffee. Usually, you use the water, clean it, and then dump it.  Having a closed cycle reduces water consumption. We are currently trying to perfect the technology and, once we do, will introduce it across all our origins.

We are also working on the way we dry coffee beans. You’ve perhaps seen coffee being dried in the sun on tables. It’s what they do in Africa, but most other origins dry the coffee in machines that use a lot of energy. We are currently testing using electricity from solar panels to power the devices and then recycling the generated heat.

Otherwise, we are currently talking with companies about bean-free coffee. It’s an interesting debate. Bean-free coffee could have potential. It could reduce coffee’s carbon footprint. It could bring new flavours. But at Sucafina, we are very attached to the farm and the farmer. So, this is the kind of innovation where we want to learn and be informed, to know what is happening, what the consumer appetite is for it, and how it could benefit the environment.

Some companies buy carbon offsets to meet consumer demand for carbon-free coffee. Carbon offsets have fallen out of favour recently. Is carbon-free coffee possible without carbon offsets? 

End to end, I don’t think so. However, you can reduce emissions and create carbon insets.

We start by choosing the right variety of seeds to grow trees that need less water and give farmers better yields. We then look to see if we have good regenerative agriculture practices. If you combine both with soil analysis, multi-crops around the coffee, and reduced water consumption during processing, then, potentially, we can think of having a carbon footprint close to zero. I don’t dare say it would be zero, but it can be close to zero. I think it’s possible.

For the rest of the chain, you’re dependent on the partners. You depend on your trucking company, shipping line company, and logistic distributor. Can Sucafina be the driver of change? No, standalone, we cannot. Can we use offsets to reduce those parts of the chain where we cannot go to zero? Yes, if it’s beneficial, let’s do it.

What about green financing – is it still a thing?

It’s still there, but it doesn’t mean lower interest rates. It doesn’t work like that. What happens is you link borrowing conditions to certain environmental and social goals. We get reduced interest rates and return them directly through investment in sustainability projects.

It’s a positive cycle. It’s a way to incentive the industry to change and to achieve goals, but at some point, it becomes the standard.  Today, you’re super happy when you meet specified objectives, but once you reach them, they become the baseline.

In other words, the banks won’t finance you unless you meet certain sustainability criteria. 

Exactly. The trend is in this direction.

Of the different things Sucafina does regarding innovation, which is the one you’re most proud of? 

I’m most proud of Farmer Connect. I love that it’s a data-driven innovation where you give the benefits back to the farmers. It is a start-up whose purpose is to improve farmer incomes by allowing them to monetize their data and be at the centre of traceability.

I’m super proud of how we have transformed logistics at Sucafina. My son was in the office last week, and I kept him busy archiving documents. I laughed because all the documents were dated from 2006 to 2017, but none after 2017. It was a huge change in how people worked, sending 2,000 emails daily, printing every contract, putting them on the file, scanning documents, and presenting them to the bank.

We went from so much paper to no paper. And that, for me, is a carbon opportunity. But it’s more about how people have managed to change their way of working. It makes me super proud.

I am proud of a project we are working on connecting Sucafina with the warehouse keeper. Warehousing is a huge deal in coffee. We store coffee all along the supply chain. We exchange information with warehouses all over the world.

Sucafina is willing to invest and assign people to an idea where we know we will repeatedly fail, but we will keep trying until it works. There are not many companies that allow you to do that. It’s not a huge budget, but it is a significant investment. I wouldn’t be free to do that in another company.

Sucafina drives innovation, but how do you spread it through the industry?

Innovation cannot just be company- or person-driven. A company or a person can play a leadership role – that’s what we want to do at Sucafina – but innovation must be embraced and shared at a wider level. We need to think about how to support people who are not equipped – or do not have the time – to innovate.

How can we help people who are working hard to feed their families but don’t have the time to think about changing how they work? And how can we help companies to be more willing to try and fail? The fear of failure is sometimes bigger than the opportunity to win.

How might artificial intelligence change the business? 

We already use AI at Sucafina with machine learning for our trading model. AI is a powerful assistant enabling us to make better trading decisions. AI helps in other fields like invoicing, market research, PowerPoint presentations or blog updates. It helps us go faster in the cycle of trying and failing or trying and delivering. I have a chatbot I use to compose technical specifications. I have used it with some developers to see how AI can create user code to develop a tool.

AI has a variety of use cases. We must learn and adapt while keeping our people and our strategy relevant. As with every disruption, be aware, learn, and don’t be scared to embrace it.

Innovation is not just limited to companies; it’s also personal. You recently studied at the THNK School of Creative Leadership. What motivated you to do that, and what did you get out of it? 

I joined the experience from May to October last year, partly on-site and partly remote. It was amazing.

Why did I do it? I wanted to do an executive course to help me participate in decision-making and strategy. After twenty years in my career, I wanted to learn new skills and recognize where I had a shortfall.

What did I gain? I gained confidence that I could be different in how I engaged in leadership. It brought me a frame of thinking around change management.

It’s an executive creative school. It’s about incorporating art, feeling, emotion, and your dreams into your business functions. It spoke to me. I’m a romantic person. I cry at the cinema. But I am not like that at work. I’m not emotionally driven at work. It’s funny. I realized that if I linked the two, I would get the best of me and the best from the people I work with. So, embedding stories, reframing, and peer coaching supports me and the innovation culture within the company. It also helps the way people engage with their ideas.

I’d like to move on to women in commodities. I think you recently won an award for your role in the commodity sector. Is that correct? 

WISTA, the Women’s International Shipping and Trading Association, nominated me. I joined WISTA’s Swiss chapter in 2016 as a member and became Treasurer and Vice President. I’m no longer on the board but remain a member. The nomination came from a commodity networking company WISTA partnered with to promote women in commodities.

Why are there so few women in commodities? 

There are many women in shipping and trading, but they are more in procurement, operations, accounting, and human resources. Few are traders.

I think it’s about creating the pipeline. Trading has a reputation for being male-dominated. It’s a bias we have, but that bias is breaking down on both sides. Women are gaining more confidence. I see it at Sucafina, where we are getting close to 50/50 in our Geneva office. We have a pipeline to take female employees into management positions.

Awareness is important, confidence is important, and the world has changed. Work from anywhere. Work with parental leave, work with whatever you want to do in your life. It’s more normal now. It’s going to take time. It will get there.

So, you are optimistic? 

I’m an optimistic person. I’m confident about this because I can see it coming.

Thank you, Raphaelle, for your time and input. 

© Commodity Conversations ® 2023

This is part of the Commodity Professionals – The People Behind the Trade series.

Good morning, Michael, and welcome to Commodity Conversations.  Please tell me a little about Fixkraft – is it a private company?

Fixkraft is a compound animal feed manufacturer founded in 1971. We are Austria’s second largest feed producer in volume – and the largest privately-owned one. We are proud of being in private ownership. It feels more like a family than a big organisation. We’re close to our five owners, the sons of the founding fathers, and they’re close to the business, to the industry. It makes working here quite nice.

Our facilities are in Enns, a port on the river Danube with railway access and close to a highway.

How did you get into the business?

That’s an amusing story. I attended a tourism school, so I know how to cook, but I always wanted to do something internationally. In 2010, I worked for six months in Ukraine as an intern in Donetsk, where I learned Russian. When I returned to Austria, I looked for a job and applied to VA Intertrading, an Austrian grain trading company. They were looking for a Russian-speaking trader, and I started with them as a junior trader in Russian origination.

 I also used to study Arabic; although I don’t speak it, I can read it. In my first months with the company, I participated in a business trip to Morocco, even though I didn’t know anything. The company had a client in Casablanca purchasing around a million tonnes of corn every year. He asked me what I thought of the market. I managed to give him an answer, but I thought, “Wow, it’s nice that he asked me.” In other industries, they look at you, see that you’re new and have no clue, and then talk to the older guys with more experience. But no, he genuinely wanted my opinion.

The company then sent me to Algeria to try to open some markets. I also worked with Iran on grains and oilseeds. As you know, commodity trading is about contracts, and you don’t see the physical grains. I thought getting a little bit closer to the goods would be nice, so after three years, I moved to an Austrian apple juice concentrate manufacturer, buying apples in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine. It was interesting but different to the grain business. There was no forward business, no futures, nothing. If you offered a reasonable price, the trucks turned up at your plant. If your prices were too low, they went to your competitor.  It made it linear. I missed the grains business, so in 2019, when the opportunity came up with Fixkraft, I grabbed it.

 How do the different types of animal feed vary? Is pig feed different from cattle feed, for example?

Yes, absolutely, both in terms of nutrients and legal requirements.

There are different legal requirements depending on the type of animal feed. For example, you can use GM soybeans for pigs but not poultry. Most of our feed goes to poultry, where we cannot use GMOs. For cattle, on the other hand, we are restricted to European-origin meals. I can buy Brazilian non-GM feed for poultry but must purchase European non-GM soymeal for cattle.

It is diverse. Non-GM European-origin meals would work for everything, but they are the most expensive option. You could use non-GM European soybean meal for pig feed, but you wouldn’t sell a kilo because it would be too expensive.

We use Danube-soy-certified soymeal for laying hens. They require meals exclusively grown in Europe. And then we also use some high-protein, mid-protein GM and non-GM soy, depending on price. The price plays a role here. We use eight, maybe nine, different types of soya in our production.

And you must separate them all.

Yes, we must keep them separate.

Is your objective to obtain the right mix of carbohydrates and proteins at the best possible price, or is it more complicated than that?

There is the legal side I have already mentioned, but there are some further issues, such as the permitted level of toxins. We need to track them, particularly in corn.

Some farmers believe that they can do on the farm what we do in a compound feed factory by mixing their homegrown grains with soya. It does work. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but they do not have the analysis. It’s a natural product, and corn has different humidity and starch levels.

Our customers often require specific feeds for their animals. There are so many factors in raising livestock. It’s not just feed; it’s also the water and the heating. We have harsh winters here in Austria, and with high energy prices, farmers may reduce the heating, which can affect livestock growth.

We also look at the amino acids in the soya. We use synthetic amino acids to make the feed more easily digestible for the animals.  And there it becomes a kind of rocket science.

Do you have computer programs that help you? Is it something that artificial intelligence could help you with in the future?

To a certain extent, yes. We do have a computer program that gives you the best mix for the best price. You enter the costs and the products available, and you press Start. It then shows you the cheapest combination for each breed of animal. However, there are certain aspects that the computer program does not measure. For example, we add sugar beet pulp pellets or apple pomace to our cattle feed. Neither calculates financially, but it is hard to quantify how much taste is worth.

Artificial intelligence will struggle with customer needs. If one of our customers has a problem, we visit them and try to find a solution together. Sometimes it’s obvious, like increasing the heating or changing the air filter; sometimes, it is more complicated, and we may call a veterinarian to help.

For cattle, we also need to analyse the farmer’s grass. If the grass is dark green, it will have a lot of protein, and we can lower the protein in the compound feed. We must analyse the corn for pig feed if the farmer uses his own corn.

How many inputs would go into feed for dairy cattle – five, ten?

Much more! And as I mentioned, we work with our clients to get the proper feed for them. We also do niche feed products, for example, for deer.

How do you hedge your inputs and sales? Do you use futures, OTCs, or physicals?

My favourite hedge is when we buy the raw material and sell the compound immediately. In most cases, it is not possible.

How I hedge depends on the product. There are some products where I feel comfortable working with futures. Matif wheat correlates well with feed wheat, especially regarding new crops.

It is more complicated for corn. Many German producers use Matif wheat to hedge their corn. They say it works for them. I have had bad experiences with Matif corn futures due to a lack of liquidity.

Sometimes, I do physical hedges on corn. I buy corn delivered on a barge to my factory and sell it elsewhere.

Soya bean meal is more complicated. In the last two years, you have had a poor correlation between Chicago and non-GM soy; you could lose a lot of money. If the euro/dollar exchange rate is stable, it’s easier for GM soy because I can hedge it on the CBOT. I prefer to keep my hedges in euros, so I use physicals to hedge, buying a delivered physical barge and selling the same quantity in the port.

Do some trade houses offer OTCs and hedging platforms?

They do, but I prefer to do the hedging myself.

Do you sometimes buy full cargoes of soybeans?

We are unfortunately too small for that. Our trading business is not that big. We sometimes buy a part cargo, maybe a hold of 5,000 tonnes, but it would be the maximum.

How has the Russian invasion of Ukraine impacted your business?

My job was easy when I first started with Fixkraft. Things started to get messy regarding availability when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020. Nobody knew whether the trade flows would continue or the borders would close.

In January 2022, I told one of my colleagues that the pandemic was over and we would enter a calm period again. The Russians invaded Ukraine a month later, and I realised the pandemic had just been a warmup. All hell broke loose. Price volatility exploded, and you couldn’t buy anything. Suppliers didn’t know if they could deliver. Nobody was selling.

We had three contracts that specified Ukrainian origin. Our suppliers could have claimed force majeur because of the war. But everyone delivered. They executed the contracts even though they were at a lower price than the market. They said, “Please understand it’s not easy, but we will deliver.”

One supplier told me he couldn’t find truck drivers. He had the cargo in Ukraine but said males between 18 and 60 could not leave the country. Somehow, he found a guy who was 62 years old. They pulled him back from retirement, got him in a truck, and three days later, he delivered the cargo. These guys value their business relationships. I will not forget that. But I had never seen anything like it regarding volatility and market movements.

Did any of your supply chains break? Was there ever any risk that farm animals wouldn’t get enough to eat?

Many of our customers called us to ask if we could deliver. And we said, “Yes, we can.”

We had a temporary challenge with mono-calcium phosphate. A raw material for mono calcium phosphate is only produced in Russia, and our supplier had his account frozen and couldn’t deliver. We found other suppliers at a higher price. The market worked; we all managed, and the trade continued.

Do you buy some of your inputs on long-term contracts, or do you buy mostly spot?

We do buy some products, for example, salt, on an annual basis, but we mostly buy up to a few months forward.

I imagine that you buy in volume and sell piecemeal. Does that mean that you hold significant stocks?

Our storage is relatively small for the volume we are producing. I would prefer more storage, and I hope my CEO reads this interview. We do not hold extensive stock.

How many countries do you buy products from?

The market is global, and it’s a matter of how you define the origin. Our GM beans become soybean meal when crushed in Germany or Netherlands. But the beans are from the US and Brazil. They are not of European origin.

We do not use palm oil, so we don’t import from Indonesia or Malaysia. We get amino acids and vitamins from China, which we buy from traders because we are not yet big enough to ship from mainland China. So, the goods might come from China, but our partners are German, Italian, Spanish, and Swiss trading companies.

Indian soybean meal occasionally finds its way to Europe. We get phosphates from Russia and Morocco.

I would say we have business partners in about 30 countries. It is a truly global business.

Will the recent EU legislation on deforestation affect your business, particularly for Brazilian soymeal?

I think the legislation is a good step, but it will be challenging for the trade houses to trace soybeans back to the field and certify they are deforestation-free. I do not originate and import beans into Europe. My trade house suppliers will be the ones who must bear the weight of the new legislation.

We implemented traceability in our supply chain a few years back. We know which farmers get which goods, and we can trace each truckload back to a particular supplier.

Have biofuels complicated your business or increased the price of your inputs?

They are a price determination issue. They have increased price volatility but have not impacted our physical supplies. Molasses might be an exception as it is often difficult to find.

In Austria, we need to import corn for feed because the citric acid and starch sectors consume the equivalent of our domestic production. A while back, there was a political discussion about whether to reduce industrial consumption by law. Some favoured it, while others said it would be too big an intervention into the free market. From an ethical point of view, I would prefer it if the country prioritised human consumption, then animal feed, then ethanol and industrial use. But it is complicated.

I’m beginning to understand that you have so many different inputs you can easily find a substitute in the case of a shortage or price spike in one of them. It effectively means that the supply chain for animal feed is very flexible.

That’s true to a certain extent. Some inputs substitute well based on relative prices. If wheat is cheaper than corn, you use more wheat.

But there are limits. For corn-fed chickens, 50 per cent of the feed must come from corn. Some of our feed comes with unique ingredients like sugar beet pulp pellets. We can’t replace them.

You can substitute sunflower meal with rapeseed meal, but to obtain a high protein feed, you need soymeal. You cannot reach the required amount of protein with a rapeseed meal.

There are some inputs you cannot substitute, like vitamins or phosphate.

The Netherlands is working to reduce their livestock numbers to meet their GHG emission targets. Do you see the same thing happening in other EU countries?

In general, we see meat consumption declining, although it will only have a limited impact on animal feed demand. However, it could result in a consolidation of the animal feed industry in Austria.

I see opportunities in terms of quality rather than quantity. For example, we have developed cattle feed that reduces the cattle’s methane emissions. It’s an excellent product.

Also, for animal welfare reasons, there is a trend towards slower-growing breeds, especially poultry. There is also a trend for animals to spend more time outside, where they grow more slowly. They need feeding for a longer time.

What is the greatest challenge in your business?

Probably, my biggest challenge is to keep our production running. We have customers who need daily deliveries. My worst-case situation would be if we were forced to halt production due to flooding, low water levels, border closures etc.

My second most significant challenge is price. Our target is not to always have the lowest price but to always have a lower price than our competitors.

My third challenge is maintaining the quality of our feedstocks. However, we have long-term relations with our suppliers and trust them. We keep open communications with them and work together to solve quality issues.

You mentioned the water levels. Could you supply your port on the Danube when water levels fell last year?

We had problems upstream. Downstream, where the water levels are always higher, it was still somehow possible.

One upstream supplier usually ships 1,000 tonnes per barge but had to reduce each load to 400 or 600 tonnes. We managed to get corn deliveries from Hungary and Serbia with barges carrying 800 tonnes. We have good water levels now and are receiving shipments of max. 1600 tonnes.

I always try to diversify my purchasing to have cargo on barges and trucks in case of low water or flooding.

How do you see the business developing over the next few years?

As I mentioned earlier, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mainly methane, will lead to a consolidation in our industry. The overall market will not grow, but the smaller players will exit.

I also expect energy sources to change. We already use some solar panels in our production and reuse the heat from our machines.

Thank you, Michael, for your time and input.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2023

This is part of a series Commodity Professionals – The People Behind the Trade

Guilherme Cauduro is Executive Director for the Bureau Veritas’ AFC Division in Brazil. AFC stands for Agriculture, Food and Commodities and is one of the company’s five divisions in Brazil.

Good morning, Guilherme, and welcome to Commodity Conversations. Thank you for taking part. First, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Good morning, Jonathan. I’m an Agronomist. After I graduated with my master’s degree from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, I started to work for an agricultural research firm. I stayed with them for two years before realising it was not for me.

I had a friend working for Schutter Group, a Dutch inspection company headquartered in Rotterdam. His work sounded much more interesting than what I had been doing. Schutter offered me a job, and I started as an inspection and certification manager at Rio Grande Port. In March 2007, Bureau Veritas acquired Schutter, and I stayed with them. So, I’ve worked for the same company for 16 years.

What is the role of a commodity inspector?

Our role is to inspect the commodities to ensure that they meet the description of the goods in the agreement signed between buyers and sellers and to meet international commodity regulations and rules.

Could you tell me a little about Bureau Veritas?

Bureau Veritas is a French company specialised in testing, inspection and certification founded in Belgium in 1828. Five years later, the headquarters moved to Paris, where it is now publicly quoted on the Euronext exchange. Bureau Veritas has 82,000 employees in 140 countries with a network of over 1,600 offices and laboratories. It operates in various sectors, including building and infrastructure, agri-food, and commodities, marine and offshore, industry, certification, and consumer products.

I understand you did an agricultural degree. Does it help you in what you’re doing now?

Yes, because we have some upstream businesses dealing with farmers and cooperatives. Being an agronomist helps me understand the language and the people.

 Do you come from an agricultural background?

My father was an Agronomy professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. He also grew soybeans for about ten years. As a teenager, I used it to travel with him to the farm. I saw that it was a good business, and it suited me.

Did you grow up on the farm?

No, I grew up in the city, but my father spent a lot of his time on the farm when I was at university, and I accompanied him when I could. Many of my university friends were from farming families, and I spent time on their farms. I don’t enjoy the noise of the big city. I prefer the quiet of a farm.

You mentioned the upstream work that you do. Is that mainly certification work on sustainability?

Sustainability is part of our corporate culture; all our solutions consider its pillars. We do work with sustainable certifications, but it’s not the primary demand in our division.

We have a massive operation inland. When trading houses originate soybeans or corn from farmers, they send the trucks to the farms to load and transport the commodities to the ports or the crushing plant. They hire our services to inspect the trucks when they load to ensure the quality is according to the contract between the farmer and the trading house.

Another business we do upstream is credit monitoring. The trading houses, banks, and chemical companies prefinance the farmers and cooperatives who need money to plant and harvest. We are on the farms to check how the crops are growing and to see if the harvest will be good enough to pay back the money to the financier.

Bureau Veritas is also prominent in cotton, particularly in Mato Grosso State, where we test about half of Brazil´s cotton production. We have five laboratories in Brazil that test cotton fibre quality.

We are very much involved in farm transhipment. When the trading houses tranship cargoes from trucks to rail cars or trucks to barges, we are in the transhipment points collecting samples from trucks, from the barge, and from the rail cars to see if the quality is OK.

We also work for seed companies, protecting their royalties from GM crops. In Brazil, seed companies can charge royalties against GM crops for ten years, and we have teams that inspect the crops to ensure farmers pay royalties.

Do you weigh the cargo during transhipment? 

Yes, absolutely. We check the scales to see if everything is correct and do a draft survey on barges to verify the volume.

Within Brazil, how much of your business is upstream, and how much is at the port?

Nowadays, our upstream accounts for around 60 per cent of our income – that’s for the agriculture division.

Are trade houses now originating more volumes directly from the farm?

Yes, especially in the central part of Brazil. Large farms in Mato Grosso produce around 30-35 per cent of Brazil’s soybeans. The trading houses buy about half of the crop directly from the farms.

And the trade houses advance the money to the farmers and then get paid back with the grain and oilseeds?

They don’t pay 100 per cent in advance, only part of it. They buy the rest in the spot market.

How many people do you have in your division?

In the harvest season, we have around 3,000 – 3,200 inspectors working in our division in Brazil. In the mid-season, we have 1,500-1,800 people.

What is it like being a surveyor?

We have a saying in the business that we must “kill a lion a day.”

We have a lot of responsibilities and pressures from the clients. The costs can quickly mount if we fail to do our job correctly, whether quality inspection or crop surveying. It can be a considerable amount of money for a trading house. If we make a mistake in our analysis, we have problems with the farmers because they have guaranteed a certain quality.

Testing, inspection, and certification are all about trust. We must maintain an excellent relationship with our clients. They must trust us because we protect the quality and the quantity of the goods they are trading.

We operate 24/7. In our business, we are always available to perform operations or to attend to a client; readiness is one of the critical factors of Bureau Veritas’ success in the agri market in Brazil.

What are your biggest challenges?

Our business is people. We train our people and help them develop their skills.  We are present in fifteen ports in Brazil, and our clients expect – and need – the same standard of service in each port. So, our biggest challenge is to ensure our inspectors and local managers provide the same high standard of service to the client regardless of where they are based. Our business assets are not computers or cell phones; they are people.

Every day is a new story, and every crop season is different. We never have a crop season that’s the same as the other. As an inspector, you can expect something different every day.

We must guard against corruption. People sometimes try to corrupt our people by asking them to issue fake certificates – to lie about the quality of the goods. One of the absolutes of Bureau Veritas is Ethics, and we invest a lot in training our people about the fundamentals of our core business, principles, the relevance of our role, code of conduct and the absolute values of the company, among others.

So, your biggest challenge is ensuring your people are well-trained and ethical.

We must also keep them motivated. Working 24/7 means working weekends. People usually want to relax on weekends with their families. My job is to keep our teams motivated to supply the same standard of service to all our clients, to guard against corruption and maintain integrity throughout our business. Integrity is the big thing. We continually train our inspectors, showing them how critical and sensitive our job is and how much value we offer our clients when performing our service according to national and international standards.

What initially attracted you to become an inspector?

As I mentioned, I heard about the business through a university friend. I knew nothing about the job, but it sounded way more exciting and interesting than what I was doing then.

The commercial side of the business attracted me, and the company soon promoted me to commercial director. I started to make overseas business trips to visit clients in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America. It was an opportunity to meet people, to get to know different cultures, and to make friends in the business.

But when you ask me why I started, it was an accident. A happy one, I must say.

Do you travel much in your present position, internationally and domestically?

Before the pandemic, I did seven or eight overseas business trips yearly as Commercial Director.

Why so many?

You may have an excellent relationship with your clients in Brazil, but you must also develop relationships with end buyers – the final receivers of the cargo.

When a trade house sells cargo to China or Vietnam, or wherever, it is often the final receiver who chooses the inspection company at load. Remember, weight and quality are final at load. A trading house may prefer a different inspection company but will not say “no” to a client. My job as commercial director was to persuade the end-buyers to choose us rather than our competition.

In December 2021, I started in this new position as Executive Director. I still travel overseas, but a maximum of two trips a year. There is much to do here in Brazil, and I cannot stay away too long. That will change over time. I’m training my colleagues and passing all my client relationships on to them.

Is it usual for a buyer to appoint a surveying company and a seller to nominate a different company? And what happens in that case if they disagree?

Yes, it is widespread. The buyer and the seller may want to appoint their own supervisory company.

If there is a discrepancy or a disagreement, the seller, the buyer, and the inspection companies talk together to come to an agreement. They may agree to remove, for example, part of the cargo that may be off-spec – or the seller may compensate the buyer financially.

I am surprised that you had no training when you started with Schutter. What training does Bureau Veritas give to your trainee inspectors?

I learned on the job when I started in the business in 2007. I stayed in the port for 10-12 hours per day to understand how it all worked – the trucks, the terminals, and the conveyor belt loaders. I also learned how to do a draft survey.

Most of the issues occur at night and at weekends. I initially spent many nights and weekends at the port. I would often only get home at three or four in the morning. It was tough on my wife, but she supported me.

It is entirely different now with Bureau Veritas. We spend considerable time and money on training, particularly regarding safety. The safety of our employees is our number one priority – and our number one risk.

You mentioned issues often occur at night or the weekends. Why is that?

First, people sometimes try and load off-specification quality goods at night or on the weekend when they think our inspectors are less focused. If a seller has a quality issue with a portion of the cargo, they may try and load that portion at night or at the weekend.

Second, more accidents occur at night, especially in winter in southern Brazil. Temperatures sometimes fall below zero degrees, and surfaces can become dangerous.

There have been issues with traffickers smuggling cocaine in commodity shipments, particularly in containers. Is that a big problem?

It is a big problem. The traffickers have a lot of money and a lot of power. It is not only in containers. Nowadays, the traffickers have divers in the load ports, attaching boxes with cocaine onto a vessel’s hull, and then divers removing these boxes from the ships at the destination. Rotterdam Port Authority employs divers to randomly check arriving vessels to see if they can find these boxes.

It is a problem for the entire Brazilian agricultural sector.  Did you know that the GDP of Brazil’s agricultural industry is higher than Argentina’s total GDP?  Therefore, the Authorities in Brazil should make all efforts to try to avoid such kind of situations.

There was once an issue with sand in sugar shipments from Santos. Was it a result of corruption?

Not really. Sand and sugar look almost identical. So, many years ago, some gangs replaced sugar with sand on the trucks going from the mills to the ports. Fortunately, our people are trained to identify visually or do quick tests to see if there is fraud in the cargo. It is one of the reasons why Bureau Veritas is continuously investing in our teams’ technical development and qualification.

Not many people outside the business understand commodity traders don’t trade commodities; they trade documents. What shipping documents do you produce and handle?

We are not involved in trading. All we do is certify the quality and weight of the traded goods.

What about the phytosanitary certificates*?

Good question. In Brazil, the Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for issuing the phytosanitary certificate for corn, rice, and wheat. Inspection companies issue a document called IN 15 for soybeans. The Ministry of Agriculture will use this document to issue the phytosanitary certificate to the shipper of the cargo.

How has technology changed the business over the past few years? And how do you imagine it changing in the future?

It’s incredible how technology has changed our business, especially in digitalisation. Only five or six years ago, our inspectors in the ports would note their observations on paper about weight and quality and then send them to our local office, where a guy would manually enter the information onto an Excel sheet and then send it by email to the client. Our port inspectors enter the weight and quality information directly into their tablets or smartphones, and the system sends it automatically to our clients. OK, it’s not still 100% digitalised, but I would say it’s 85% digitalised in Brazil.

We now have a machine that measures the moisture content of a commodity underload and sends the results through our system, which goes directly to the client. We don’t need people typing in the moisture anymore. It is a significant change.

The conveyor belts in Brazil load about 3,000 tonnes per hour. It’s fast, and you don’t have time to waste. When it comes, the continual automated quality screening will be more efficient and accurate.

To what extent can you take out the human element? Can machines replace inspectors?

We already have some grading machines in Brazil that screen for damaged, mouldy green beans and foreign matter and impurities. We must calibrate these machines correctly and manually double-check they provide accurate results for the sample. This technology will help our inspectors to work faster and more efficiently.

What do you like and dislike about your job?

I like the job dynamic, meeting people, connecting with them, getting to know their cultures, and doing business in their countries. I like the speed of the business – the adrenaline. I like that every day is different. You don’t sit in front of your computer doing the same thing every day.

I don’t like my job when people try to bribe our inspectors to issue fraudulent certificates. Corruption is a problem in Brazil, as it is throughout South America.

So, how does somebody reading this become a surveyor?

They just need to apply through our website or local offices. We are always open to newcomers, and we like to train people.

Are there any professional organisations for vessel inspection and others?

Yes. In Brazil, we have an association of inspection companies where we mainly discuss technical stuff about new regulations.  We ensure everyone has the information to prepare for new rules. Internationally, we are members of all the leading industry associations, such as GAFTA and FOSFA.

What advice would you give someone who thinks this might be an exciting career for them?

I would tell them it’s a dynamic business. We don’t do the same thing every day.

I would tell them that they must be aware that we are a 24/7 business and that they must always be available to receive a call from a client with a question or from a team member looking for help in an operation. It’s not a regular business from Monday to Friday, from nine to five. It’s not; it’s different.

You have a stressful responsible task managing all these people and dealing with all these issues. How do you cope with that stress, and how do you manage your work-life balance?

My family supports me. I couldn’t do this job if my family didn’t help me – my wife and two boys. I have a very supportive wife. I travel a lot, and most of the responsibility is with her because she is with the kids and doing the everyday stuff.

One of my boys is ten, and the other one is fourteen. They like soccer. I take them to soccer games and play soccer with them as often as possible. I also take them bike riding.

Sport helps. I go to the gym every morning for an hour and don’t take my cell phone. I need the time with no cell phone, WhatsApp messages, or calls. It allows me to clear my brain and prepare for the day.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I would like to emphasise that a surveyor’s role is essential to the agri-commodity supply chain. We, as surveyors, are responsible for checking the weight and quality of the goods traded between seller and buyer, and we are pleased to see that the clients understand how valuable our job is.

Thank you, Guilherme, for your time and input.

• A phytosanitary certificate verifies that agricultural products have been inspected and are pest and disease free (“phyto” means “plant”, and “sanitary” means “clean” or free from pests and diseases).

© Commodity Conversations® 2023

This is part of the series Commodity Professionals – The People Behind the Trade.

Good morning, Alex, and welcome to Commodity Conversations. You have extensive experience in commodities and the agricultural supply chain, procurement, traceability, certification, and price risk management. I want today to concentrate on cocoa and your role as a cocoa arbitrator. Where did you learn about cocoa?

Good morning, Jonathan. I began my commodity career in sugar. I learned about cocoa when I joined Barry Callebaut after completing an executive MBA at Université Paris Dauphine. I was a senior cocoa trader with Barry Callebaut for about ten years in Zurich.

Barry Callebaut was – and still is – the world’s number one chocolate producer and transformer. It was a fantastic learning experience. I went through the whole value chain, from cocoa bean production to the different steps of transformation all the way to the chocolate bar and liquid industrial chocolate. Except for chocolate, I touched on every cocoa product. By trading all the products, I developed a deep understanding of the problems linked to the supply chain. My time with Barry was an immensely fulfilling one.

Was it a procurement or a trading role?

It was more of a procurement role. Eight people were on our desk, handling a little more than 10 per cent of the world crop and a substantial quantity of cocoa products. We were all backups to each other. Not only did we have responsibility for hedging our own portfolio, but we were also, at times, required to participate in the pricing and structure of the market management.

Did you have a specific geographical area that you looked after?

Initially, I was trading organic and certified cocoa beans, omnibus, from origin niche markets. From there, I moved to cocoa products, liquor, and butter, mainly in Europe but also from Asia.  Because of Barry Callebaut’s large footprint, I was also involved in the Americas flows. I then moved to bulk beans from West Africa. I oversaw Ivory Coast and Ghana.  That last role is the one I kept with my subsequent employers.

You began your commodity career in sugar before moving to cocoa. How does the sugar market compare to the coca market? Are there any specific differences between the two markets?

First, the sheer size of the market. World sugar production is more than 180 million mt compared to 5 million mt for cocoa beans. It’s on a different scale.

Second, cocoa is grown in a relatively narrow band between 15 degrees north and 15 degrees south of the equator. It limits the number of countries which can produce cocoa. Sugar is grown pretty much everywhere due to beet and cane production.

Third, cocoa has two main crops. The first is from October to March, and the second is a smaller crop from May to September. Both crops are significant and have implications for the market and its prices.

Fourth, the weather can have more of an impact on cocoa than sugar. For instance, if you have too much rain in West Africa, the area will develop different types of fungus that can wipe out the whole crop.

Fifth, cocoa is a tree crop, so you have a lag between planting and production of three to five years.

Six, sugar is harvested on an industrial scale – very little is now done manually. Cocoa farmers manually harvest the pods, open them, and often ferment the beans around the trees. The average plot size is small, usually slightly more than one acre. The farmers sell the beans to the middleman, who goes around different farmers or groups to gather their beans, bring them to the port and prepare them for shipment.

Lastly, sugar is still shipped in large bulk or breakbulk vessels. In cocoa, most of the trade is done in containers.

It seems that disease is a significant factor in cocoa. As you say, disease can wipe out the crop if you get terrible weather.

Absolutely. Cocoa traders pay specific attention to meteorological events. La Nino and El Nino are examples of patterns that can affect crops significantly and specifically around the equator. Some market actors take protection or insurance on the market with over-the-counter (OTC) instruments on weather patterns. Meteorology is indeed an essential part of cocoa trading.

Sustainability, farmer welfare, and human rights, particularly child labour, are significant issues in cocoa. What are the specific challenges you faced as a trader and procurement manager?

These issues changed the whole supply chain, flow and pricing of cocoa beans and their derived products.

When I started in cocoa in 2006, consumer demand began to drive profound structural change within the supply chain. There was a significant shift in the profile of chocolate consumers. The population was getting older and wealthier. Consumers were looking for a healthier product, but also for a product that demonstrated it cared about our environment and the welfare of growers.

There was a particular focus on child labour in the fields, notably in West Africa among immigrants from neighbouring non-cocoa-producing countries working in cocoa fields.

What about deforestation?

The first problem in West Africa is that people often don’t know who owns the land. Farmers often don’t have official title to their land. I understand that several initiatives are currently being rolled out to address this issue.

The second is that protected rainforests are not protected enough. Farmers go into natural forests, cut down indigenous trees, and plant cocoa trees. It is attractive because the soil in these areas is more fertile, and you have a better canopy. Farmers have discovered that the trees grow better, and they can turn around their crops quicker, reducing costs.

Deforestation is a huge issue, especially with the new EU legislation on deforestation. It will be challenging for the supply chain to demonstrate that the cocoa they are importing hasn’t caused deforestation.

I would like to move on to your role as an arbitrator for the Federation of Cocoa Commerce. Is the FCC the cocoa market’s equivalent to GAFTA in grain or the SAL or RSAL in sugar?

Yes, it is.

The FCC was established to serve the trade in physical cocoa. Its aim is to develop a single robust commercial framework for the cocoa market – to harmonize the rules.

It also provides support services and education programmes, not only for traders. FCC members come from various stakeholders in the cocoa supply chain: exporters, processors, chocolate manufacturers, traders, brokers, warehouse keepers, and all other ancillary services. The FCC has about 200 members spread across 38 countries.

The different bodies, FCC, GAFTA, RSAL and SAL, enforce their contract terms under English Law and the provisions of the Arbitration Act 1996. There is a constant watch on what is happening with these different trade associations to see if we should consider their findings in our rules or guidelines. The FCC follows what happens at GAFTA as well as other trade associations.

Cocoa destined for Europe normally trades under FCC rules, but cocoa for other destination trades under different rules and associations, such as the Cocoa’s Merchant Association of America in the USA.

When did you first become an arbitrator, and how many cases a year do you arbitrate?

I became an arbitrator in 2011. I went through the FCC training with some of my Barry Callebaut colleagues.

The number of arbitrations varies yearly, usually depending on weather, market conditions, shipping issues, etc. Poor weather can lead to quality issues with the beans. It can also lead to defaults if the production is below expectations. An oversold crop can lead to disputes between sellers and buyers on the beans and the products. Depending on the years, I have anywhere from two to ten cases. In some years, I have none. Beyond arbitrations, we also have appeals to arbitration decisions.

How many cases a year does the FCC arbitrate?

I believe that is protected information from the FCC. All FCC contracts are copyright protected.

Okay, no problem. How many arbitrators are there?

I would say we have around 43 arbitrators. Most are from the big names in the sector, such as Barry Callebaut, Olam,  Cargill,  Sucden and Mars Wrigley.

You must understand that there’s a significant percentage of traders in my age group, and retirement is looming. We’re trying to get younger people in the industry involved as arbitrators.

What’s the role of an arbitrator?

That’s a big question. The point of arbitration is to have respected members of the trade, not only in terms of people but also of organizations, to find a fair, timely, and economical form of dispute resolution as a service to parties who use our contract terms.

Okay, that’s the number one point. Arbitration provides a fair, timely, and economical form of dispute resolution. What else?

Cocoa coming to Europe and contracted under FCC rules follows English law in accordance with the procedures of the FCC and the arbitration and appeal rules of the Arbitration Act of 1996. All disputes are arbitrated by arbitrators recognized by their peers. To become an arbitrator, your peers must support and identify you as a respected individual who knows the business. To become an arbitrator, you must follow serious training with your peers, older traders, and lawyers. There’s a whole language, behaviour and way of thinking that develops in this training.

And then, once you are in the FCC or arbitration and appeal panel, the Council will periodically review you and your decisions. They might ask you to go for further training or review your standing.

I understand that there are two types of cases. One is quality, and the other is contract non-performance.

Yes, you have two types of arbitration. Technical arbitration pertains to contractual rules, such as default, late shipments, or companies that have gone bankrupt and, in general terms, contract non-performance. It can also involve two entities that have a complex contractual agreement. They may ask the board of arbitration for their interpretation of the contract.

The second type of arbitration is about the quality of the cocoa beans. Arbitrators will do a cut test to ascertain the quality of the beans. They may then ascribe a discount to the cocoa or reject it as unfit. While the FCC is not a grader of cocoa, it is essential beyond resolving a dispute, as it may determine specific problems at a given time from a particular origin.  For products, the process of ascertaining quality is a little more complex.

Do you arbitrate any cases on the New York or London futures exchanges?

No. We restrict ourselves to the physical movement of cocoa rather than trading on the futures markets.

Are the FCC rulings confidential, or are they published?

They are confidential. And arbitrators are not allowed to talk to each other about the cases they’re doing.

You mentioned that many of the arbitrators work for the big companies. Can’t that lead to a conflict of interest? If an arbitrator from a big company arbitrates a case, they could look at their interest rather than for fair results. How do you get around that?

There is a spirit of the rules and the spirit of the law. You should not be an arbitrator if you’re not fair or looking for a good resolution. However, human nature is what it is, and yes, it has happened.

But if you feel that you’ve been unfairly treated, you can go to appeal, which will bring in a new tribunal with a new panel of arbitrators, sometimes with totally different views. I’ve been on appeal panels that have overturned decisions. Finally, if you feel the whole process has been unfair, you can go directly to the High Court of London.

So, if you’re not happy with the first arbitration ruling, you can go to appeal with a different set of arbitrators. You can go to the High Court of London if you’re still unsatisfied. That last step sounds like a big one.

Yes, it becomes serious because everybody involved throughout the whole history of the case, including the FCC, becomes liable and is under the scrutiny of the law.

Very interesting. When you’re arbitrating on the panel, Alex, do you look at precedent?

Parties to arbitration may take on a law firm to represent them. A law firm will often try to use legal precedent to defend or claim innocence for their parties. But I’ll be frank with you; arbitrators prefer it when lawyers are not involved. It’s quicker and cheaper. I have been in some arbitration cases where the legal costs were so high that they threatened a company’s economic survival.

It’s the role of arbitrators to tell the parties when to stop. There are rules. The claimant states his case, the defendant states his case, and there is room for rebuttals. The arbitrators then decide when to cease submissions from the parties unless they need more clarification.

With modern technology, it is now unusual to hold face-to-face hearings. Each party presents their arguments electronically.

If a counterparty is found in default on a contract, it must pay compensation to the other party. How do you ensure that they pay the compensation?

We publish a list of companies that fail to honour an arbitration ruling. Reputable trading houses will not trade with anyone on that list. Companies will be taken off the list once they fulfil their obligations.

What advice would you give to cocoa traders and buyers to avoid finding themselves in arbitration?

Cocoa has the benefit of being a small market. Most participants in the market know each other or know someone who knows somebody. People understand the contractual terms they’re trading. The rules of contracts are available in French and English. The contract terms spell out the obligations of each party at each stage. As with everything in life, people should not enter contracts without knowing the rules.

And they should be careful not to overtrade and find themselves in an unfavourable financial position where they cannot honour the contract.

So read the contract and don’t overtrade.

 What’s the most challenging thing about being an arbitrator?

Time. Being an arbitrator takes commitment and tempo in your work with the other arbitrators.

What qualities do you need as an arbitrator?

Humility, an open mind, and the curiosity to listen to all the arguments from both sides. You also need to have listening, writing and analytical skills.

To continuously test any biases you think you may have.

The ability to work in a team with your colleagues on the arbitration panel.

Stubbornness.  If something is not clear, you must go back and dig. Sometimes, one point can take a long time. You must make the effort necessary to clarify any unclear issues.

A sense of fairness – and the will to find the fairest solution.

And once you have made a ruling, you must be able to write it clearly and coherently.

How do you become an Arbitrator?

Voting and Associate Members of the Federation can nominate employees as applicants for the role of Arbitrator for the Council’s consideration for appointment as arbitrators within the FCC Arbitration & Appeal Committee.

The Arbitration and Appeal Committee will then talk to different parties and see if you have the industry support and market knowledge to be recommended for the role, subject to following the compulsory FCC Arbitrator training. You must have at least five years of experience in the cocoa trade and FCC rules.

The recognition of your professionalism and competencies by your peers is essential. Being an arbitrator is not just a title. You must demonstrate the will to better the industry.

Do arbitrators get paid?

Yes, they do. We are paid an hourly amount clearly stated in the arbitration and appeal fees and the arbitration rules of the FCC.

I guess that you don’t become an arbitrator for the pay.

You guess right!

What else are you doing now, Alex, to keep food on the table?

I’m still doing consulting, not only on cocoa. I’m busy even if I’m not making as much money as I used to. I miss trading, but it is challenging to remain in the market when you are 58. It’s a young man’s, women’s game, and you must accept that.

Is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t covered?

Only to stress that I love being an arbitrator. It is challenging as many of the cases are complex, but I enjoy the challenge. A bonus is that you meet people from all over the supply chain.

Thank you, Alex, for your time and input.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2023

This is part of the series Commodity Professionals – The People Behind the Trade.

Good morning, Wouter, and welcome back to Commodity Conversations. Please tell me a little about yourself.

I am the Executive and Academic Director of the Erasmus Commodity & Trade Centre in Rotterdam.

We run two commodity programmes: a commodity elective on our MSc course at the Rotterdam School of Management and a part-time executive programme in commodity trading.

Are you an ex-trader?

No, I’ve never traded commodities. I’m a pure academic. I’ve spent my professional life in academia. I have a master’s in science in spatial planning and economic geography. I did my PhD in management with a thesis on the political economy of port competition between Rotterdam, Dubai, and Los Angeles.

If you grow up in Rotterdam, you live with the port, the cargo, and the ships. It is the DNA of the city. And we’re proud of it. Rotterdam is a place where people talk straight. It forms you. Also, growing up in a big port makes you at a young age aware there is ‘another world out there’.

What is spatial planning?

Spatial planning is about regulating the use of land. And land is scarce in the Netherlands. Strategic planning, where I did my specialization, focuses on using scarce resources broader than land and aligning stakeholders around common objectives. During my PhD, my focus shifted towards more institutional factors shaping differences in regional economic outcomes, such as the level of state involvement or the role of mandates and decision-making structures of port authorities. I travelled to Dubai and Los Angeles for my PhD. It gave me a global focus on the economic geography of trade.

What is economic geography?

In economic geography, you ask why particular activities occur in specific locations. For example, it is logical to situate an oil refinery in a port to reduce transport costs. But why are so many traders located in Geneva? That’s a more complex question to answer.

After my PhD, one of my first commercial projects was studying the relationship between business services and the port economy. I talked with bankers, insurance companies and lawyers, learning about the white-collar jobs around maritime trade, shipping, and port operations. They introduced me to commodity trading as the business that makes things move.

A whole world began to open to me, and I could see everything come together. I began to ask why I didn’t know about this world before – why had no one taught me any of this? Why are the universities not teaching this?

I saw a great opportunity to swing my academic career in a new direction. I love to teach and research. I wanted to transmit my intellectual fascination and newfound awareness of the commodity world to my students. I realized we needed educational programmes on commodities, so I decided to build them.

I designed and set up our executive program, which is, let’s say, an MBA light. I recently told my wife, “It’s, in a way, a gift to myself, which I can enjoy every year and learn from.”

You spent two years in China. What did you learn from your two years in China, and how did that come about?

It wasn’t full-time. I was there as part of a partnership agreement that the University of Antwerp in Belgium set up with a university in Chongqing, China. I taught a course on global production networks. It was a fantastic experience, learning from subtle cultural differences and about different perspectives on world affairs.

Are there any commodity courses in China equivalent to what you have here?

I’m pretty sure there are. However, I’m not aware of, let’s say, a Geneva or Rotterdam type of approach to teaching commodity functions such as shipping, finance, or execution.

Could you tell me a little about Erasmus University Rotterdam and the School of Management? You mentioned earlier that you are relatively well-placed in the rankings.

Merchants founded Erasmus University in 1913 as the Netherlands School of Commerce. The university has traditionally offered courses on business and maritime trade. The Rotterdam School of Management was founded in the 1970s, inspired by American business schools. It was when prominent Dutch multinationals like Shell, Phillips, and Unilever started to advocate this type of education.

In economics and business, we rank among the top ten in the world. The Financial Times consistently lists RSM in the top ten in Europe. The Financial Times ranked our MSc in International Management as third in the world in 2022.

Why is the Erasmus scheme, where EU students can spend one year in different universities, called Erasmus? Is it because you guys started it, or is it just a coincidence?

Good question. The inter-European subsidy scheme is for students who follow parts of their curricula in other universities and countries. It is named after Erasmus, as is our university. Erasmus was a humanist scholar from Rotterdam, known for his critical essay ‘In praise of folly’ from 1509/11. He was among the first travelling scholars visiting other European universities to learn and share ideas. ‘Open-mindedness’ and ‘world citizenship’ are still core values of our university.

Let’s start with your executive programme. What is it?

The executive program is a leadership program for young professionals with eight to twelve years of experience in the commodity space. Our focus is not on operational trading skills but on learning to navigate in times of uncertainty. All businesses are exposed to uncertainty, but the commodities business is especially so.

We have four core modules where participants learn to understand the driving forces behind the commodity markets: geopolitics, sustainability, risk and compliance, and technology and innovation.

As part of the leadership program, we confront our participants with real-life situations. We teach them what people expect from their leaders regarding ethics, values, culture, and courage.

Participants learn from each other. It’s an integral part of the learning approach. We have a rich ecosystem in the classroom which allows participants to share experience, knowledge, opinion, and valuation of purpose – everything that is required to have long-term continuity in their business rather than, say, meeting the P&L or securing their bonus.

We teach participants to make decisions when they need an intellectual assessment and a social understanding of their company and its business environment. It’s a crucial part of the programme.

We don’t try to teach participants how to trade – they already know how to trade or are familiar with trading. However, the programme is not only for trading companies. We have participants from commercial, functional and risk roles in banking, inspection, and shipping.

How long does the executive program last?

We have a three-and-a-half week physical, full-time class exposure spread over six months and three locations. We start in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The first three days are onboarding because participants come from different companies with different functional roles. We want first to make them comfortable with each other so they can learn from each other.

It’s different from a purely academic university classroom. There is much more transmission of existing ideas in an executive programme than in a master’s degree. Here you want to facilitate the exchange of opinions and experiences and stimulate inter-generational dialogue with the current business leadership or industry veterans.

We do personality assessments and speed dating for the first three days. It includes a Marine course where participants spend day two in a boot camp solving annoying problems. Professionals from the Marines lead the day, building teamwork.

How many people are there on each course?

We have a small group of about twelve to fourteen people. We could go to a maximum of 16 or 17, but no larger because otherwise, you would get cliques – and we wouldn’t have the bandwidth to give each participant the attention that we want to provide them with.

We then do a whole weekend, moving into the four modules I mentioned. We structure each day as Understand, Apply, Reflect.

How does that work?

If we have a class on geopolitics, we start the morning with Understand. Typically, a university professor would provide some theoretical, conceptual understanding. The second part of the day is Apply, where everyone works on an assignment, business case or role play, applying what they have learned to their business and presenting the conclusions to the others.

The last part is Reflect, where we typically have the C suite in to give a campfire talk, reflecting on their own experience and moral dilemmas. On the fifth day, participants begin work on an integrated business case that will last throughout the programme. They advise on an investment in an asset, considering geopolitical and sustainability risks. They present their progress in a scenario plan for their business line or company for 2040.

Traders typically look 12-18 months ahead, but our participants are working towards taking leadership positions in their companies. They need to have a long-term perspective and take a strategic approach. It’s not about their daily P&L. They learn to strategize around uncertainty. And we force them to mobilize knowledge. Have they talked with their risk guy? Have they had coffee with their strategic suppliers or customers? How are they looking at the world in the future?

To become a leader in a company, you need to have a long-term, strategic perspective, and you need to have the courage and drive to mobilize assets within your organization and convince others to move in a particular direction.

How is the executive course split geographically?

This year, we did the Rotterdam portion in January and the Colorado, Denver portion with the JP Morgan Center in March. Denver has the same four topics but with an American perspective. We conclude in Singapore with an Asian view.

I can understand Singapore, but why Denver?

Denver is not an international commodity place, but it’s a domestic one with renewables, oil, ags, and mining. Most commodity professionals know New York or Chicago. These international places are lovely to party in, but if you want to understand America, you need to penetrate deeper into the heartland. And the partnership is with an established centre at the University of Colorado, the J.P. Morgan Center for Commodities and Energy Management, with strong business ties across North America. The Rocky Mountains add to the scenery.

Is the course multi-commodity?

Yes.

How is your gender split?

It’s typically about 40 per cent women and 60 per cent men. Our supporting companies are outspoken about gender balance and are keen to have women in the programme.

Who pays for the executive course? Do companies typically sponsor their employees, or do individuals pay individually?

Companies overwhelmingly sponsor their employees and meet their costs.

Do new people join in Denver and Singapore?

No, participants follow the programme from beginning to end. It’s the journey together that matters.

How many different nationalities are on the course this year?

This year, we have participants from Kenya, Nigeria, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and Switzerland. I think that’s it, about five or six nationalities.

What is an example of something you learned while doing the programme?

I once asked one of the programme’s contributors, an international trading company COO, about his best trade. He told me that he remembered the worst trade he had made but couldn’t remember the best trade because he was still looking for it. The best trade was still to come, but the worst rate he will never forget. For me, this was an excellent message.

So that is your executive learning course. Tell me a little about your master’s programme.

We offer a commodity elective for our MSc students in our business school.

Like elsewhere in Europe, we operate the Bologna system in the Netherlands. Students do a three-year bachelor’s degree and a one-year master’s degree. They can then do an MSc in a business school. The average age of our MSc students is around 23 years old.

Within our business school, we provide an elective course. It is what the name implies; students need to choose it. It is an introductory course in commodity, trade, and supply networks.

Everybody in the business school follows their own MSc programme. They can pick their verticals, for example, supply chain management: finance, marketing, strategic management, et cetera. They also need to choose horizontal electives.

For the last seven years, we have had around 50 to 60 students per year who do the commodity elective. We dive into the mechanics of the commodity business and the culture. What does it take to be a trader? We tell them they won’t become a trader just like that. We also tell them that trading is not for everybody, but plenty of opportunities exist other than trading. Trading companies need analysts, operators, finance, et cetera.

We want to transmit to them that there is a mechanism – commodity trading – in the world economy that impacts their daily lives but is poorly understood. We teach them how it works and explain the skills they need to succeed in the business. It’s an enormous eye-opener for them.

We bring in outside practitioners to share their experience. It’s not a business you can learn from a textbook. Each year some of the students say, “This is the business that I want to be part of.” And then, I have achieved my goal.

Why not a full master in commodities; why an elective?

A couple of years ago, when I addressed the option of a full MSc in commodity trading, the Dean of the Business School said, “Wouter, this is not so straightforward. You need to build content and a reputation of excellence while at the same time doing your own marketing and recruitment and navigating university politics. To be accredited as a full master is an intense and cumbersome process. My advice is to start building content and align with faculty through our elective system”. It was valuable advice, as formalizing a university education is not easy. Indeed, I can tell.

Also, students who have finished their bachelor’s degree are typically 20 years old. Most don’t yet know what they want to do in life. They may know they want to do something with supply chain or finance but aren’t yet committing to a niche business like commodities.

Our commodities elective is one of the most popular in the business school. About 60 of our 400 students choose it each year.

How would a student in France or Spain who has finished their bachelor’s degree apply to the Rotterdam School of Management – and take the commodity elective?

You must apply and be accepted as a full-time MSc student in the business school. You can then choose the commodity elective.

How much does a master’s degree cost? I imagine the students must finance it themselves.

Yes, they do. However, the EU subsidizes MSc programmes for EU citizens. If you’re an EU citizen, you pay less than €3000. If you’re a non-EU citizen, it costs around €25,000. You must pay your living expenses on top of that.

Do many of the Rotterdam School of Management flow from Erasmus University, or does the majority come from other universities?

If you do your bachelor’s degree here, it’s logical to continue with your master’s here. However, we have students from other European universities who join during the Bachelor of International Business Administration. Our business school and the university are well-ranked.

In addition, there are a lot of exchange students who are full-time students in universities in Brazil, Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Canada that have an exchange structure with Erasmus University. It’s a peer-to-peer exchange. All universities have them.

When I started at Cargill, they wanted people straight from bachelor’s degrees. It didn’t matter what bachelor you did – it could be music, divinity, or ancient Greek. Cargill wanted to train people themselves. Is that still the case, or are the trading houses now looking more for MSc students?

I can resonate with this line of thinking. I advocate making Batchelor students aware of possible careers in this great industry. And there are always people that already have an appetite for commerce at a young age. And the younger recruits are, the more you can form them.

But I also think it is changing. The commodity trading business has become more complex. Companies will never refuse a candidate just because he has studied ancient Greek, but they are increasingly looking for candidates with a more analytical and commercial bent.

Do you receive financial support for the master’s programme from trading companies?

The academic programme is subsidised, so we cannot monetize the course. The trading houses provide educational support by giving classes on trading, hedging, shipping, or what it’s like to be an operator.

In addition, we launched the Erasmus Commodity & Trade Centre (ECTC) in January. We formalized our activities into a dedicated centre within the Erasmus family. Our mission is to nurture ideas and talent for tomorrow’s trade. We do this through education and applied research and by building a community and an international learning platform. As I mentioned, merchants founded Erasmus University, and an endowment from industry partners enables us to achieve our mission and ambitions.

Who are your partners?

Cargill, Cefetra, Count Energy Trading, Eneco Energy Trading, ING Bank, Interfood, VARO Energy and Vitol.

What would be your elevator speech about why a) somebody should do an MSc with you and b) choose the commodity elective?

We are hands-on and business minded. Our course is theoretically informed but practically driven. We aim to give our students real-world exposure to commodity trading, from pre-trade analytics to contract execution.

We are ideally placed to do that because we have the entire ecosystem in Rotterdam. We can show students the port operations, the tanks, the storage facilities – warehouses full of metals or soft commodities. We can give our students the look and feel of a physical trading operation. And we are internationally connected.

We have been running the commodities elective for MSc students for seven years, and it has built a solid reputation. Students now come from all over Europe.

Are the courses in English?

Yes.

What about sustainability?

Sustainability is an essential element of our business school philosophy. We look at how to measure and monitor sustainability and guide sustainability into future leaders’ strategy, taking a more systemic, planetary boundaries approach.

We also look at the moral and ethical questions that crop up. There is sometimes a conflict between the trader and his company. A trader might want to do a deal to maximize his P&L, but a company will take a more comprehensive view to ensure the trade complies with all the regulations. It will also want to protect its reputation and brand.

At the same time, we emphasize that hunger for commerce, risks, and adventure drives the business and defines the business culture.

What do people typically do when they have completed their MSc?

Many of our graduates go into commodity-related companies, although most will not go immediately into trading. Operations and execution in physical trade are what this port city is most about. It depends on the employer, of course, but the old idea of “sink or swim” is less prevalent than it used to be. Most companies now initially put graduates into support functions such as analytics, finance, shipping, or contract execution.

There is a high demand for our MSc graduates. The sector is short of talent. Our students will not end up unemployed at the end of the course.

The business school is delighted with student demand, and the business is delighted to have a pipeline of new talent. It is a win-win.

Is there anything you would like to add?

People underestimate the relational aspect of making things happen. It fascinates me. In a company or team, you have a bunch of people who need to engage with, understand, and trust each other fully. These relationships are the essence of business. They spur the exchange of ideas, cultural understanding, and awareness about different parts of the world.

Money is a reward, but relationships drive businesses forward. It holds for me in setting up the Erasmus Commodity & Trade Centre. I had to deal with business executives, university executives, and professors and align around a common objective while building meaningful learning content. People matter. They give you reflection, trust and can push you in the right direction.

Finally, I would like to thank Reinette Sluijk, our programme manager in the Executive Programme Leadership in Commodity Trade and Supply Networks. She has been foundational to the programme, bringing ideas into execution, and has made a tremendous difference!

People – and personalities – matter.

That’s all the questions I have. Thank you, Wouter, for your time and input.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2023

Good morning, Charles, and welcome to Commodity Conversations. After an initial experience working in Paris as a broker in the inter-trade physical sugar market, you moved to Durban as the South African Sugar Association’s export manager. SASA was, and I believe still is, the central selling desk for South Africa’s sugar industry. What did the job entail?

It entailed selling about one and a half million tonnes a year of raw and refined sugar to the world markets. We had close relations with some Far East raw sugar refiners, and we gradually built up a white sugar sales book to East Africa, particularly in containers.

It was an exciting role because it combined both futures and physicals. Those are the best roles for a trader because you see how the two interact, giving you a good insight into price discovery. During my three years at SASA, we exported almost five million tonnes. It was fascinating developing new markets and new relationships with the trade and with the destination.

Cargill headhunted you, and you moved, I think, to the Philippines. Is that right?

Yes, I did – as a physical sugar merchandiser and to manage the company’s sugar business there. Cargill wanted to develop their sugar operations in the Philippines with domestic distribution, imports (when the country needed them), and to be involved in some of the US Quota exports. I was there about a year and a half before Cargill brought me back to Geneva as their Structured Trading Manager.

What is structured trading, and how did you manage it?

Cargill had sugar terminal facilities and elevation in Brazil. My job was to develop a downstream sales book through long-term structured contracts to provide the material for the trading team to leverage between origin and destination. Most contracts had quite a bit of optionality on both physical and futures. It’s an extended value chain with plenty of risks to manage.

It was a fascinating job because it linked origin to destination. We had some great customers; visiting their countries was an authentic cultural experience – and insightful into doing business the right way.

Was it more of a merchandising role or more of a customer relations role?

It was both. You must open doors to be able to trade. You need customer skills to develop credibility with customers for them to say, “Yes, let’s become trading partners.” The first cargo is often the hardest. It’s about getting your foot in the door with that first cargo, creating the access and then bringing in the trading cavalry.

My role for the first year and a half initially focused on opening doors and developing longstanding relationships. The subsequent years were more focused on trading around the contracts. It was the best role I could wish to have because it combined the people contact with some good usage of trading skills. Structuring a contract took time and energy, but it was exciting.

How long was an average long-term contract?

It could vary between one year to three years, primarily for three.

Cargill is famous for training their traders. What did you learn from Cargill?

I came to Cargill at a slightly later stage than most. I had done a reasonable amount of trading at SASA. I honed those skills at Cargill. Improving my trading skills and learning new ones was the best part of Cargill.

Cargill taught me the value of optionality. It taught me to always look at a trade from a risk-reward perspective, to take out the emotion, and to seek out value.

I sold to many end users – some of them wealthy families or family-owned companies – who didn’t have to trade. As a trade house, you must trade to exist. It makes a trade house creative in a positive way, seeking out trades that have an optimal risk-reward profile and then following through on the opportunities. Developing the proper risk-reward mentality was crucial to being successful.

After seven years with Cargill, you joined Aisling, one of the most significant and successful commodity hedge funds at that time. What was it like moving from a trade house to a hedge fund?

You can apply the skills you learn in a trade house to a fundamental hedge fund. Most of the people at Aisling were from Cargill, so we shared the same language and way of looking at markets.

At a trade house, you have long-term contracts and a physical flow. You arrive on day one at a hedge fund with a blank paper. You don’t have assets, so you can’t trade around them. You must create value in your own space, which for me was soft commodities, specifically sugar.

I was fortunate in that I moved there in 2009, the start of a bull run. Sugar had been flatlining between twelve and fourteen cents per pound (c/lb). Between 2009 and 2011, the price rallied to 30 c/lb, fell to 14 c/lb, climbed to 36 c/lb, crashed to 20 c/lb, and then retraced to 30 c/lb.

At a hedge fund, you must do your analysis. You must have contacts and put on risk, even though you could be wrong and lose a chunk of money. Once you’ve put your pillars in place, put on that risk, and made a positive PNL, you gain confidence. A hedge fund allows you to do things you wouldn’t be able to do in a trade house. You’re given a lot more risk to manage.

Some top traders from Cargill and elsewhere have recently moved to hedge funds. Would you recommend a physical trader move to a hedge fund?

I would recommend it on two conditions. First, they have at least 15 years of experience in a trade house where they have learned the ins and outs of trading. You don’t want to go to a hedge fund at 25.

The second element is that you must put on risk. Doing that in a trade house is usually a team decision, and you get pulled along. If you put on risk in a hedge fund, it’s all on your shoulders. You must accept that level of responsibility where it can go wrong, and it can go right, and it may be a volatile ride.

You must have a significant risk appetite and sense of independence to be the right fit for a hedge fund. Someone once asked if I could ever relax, to which I replied that it was only stressful when the markets were open. I always slept well at night!

Your next move was to Dubai to head up risk management at Savola. Could you tell our readers about Savola and what commodities you managed?

Savola is the largest food company in the Middle East. It is a Saudi company, well organised and well-established in its markets, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Savola buys about two million tonnes of sugar annually for their refineries and about a million and a half tonnes of edible oilseeds. My role in Dubai was to manage the price risks in those flows.

Were you responsible for procuring those two commodities, or did you oversee the hedging and risk management?

Savola has a professional procurement team. I was involved in procurement, but we didn’t do it directly. I managed a separate risk management team.

You stayed in Dubai for a year and a half before returning to Switzerland. Was that move back a personal or professional decision?

It was a bit of both. Savola decided to close the Dubai office and move everything back to Jeddah. I liked Dubai, but in my mind, it always had a time limit to it. It’s a fun place, but I missed Switzerland.

Would you recommend young people to move to Dubai for part of their trading career?

I would, and the younger, the better. It’s a young person’s town like Paris is a young person’s town. Dubai is suited to a sort of 25 to 40 period in your life. It’s a place where you have fun and work hard.

Dubai is a meeting point between East and West, and culturally, it’s fascinating. There are different nationalities, different things going on, and different ways of doing business.

In August 2014, you moved to Schaffhausen in the German-speaking part of Switzerland as director of Commodity Risk Management at Unilever. It must have been quite a cultural shock moving from Dubai to Schaffhausen and from a trading to a risk management role in a Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company. How did that move go?

It went very smoothly. Schaffhausen is a lovely place to live and work. Commodity markets are stressful, but Switzerland allows you to have stress in the day and a more relaxed environment in the evening. It is an excellent combination.

Moving to Schaffhausen and a large multinational suited me well. Unilever has less trading appetite than a company like Cargill but is close to commodity markets.

I enjoyed the broader range of commodities. Until then, I’d done sugar and edible oilseeds, but I handled other things like dairy, cocoa, and some metals at Unilever. It was intellectually stimulating to learn new commodities and meet new people. I managed about eight or nine commodities for the company globally.

Which was your favourite commodity?

Sugar is my favourite commodity, partly because of the people. You might be surprised to hear that the dairy sector is my second. It is fragmented and global, with various international exchanges. It’s a lovely industry with great people, and so quite like sugar. You can also have lots of fun in cocoa if you pick the market right.

What is the difference between a trader and a risk manager?

For me, a trader and a risk manager are similar; if you trade, you must know how to manage risk. Risk is at the heart of it all. You start with risk, and then off you go. To be a successful trader, you must understand and appreciate risk to create a positive and consistent PNL by mitigating the bad trades and maximising the good ones. It uses a more offensive approach.

As a risk manager, you also focus on risk and reward either for hedging decisions or putting on a trading position. It is more of an approach to assess what can go wrong with either decision and put a plan in place to limit losses and capture gains. As a risk manager, I would say you have a broader appreciation of market risk, which in today’s volatile environment, is a more suitable way to approach trading. It uses a more defensive approach.

Okay, what’s the difference between procurement and risk management?

There’s a big difference. The risk manager knows the commodity markets and appreciates risk. The procurement manager knows the process but often has no notion or appreciation of risk.

At Unilever, the risk management team were part of procurement, but the company separated purchasing procurement from risk management. It was sometimes difficult for a procurement manager to understand the risk manager.

To be clear, when you’re talking about risk management here, Charles, you’re talking about commodity price risk management.

Yes. We weren’t responsible for other risks, such as counterparty risk. That was the procurement manager’s job.

FMCG companies are structurally short of commodities. Are the FMCG companies forced to trade the markets?

As a risk manager in an FMCG company, you look for price certainty and to mitigate price volatility. It is a very different mindset from a trader in a trade house who seeks out risk in price volatility for profit maximisation.

The objective of a risk manager in an FMCG company is to provide as flat a price line as possible, so the business can lock in margins over the medium and long term while at the same time using the volatility in the market to make the company more competitive.

An FMCG company wants you to flat line, but to be competitive, it needs the bumps – the ups and downs of volatility – to pick the right timing to cover hedges. It’s a delicate balancing act.

Commodity risk management isn’t just about beating an internal forecast. Nor is it about ensuring there’s no inflation from last year’s cost price. Inflation is the same for everybody. If wheat or sugar prices have gone up from last year, they have gone up for everyone.

To look at it from a pure procurement mindset is missing the point that it’s crucial to mitigate costs by buying at an opportune time, irrespective of inflation.

Consumer companies must have a strategy and build governance around it. They must have a mindset as to what is making them competitive. Beating last year’s price or the end-month forecasts is insufficient.

How do FMCG companies trade the market? If they thought, for example, that the wheat or sugar price would go up, do they buy further forward than they would otherwise do? And if they thought the prices would fall, they would buy more hand-to-mouth. Is that how it works?

Yes.

I suspect FMCG companies are not as fast-moving as the name implies. How quickly could you get your senior management to take the trading decisions?

It would be quicker and easier to get approval when prices are low. It is difficult to convince senior management to put on hedges when the market is rising. It’s challenging for FMCG companies to understand why they need to pay up – and why the price might not revert to mean. It can cause delay, and a delay in an upward-trending market will mean additional costs. It can be challenging, but people trust you once you have a good track record. It speeds up the decision-making process.

The challenge is often with the structure itself. FMCG companies are heavy on people. It can take time to get everybody’s buy-in.

Companies must trust their risk management teams as they trust their finance teams. It’s an area of development in many FMCG companies.

How do you know when a price risk manager is doing well? What are the benchmarks?

It’s easy if you are a risk manager in a trading company – you look at the P&L.

A risk manager in a procurement function doesn’t have a clear PNL. You can look at it in various ways, but you typically base it off a market average versus where you hedge. You can also look at it versus the cost of the additional inflation or deflation that occurred because you made those decisions.

In all honesty, the area is ill-defined. We looked at it from different angles over the years, but there’s no correct method because there’s no P&L per se. You’re trying to beat the market and to keep it all as flatlined as possible for the business.

The rest is about whether you communicated well and involved the right people in the decision process.

What was the most challenging part of your role at an FMCG? Was it getting the markets right or explaining how commodity markets work to your colleagues?

Considering their volatility, we had a good run on most commodities, particularly dairy, cocoa and sugar. The challenge was more the education process, getting the teams to understand the markets.

In most FMCG companies, people move around every three or four years, so you start again each time someone new comes along. It can be frustrating to rinse and repeat, having built up a certain amount of knowledge and buy-in. FMCG companies like to move their employees between different roles and geographies. Traders tend to stay in their markets for many years. I think FMCG companies should look at more longevity in specific positions.

After over seven years with Unilever, you established your own consultancy company – CFCommodities – in January 2022. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

I had wanted to do it for a while, and I had the backing of some long-time customers. There are three aspects to what the company does today.

The first is to offer a boutique risk management advisory to industrial clients in sugar, grains and dairy. I provide insights into managing risk, pricing, and physical flows. Not all commodities trade the same way, so understanding the dynamics of each (volatility, liquidity, fundamentals) is essential to provide insightful advice.

Second, I offer a consulting service to some large management consultancies who want to understand how commodity price risk management works in the consumer segment.

Third, the company trades on the markets and provides a trading service to customers. It’s been a busy and active time, and the commodity markets have provided plenty of volatility and opportunity in the last 15 months.

So, the company takes positions on the market? Doesn’t it take away your independence as an advisor?

I don’t think it does. As Scott Irwin mentioned in your recent conversation, you must have some skin in the game to be a good advisor – but not enough to get flayed. I tell my clients what positions I take, my rationality for taking them, and my estimated risk reward. As Ralph Potter emphasised in his comments, trading is risk management. It is my speciality, and I don’t see any conflict of interest—quite the reverse.

Isn’t it difficult to follow multiple markets and be an expert in everything?

The best traders and risk managers know how little they know. As Socrates, one of history’s greatest philosophers, famously said, “All I know is that I know nothing”.

I like to think that I understand markets. I also have hands-on experience in the physical flows of the commodities I follow. There are some excellent, expert market analysts out there, and I buy in their services. I like the structure I have. It works.

To sum up, you started as a broker in Paris but moved on to become a sugar exporter in Durban and a merchant in Manila. You were a structured trade manager and a hedge fund trader in Geneva before becoming a commodity risk manager, first in Dubai and then Schaffhausen. You now have your own company. Which part of your career did you most enjoy?

There were three roles I particularly enjoyed before starting my company.

I liked my experience in South Africa. I was young to have that responsibility and exposure to the markets and combine futures and physicals. It was nice having a good industry behind you.

The second role I liked was being the structured trade guy at Cargill. It had everything I would want in a job: customer contact, analysis, and trading. I also loved learning more about managing risk and optionality. It ticked all the boxes and was in Geneva, a lovely city.

Finally, the hedge fund was challenging, exciting, and rewarding. A thrill a minute, and we even took delivery off the exchange twice!

Right up there is what I do now, running my own company. I can decide what to do and how and where to do it. I felt positive and happy from the day I started. It links everything I enjoy: trading, some excellent and reliable long-term customers, advice, analysis, and travel. I couldn’t ask for a better job.

I talked with Jeremy Reynolds a while back. He recently set up a shared-service company offering trade operations and contract execution. It seems you are doing the same but with a price risk management service. Is this move to shared services a coincidence, or is it a general trend?

It makes sense for some companies to outsource rather than hire. Using shared services, you access experienced and credible people. It is perhaps something the large consumer companies should use more, particularly in today’s environment where the markets are getting more volatile. It could be in their interest to buy in some of this off-the-shelf expertise.

Thank you, Charles. I wish you every success with your company.

© Commodity Conversations® 2023

This is part of a series Commodity Professionals – The People Behind The Trade.

Scott Irwin is the Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is one of – if not the – most respected agricultural commodity academics globally.

Scott, could you tell me briefly about your new book, Back to the Futures and what prompted you to write it?

The book’s purpose is to be an entertaining way to learn about commodity futures markets, emphasising the fun part. It has a serious teaching purpose, but it’s wrapped in, hopefully, entertainment that keeps the reader moving along.

Why did I write it? I have been teaching, writing, and researching commodity markets since I was a senior in high school. My interest in the markets goes way back. I’ve been involved in them as an academic my whole adult life.

Most people don’t understand how markets work. I wanted to write something to explain how commodity markets work, but I didn’t want to do another academic project or write a textbook.

It’s also my professional DNA. Every ten or fifteen years, I need to do something that challenges me and keeps me interested and energetic. Writing this book was one of those challenges.

Would you describe the book as a biography?

It has a memoir or autobiographical component, but it’s neither an autobiography nor a memoir.

I included the memoir material to make the book fun. I wanted to make it entertaining to entice the reader to learn about futures markets.

As a good friend told me, each memoir story is designed to be a market parable. Each one is intended to illustrate some part of the operation or functioning of commodity futures markets.

I introduce my childhood friend, Jack Hunter, and his daredevil, reckless behaviour early in the book. I’m as equally guilty as Jack was, but I use Jack as my stand-in for a speculator, taking unreasonable risks. A few chapters later, I introduce my father, a farmer, to explain the concept of hedging. He struggled with that aspect of his farm business; his personal stories illustrate that.

You co-authored the book with Doug Peterson.

Doug is a close friend and a professional author with over 70 books to his credit.

About five or six years ago, I discussed the idea for this book with him. He loved drawing on my large inventory of crazy, insane stories growing up in rural Iowa. I would not have had the courage to write the book without Doug.

I knew that I needed Doug to achieve my objective of a fun way to teach people about the futures markets. After nearly 40 years of writing for an academic audience, I knew I didn’t have the skills to write the book I envisaged.

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Did you have a target audience in mind when you were writing it?

My target audience was anyone interested in learning about commodity markets – someone with some knowledge and experience who would like to develop a deeper understanding of the markets. I view my core audience as farmers, hedgers, merchandisers, and agricultural commodity traders. I aimed the book at someone who would never read a textbook but wanted to learn.

Let’s talk now a little bit about you. You had two attempts to trade on the grain futures markets. The first was in August 1981 when you were a graduate student, and you thought that the market was overestimating yields. The second was more recently when you believed the market was overestimating acreage. You lost money on both occasions. What did you learn from those experiences?

The first was hair raising, a near-death for my graduate school experience. It taught me that I didn’t have the nerves to be a trader.

I was stupid to take those kinds of risks as a graduate student – it was insane. But it was a good lesson to learn without getting bounced out of graduate school. It taught me to stick to what I’m good at. I am pretty good at academics and research, but I don’t have the stomach to carry that financial risk. I’m just not built that way.

If you’d made money on that first trade, would you have persevered and tried to become a trader?

That’s an interesting question.

It was the classic newbie trader story. I made enough money in the first few months to be dangerous. I got blown out. I had considered buying a seat on the old Mid-America Commodity Exchange. Had I not been blown out, I may have done that. However, the odds of that happening were low.

Traders typically experience enormous volatility in their fortunes. I always like to tell people that if they want to understand what the trading process is like, go read Jack Schweiger’s first book, Market Wizards. You will shake your head at the financial calamity that most traders experienced before becoming successful. I don’t think I had the fortitude to push through that. I didn’t love it that much.

 I started trading again in 2010. First, I became a principal in a small firm providing real-time yield forecasts for US corn and soybeans. I believed it could give me the edge a trader must have to succeed.

Second, my father passed away in 2009. Our family still had a substantial farm operation, and I inherited the corn and soybean marketing for our farms back in Iowa, working with my mother. It forced me to be closer to the markets on a day-to-day basis.

Third, I believe that trading makes me a better teacher and a better researcher. It gives me a quicker awareness of emerging issues in the markets. My motivation was to have skin in the game, but not so much that you get flayed!

So, yes, I trade now a little, but only options.

Your book describes how your father repeatedly tried to beat the markets but failed. What was he doing wrong?

I believe he made a series of errors that most farmers repeat.

The fundamental purpose of hedging is to manage your risk, to reduce the fluctuations in your revenue over time. However, most hedgers work their positions selectively, looking to pick up some gain and extra return. Farmers aren’t unusual in this regard. They want to manage the risk exposure of their crops and livestock, but they don’t understand that you must have an edge to be successful.

It’s hard for farmers psychically because they’re so connected to their crops. They have an intimate knowledge of what’s going on in their fields in their area. It leads them to believe they have an edge about what will happen with supply. There is a maxim: don’t get caught looking out your back door. It was always a big problem for my dad.

As a farmer, you compete in an incredibly sophisticated, billion-dollar business where your opponents are more sophisticated than you. You must understand who you’re trying to beat.

If you’re going to play the game, you must be prepared for the ups and downs. Even if you’re beating the market on average over time, you will have significant drawdowns and big gains. Hopefully, a few big gains offset your losses.

I don’t think my father had the mindset to understand the overall purpose of what he was doing and how difficult it was to win the game of selective hedging.

Since my dad died in 2009, I do the marketing with my mom, who will be 88 in a few days. She would have made one heck of a good trader. Her instincts about the markets are better than mine. A good trader has an intuition that I can’t describe and a personality that can deal with the ups and downs. She has both.

You must also have a short memory to survive if you are speculating or selectively hedging. We’ve made some big mistakes in our marketing, but my mom always moves quickly onto the next opportunity.

 My dad wanted so badly to hit the highs. It’s a terrible mentality to win in this game. If we do a great job marketing our corn, we’ll get a better price of 20 or 25 cents a bushel than our neighbours. It doesn’t sound much, but if you do that for 20 years, man, it adds up.

Your mother was a better trader than your dad. It raises the question: why there aren’t there more women traders in the market?

Almost all US universities are now majority female, but, as far as agricultural commodities are concerned, I’m lucky if I get 25 per cent females. It is a puzzle to me that I do not understand. I see it changing, though, slowly. More and more females are going into grain merchandising, but it’s still not the 50 per cent it should be.

You mentioned that you need an edge to be a successful trader. What else do you need?

You must have an above-average ability to collect and process information.

Equally important is the right kind of psychological makeup. Probably the best typology for a trader I’ve ever seen is in the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. It is one of my favourite books of the last decade. Being a trader is not necessarily the same as being a forecaster, but this book is about people who make predictions. A trader constantly makes predictions.

A good trader must have a Sherlock Holmes brain – an insatiable curiosity to dig into the facts and understand relationships – and not necessarily believe what everybody else thinks. It’s not a normal personality, the ability to believe in your own skills and attributes. But to be a great trader, you must have that kind of Sherlock Holmes personality.

Great traders must have a nimbleness of mind to know when they’re wrong and change their positions. I don’t think there’s any way to teach that.

Great traders are super intelligent people, but they also have the drive and psychology to take that cognitive frame of mind and implement it into trading.

The Super Forecasters Project suggests that maybe only one to two per cent of people line up with the potential to be a super forecaster or a super trader. It’s a rare set of skills.

At one stage in your career, you tracked market advisors and found that, except for Dan Basse, they added little value to the market. Why do you think that is?

First, let me say that even though they didn’t necessarily beat the market, it didn’t mean they didn’t provide value to their farmer subscribers. We believe that many farmers underperform in the markets. If you faithfully follow the advice of these services, at least you’d be average, which would be an improvement. As you can imagine, that was a challenging message to sell.

So why did these firms not consistently deliver value? I think it’s because they tended to be boutique shops without the resources to be competitive with the big grain trading companies.

You’re famous for solving what has been called the crime of the century in the grain markets. During the 2000s, wheat futures didn’t converge with the physicals at expiry. Most observers at the time blamed excessive speculation, particularly by the index funds. You found that it was a technical issue regarding exchange-stipulated storage fees: traders saw that the futures were worth more than the physicals because they had a cheaper cost of storage to carry them. My question is, why couldn’t you have asked one of the trade houses? After all, the trade houses were taking delivery of the futures.

We did try to talk to the big grain companies, but they weren’t talking. They’re highly jealous of protecting any perceived edge because they know how hard it is to win, even for them. They’ve got the other majors wanting to crush them all the time. Nobody would say, okay, Professor, I will sit you down and explain this to you.

They also had agendas regarding what they perceived as their commercial advantage in the delivery process. They maybe wanted to use the issue to drive significant changes in the contracts that they felt would have benefited them commercially.

The other thing is that this had never happened to anything remotely this magnitude or length of time. So even the big grain traders were slightly taken aback and unsure how to explain it.

I understand that you have a second book coming out soon on the role of index funds and speculators. Throughout your career, you have relentlessly tried to explain that speculators add value to the markets. Why is it so hard to get that message across?

Whenever fluctuations in commodity prices cause economic pain, there’s a natural, psychological reaction to look for a scapegoat. It’s a human emotion, and it’s repeated over and over.

There is also a fallacious belief that if you’re not engaged in the physical side of the market, for example, processing or growing corn, you are somehow a parasite in the economic system. It is the belief that you can only contribute if you’re actively involved in the physical side of the production and consumption of goods.

On top of that, there are spectacular stories historically – and they’re still sometimes occurring today – of attempts at market manipulation. It feeds into that anti-speculation mentality.

Now I have a question about high-frequency trading (HFT). You write in your book about the FBI investigations into the floor locals in the 1980s. The agency fined locals millions of dollars for front-running orders. Some in the physical trade argue that HFT funds have replaced locals in front running orders and spoofing the market by placing and cancelling large orders. Do you have a view on high-frequency trading? Do they add or distract value?

I don’t think that there’s any doubt that they add value. I covered the issue in a 2022 paper in my second book. It’s one of my favourites because we accidentally discovered something very significant. We examined how much commodity index investors paid for the monthly role in order execution costs.  We measured it back to the early 1990s for the GSCI (Goldman Sachs Commodity Index).

What we found was astonishing. Until 2007, index investors paid through the nose to roll their positions, but the cost fell significantly after 2007.

How do you explain that?

We don’t have a formal model to prove it, but it’s evident that it was the move to electronic trade. It was an 80 per cent drop in their order execution costs. Electronic trading with high-frequency traders is a vastly cheaper way to trade than open outcry.

We must learn what guardrails we need in this new world of high-frequency trading and electronic markets. It is a learning process. For the past five years, it has been our top research priority for my group here at the University of Illinois. It’s a big economic question.

You mentioned in your book that you are possibly better known now for your work on biofuels than on the futures markets. In 2007, a UN spokesman called biofuels a crime against humanity. The UN later withdrew that statement, but some still argue that biofuels are unethical because they raise food prices and cause hunger among the poor. What would you say to that?

Economically, it’s not a simple question to answer. It’s complicated on both the supply and the demand side.

Let me start on the supply side. The growth of biofuels has certainly raised prices, principally corn and soybean prices. I don’t think anyone can deny that, but by how much is a great debate among economists. And it matters. My view is it’s substantial for corn prices.

But what’s interesting on that supply side is that ethanol can now stand on its own two feet without mandates or tax credits. It’s competitive as a blending component in gasoline blends in the US. We wouldn’t use one gallon less if you removed the mandates. It’s not true for renewable diesel and biodiesel; both are wildly expensive relative to the diesel they replace.

The intriguing part of this – why it is so complex – is that many poor people in the world are subsistence or small-scale farmers who benefit from higher agricultural prices. High food prices hurt the urban poor – and there’s where the rioting and political problems occur. Out in the countryside, farmers quietly benefit from higher prices.

It’s not as simple to say higher prices hurt the global poor. It is a false statement on the surface. I’ve read country studies that suggest higher agricultural prices benefit some less developed countries, particularly those with extensive crop agriculture. Unfortunately, it’s a perspective few people want to hear, particularly in Europe.

I recognise that food price spikes hurt billions of people in less developed urban settings. Still, perhaps a more significant issue is that beggar thy neighbour export restrictions aggravate their suffering. When a country bans food exports to protect its domestic consumers, it transfers the price volatility to importing countries. It is a big problem.

Do you think biofuels have a role to play in the decarbonisation of the economy, or do you see the car fleet becoming exclusively electric?

I’ve been public in my views about the transition that we’re in, and I’m not particularly popular among farm groups and the biofuels industry. But you are not paying attention if you don’t believe that most of our surface transportation fleet will become electric. It’s coming. EVs are vastly better consumer products.

However, I believe the EV evangelists portray a faster transition than will happen. In the US, we have nearly 280 million internal combustion engines that we must depreciate. It is going to take decades.

Tractors began coming to the US in the late 1910s and early 1920s. It wasn’t until after World War II that tractors and not horses provided more than half of the power in US agriculture. There was a lot of horse agriculture in the 1950s in the United States. The market for ethanol and gasoline will eventually peak, but these transitions take a long time at this societal scale.

The decline in diesel usage will probably be slower, but it will eventually go down. However, biofuels have an ace in the hole in sustainable air fuel (SAF). It’s a vast global fuel market. We will need liquid jet fuel for the foreseeable future, and biofuels will play an essential role in decarbonising aviation. They may also have a role in maritime shipping.

What about renewable diesel? The US has some massive plans, but does it have enough vegetable oil? And can trucks be electrified?

Let’s start with the last one. Can trucks be electrified? Probably, but I’m guessing it’ll be slower because the amount of power you need will make the batteries so heavy they’d be inefficient, at least for a while. Short-haul delivery trucks will be electrified sooner; long-haul trucks and trains will take longer.

Regarding your question about renewable diesel, there is enough feedstock for the renewable diesel plants we’re building. If they all get built, we can supply them. But can we do it at a price that won’t cause a huge political controversy? We may price ourselves out of the exports of fats and oils.

I’m writing a lot about it now in my research. I’m sceptical that all the announced capacity will come online. I don’t think we will mandate enough demand through the RFS to justify all the plants we’re building.

I wanted to ask you about the courses your university offers in agricultural marketing.

We offer three courses at the undergraduate level.

The first is a popular freshman-sophomore course on agricultural marketing. We also provide junior-senior classes on commodity price analysis and commodity futures markets. And then we have the commodity futures markets course, looking at the markets and how you hedge and speculate in them.

We also offer three courses at the graduate level. One covers time series econometrics applications in commodity futures markets. We have a second one that covers traditional supply and demand and trade policy in agricultural markets.

And then, we have a unique and fantastic course in our PhD program, a one-semester seminar course where students read as much cutting-edge literature as they can in a semester. It’s kind of the jumping-off point for students doing dissertation research.

Last question. What advice would you give a young person looking for a career in agricultural marketing?

First, get as much academic training as you can. We have recruiters constantly engaging with the students at the undergraduate level. We never have enough Master students for the market demand.

Second, while you’re getting that training, do as many internships with grain and trading companies as possible to find out if you have the profile for the business.

Third, I tell my students to start following the markets and the daily market narrative. Get engaged in what I call the everyday market conversation.

Fourth, read as much as you can. I tell my students to start with your book, Commodity Conversations. I then ask them to read The Economics of Futures Trading by Thomas A. Hieronymus, followed by The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy.

I’m honoured to be in the top three. Thank you, Scott, for your time and input. It has been a fascinating conversation, and I have greatly enjoyed talking with you.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2023

Ralph Potter is an ex-Green Beret, the American equivalent of the British Special Forces. For the past forty years, he has been an active trader and broker on the world sugar market and has mentored many of the sugar market’s most successful traders.

I met Ralph at his local pub in Surrey, England and asked him how he got into the sugar business.

I got into the sugar club by accident. I had returned from the Vietnam War and was attending the University of Illinois. I had some money to invest. My grandfather was a farmer, and when I was a boy, I used to go with him to talk to farmers about the price of corn. I learned at an early age that the price would go up and down.

While at university, I seconded myself to a small grain and feed merchant. I first noticed them because their parking lot was full of Cadillacs, Mercedes, and Porches – and even an AC Cobra. That was in 1971, a very auspicious time to learn to trade grains. They paid me something but not much. I worked with a rag in one hand and some chalk in the other: a girl would call out the prices from the telex ticker tape, and I would erase the old price and mark up the new price on the board.

The room was half the size of a tennis court with eight desks. At each desk was a grain merchant with an assistant, all on several phones to various clients, farmers, elevator operators, chick feed buyers, that sort of stuff. It was mainly for corn, soymeal, and beans. They taught me a method I have used for 44 years, with a few improvements. The heart of the method is technical analysis and management of the position.

After a few months, I was short of two soybean oil contracts. At the weekend, I went out to play soccer, and frost was all over the ground – it was 9^th September. That cost me half of my trading account. It was an expensive lesson.

I met a guy in a bar who had inherited $8,000 from his grandmother. He bought copper. His trading account went from $8,000 to $60,000. Remember that at that time, you could buy a house for $14,000. He ended up with a debit of $4,000. He had no system of money management. That was a lesson I learned from someone else’s bad habit.

When I left College, I ended up at Merrill Lynch as a registered commodity broker, but I struggled to get clients in the grains. I was too young; it felt that you had to be at least ninety to be respected in the grain markets!

By some accident, I ended up with ADM’s sugar account; no one else in the office wanted it. I knew nothing about sugar, but ADM gave me a chance. Once I had one sugar client, I concentrated on the sugar market and found it easier to win other big sugar clients.

What lessons did you learn at that time?

Being in the military taught me two things. First, a bad plan poorly executed is better than no plan. Second, you should only commit reserves to exploit and consolidate victory, never to salvage defeat. Another way of saying that is, “Don’t throw good money after bad.”

I once asked a friend how he traded. He replied that he tossed a coin to decide whether to buy or sell.

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s your trading system?”

“Yes,” he replied, “but I also have a rule never to take a losing position home overnight.”

It’s not the trigger that gets you into the market that’s important. It’s about managing that position once you have put it on.

There is a famous story about a speculator at EF Hutton who got his trading recommendations through a Coke bottle wrapped in tin foil; a coat hanger acted as an aerial that he claimed picked up trading recommendations from outer space. Of course, everyone ridiculed him.

At that time, people didn’t have screens, so they would come to their broker’s office and sit and watch the prices on the clacking electronic quote boards at the front of the room. When they wanted to trade, they would walk up to the order clerk and hand them their order on a slip of paper.

Most of these people lost money, but this guy had been trading for several years and was a rare success. He would receive a signal from his Coke bottle to, say, buy corn. He would lord it over everyone else if he were winning on his position. He enjoyed that. The net result was that he would let his profits run and not snatch them. But when he was losing, the others ridiculed him so much that he quickly exited any losing positions.

When a winning position gave back a certain percentage, he would quickly get out for the same reasons. So, money management worked even for a crazy person – someone who received trading signals from outer space.

Can you briefly explain how you trade?

I don’t want to explain it in detail, but it is all about managing the position and taking the whipsaws. A whipsaw is when the market moves through a specific price point. You put on a trade, but the market reverses again, and you must reverse that position. It is the way floor traders used to trade.

Most people try to trade in a way to avoid whipsaws. The average trader would rather lose money than get whipsawed. I embrace whipsaws. It is like trying to be a boxer without getting punched. No one likes getting hit, but you must let your opponent strike you on your forearms, shoulders, or gloves – a glancing blow. You avoid being smacked on the head but take the more minor hits.

What is the biggest mistake that traders make?

The biggest mistake traders make is snatching profits. There is a saying that no one ever went broke taking a profit, but that is a lie; people go broke snatching small profits that don’t offset their losses. People often grab profits expecting to return to the market again at a better price. They may do, but usually, the market runs away, and they either must chase it, or they don’t get back in.

The best thing to do if you have a winning position in the commodity markets is to take partial profits in a non-emotional manner. You reduce the size of your position, but you hold on to the core. Trimming, or reducing a position, provides you with a psychological way of holding on to your core trade.

What is a trader’s greatest enemy?

A trader’s greatest enemy is lack of discipline and succumbing to hubris – when you think you know more than the market because you have been lucky or succeeded in using your trading method.

The worst thing that can happen is when a trader thinks he knows something and disregards his rules. It can be when he has invested so much of his credibility – and so much of his personality – into putting on a trade, it makes it hard to exit. It’s hard to change your mind. That’s why you must have a risk point.

What makes a good trader?

The best traders are the ones who have unconventional vision and self-belief: to stick your neck out and have the guts to say, “I am going to commit my company’s money – or my investors’ money – to make this trade. It takes someone with exceptional self-belief. Most traders on a desk just want to keep their heads down.

But you must take the risk. You must have the guts to trade. You also must have an absolute disdain for the opinions of other people. You don’t have to tell everybody you think they are full of it; other people’s views mustn’t sway you.

To succeed in the markets, you must have a well-developed sense of fear: it will keep you in business longer than brilliance. Brilliance can desert you in critical moments. Some traders are naturals, but if nobody trains them properly, they blow themselves up and take everyone else with them.

You talk about risk management, but don’t you think that most companies have taken risk management too far?

No, I don’t. But I do think some companies have taken the process too far. Over recent years some of the more prominent trading companies have cashed in and gone public. As public companies, they find that they must comply with thousands of new regulations which can swamp the management.

Unfortunately, some companies no longer view a good trader as an asset. They consider them more as a liability – a risk. The creative guys get swamped with compliance, process, and management issues.

I could never work for a big company these days; I would be sacked within a year. There is a joke about an old trader interviewing for a job. “What do you think is your greatest weakness?” he was asked. “I’m too honest,” he answered. “I don’t think honesty is a weakness,” the interviewer replied. “I don’t give a damn what you think,” replied the unsuccessful candidate.

So, you have been happier as a sole trader?

I have traded significant positions for big trade houses and a couple of hedge funds, but I never aspired to be a multimillionaire. I don’t have the temperament or the drive. Every time I wanted something like a car or a yacht, I got it, but then I was happy with that.

The excess money I made I gave away to people who needed it more than me. I have enough money, even if my wife disagrees. I like being part of the sugar club, part of the team. That was – and is – more important to me.

What I enjoy now is teaching. I am happy to give something back to the sugar business; to teach young people about markets. I try to show them how to use technical tools and position management in combination with their fundamental trading strategies.

Remember, the trade houses’ primary role is efficiently moving food around.   If I can help them to do that profitably, then I am happy.

Do traders manipulate markets?

Good traders don’t need to manipulate markets; they can make money on their abilities. Weak traders may try to manipulate markets, but it seldom ever works, or if it works, it only works for a limited time. The ceiling quickly falls in on them.

But what if traders get together – could that give them the market power to do it?

Maybe for a while, but the price has a habit of going where it wants. You may stop it for a time, but you will never stop it for long. If you push prices up, extra supply will come out. If you push prices down, supply will dry up. Traders invariably lose money if they try and push prices away from where they should be. I have seen some big companies try and fail spectacularly.

It is difficult to manipulate a market. It is much easier to manipulate a government, but then you don’t have to be a trader to do that. Everyone can manipulate a government; it’s called democracy.

Thank you, Ralph, for your time and comments.

© Commodity Conversations® 2023

This interview is part of an occasional series I call “Classic Conversations” which was first published in my book The Sugar Casino, available on Amazon.

Good morning, Jerome, and welcome to Commodity Conversations. Could you please tell me about yourself and your career so far?

I am Swiss and grew up in a little village in the Swiss Alps. My mother would probably tell you that when I was growing up, I spent more time on the ski slopes or the hockey rink than in the classroom. However, I was good with numbers and decided to go into accountancy, joining KPMG. I then joined PWC, where I passed my accountancy qualifications.

One of my main audit clients was an oil trading company, and I spent a lot of time in their offices. I quickly became interested in supply chains and trading. I found it fascinating to be able to put together the global news that I was reading in the newspapers with my day job. Geopolitics has always interested me. It was fascinating to me.

There was someone from Cargill on my accountancy course, and he suggested that I apply for a position with the company. I went through a round of interviews, and Cargill gave me a job. It was not in Geneva as I had expected, but in an animal feed nutrition mill that Cargill had recently bought in Switzerland. It was a family business that had to be integrated – financially, system-wise, and culturally – into a big multinational. It was a fabulous experience. I learned agribusiness there, stocks, shrink, and cash flow – all pragmatic and tangible activities.

After spending two years with the feed mill, I moved to Geneva, where I became the controller for their energy business. Cargill then sent me to Minneapolis to work as a financial controller in their North American energy business. I spent four years there.

After deciding to focus more on its core agribusiness, Cargill sold their energy business to Macquarie Bank. I was involved in the transaction, and headhunters began to call me, offering me various positions. One of those positions was as a financial controller for ADM’s grains business out of Hamburg, Germany. I talked it over with my wife, and we decided to take the offer and move to Germany, where I spent three years.

I then moved back to Switzerland with ADM to be the divisional CFO (Chief Financial Officer) of Global Trade – – ADM’s international distribution and marketing arm.

Just last week, ADM also made me CFO of their International Corn Milling business – starch and sweeteners.

Was it easy for your family to follow you to Minneapolis and Hamburg?

There is a saying that you cry twice when your company transfers you to Minneapolis – once when you arrive and once when you leave. It was initially complicated. My wife worked for Nestlé and had to quit her job when we moved to Minneapolis. Nestlé contacted her after we had been there for a couple of months and offered her a position.

As for my two daughters, they quickly made new friends within the French-speaking community. It is easier to create bonds with people who speak the same language. It was a fantastic time for the whole family – and we visited 28 states in our four years in the US!

Is your wife also in finance?

No, she is head of procurement for Nespresso. ADM doesn’t trade coffee, so there is no conflict of interest.

Could you tell me a little about the role of the CFO in an organisation like ADM?

I see my principal role as the glue between trading, execution, and the other functions within the company. I act as a chief of staff, supporting the BU (Business Unit) presidents in their roles and providing the financial information they need to make the best possible decisions. I work with them to develop and implement the strategy.

I play a coordinating role in liaising with corporate headquarters and the group CFO, making sure that we are in tune with corporate strategy.

I am overall in charge of the contract execution function and have a role in seeking efficiencies and increasing productivity. Trading is a high-volume, low-margin business, so productivity gains are always welcome.

Lastly, I have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure our financial accounts and reporting are timely. ADM is a publicly listed company.

What is the difference between a CFO and a Financial Controller? I see you were both during your career.

The role of a financial controller is to ensure that accounting and reporting align with US GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

In addition to a fiduciary role, financial controllers ensure that internal controls are respected and follow up on internal audits. Financial controllers report to the CFO.

So financial controllers have more of an audit, compliance, and accountancy role than a CFO?

They ensure that the company respects internal and external financial controls and complies with international accounting standards. This is a critical role as the last thing a listed company wants is to restate their historical financials for misstatement or error under the governance of the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission)

Besides controlling, another important part of the finance function is FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis); each BU has a yearly plan, and we have a monthly meeting to ensure everything is on track. Part of my job is forecasting future earnings and capital requirements and updating those forecasts in line with any market changes or events.

I work with the BU president to ensure that the BU’s plans respect the company’s capital limits. I also look at the expected returns of new investments.

Is it fair to say that a financial controller would focus more on the past while a CFO would look more to the future?

I think that is a fair way to put it.

What are the biggest challenges in your role as CFO of a major trade house?

It is probably managing the information flow. We have a fantastic bunch of people here at ADM, and they constantly come up with ideas for new businesses or how to develop our existing businesses.

It can be challenging to separate the great ideas from the good ones – to decide where to allocate our resources and ensure that we have covered all the risks and business implications, such as tax.

It can sometimes be frustrating for team members when their ideas are turned down or shelved for later, but we all understand that we must prioritise the best ideas.

I don’t work on my own. We have a finance team, a controller team, a financial analysis team, and a business development team. Together we ensure we continue to invest and that our existing businesses operate profitably.

How closely do you work with your risk managers?

Very closely.

What are your most significant risks?

Credit and counterparty risk is one – the risk of a client or supplier defaulting on a contract.

When I spoke with Greg Morris for my book The New Merchants of Grain, he mentioned that ADM operates from origin to end destination and that this mitigates much of the counterparty risk. Is that still true?

Operating along the supply chain and sourcing commodities from local ADM companies reduces counterparty risk.

People in the energy markets often trade ten years forward. We don’t deal that far ahead in agriculture, and that reduces our performance risk. We trade this crop year and the next one, so the mark-to-market risk is less than in the energy markets.

What are the other risks?

Operational risk – a boat stuck somewhere that could lead to a vessel arriving late and being out of contract – so default risk.

There is weather risk, for example, a hurricane in the US or a drought in Argentina. We have an advantage because we are a global company with a geographically diverse portfolio. It reduces our market risk compared to local players. If there is a drought in Argentina, we can source soybean meal from Brazil or the US.

There is also a risk of having a rogue trade somewhere. I experienced it earlier in my career, and it’s not nice. One of the worst nightmares for a financial controller is to have “bottom drawer contracts,” transactions that traders don’t put into the system.

I am fortunate to work with great leaders who set the environment – the tone – from the top. They acknowledge that traders can make mistakes and that errors happen. If the trader declares it immediately, they know they will be treated fairly. However, they will be harshly treated if they try and hide it.

Do you have trouble sleeping?

I am cheerful and optimistic, and business problems don’t keep me awake at night. A big part of our job is to deal with these issues and find mitigation strategies and solutions when they pop up.

However, as I mentioned earlier, I do have two teenage daughters. They can sometimes be more challenging than a ship that is running late.

Moving on to the finance function, please explain the difference between transactional or cargo-by-cargo finance and overall finance.

Big companies can issue bonds and syndicate bank loans. We don’t have to worry too much about financing our treasury operations.

Smaller companies are in a less fortunate position and often struggle to obtain the financing they need. Banks will often only finance them on a cargo-by-cargo basis.

In 2019 I interviewed Karel Valken, the head of CTF at Rabobank. He told me that the bank only wanted to finance the big trade houses because the due diligence made it unprofitable to fund the smaller trade houses. How easy is it for small trading companies to obtain commodity trade finance?

Funding can be challenging for smaller companies, but it shouldn’t be a problem if the margins are there. A trading company will get financing if it is making profitable deals.

CFOs in small companies will spend more of their time obtaining financing than allocating it internally. I spend most of my time not raising funds but ensuring we allocate them efficiently.

McKinsey recently wrote that the commodity trading sector would need an extra $300- $500 billion in trade finance. Do you agree, and if so, is it a problem?

The world trade in agricultural commodities will not grind to a halt for lack of finance. I am a great believer in markets. If the margins are there, the finance will be available. The margins will adjust to enable the sector to finance its activities.

Why do banks come in and out of trade finance – do the risks of a blow-up offset the margins on regular business?

Sometimes, a bank might come into commodity trade financing without understanding how trading works and how traders manage the risks. It eventually leads to problems, and the bank will exit the sector. We work closely with our banking partners to ensure they understand our business and we understand theirs.

Do you have to compete internally for funds?

Yes, we compete internally for capital. Most big companies set thresholds below which a BU president can take investment decisions. Above those thresholds, they would have to take the plan to HQ and compete for internal funds.

But before doing that, we must ask, “Is the projected investment a good strategic fit?” For example, we would not invest today in a banana plantation, even if the expected returns were good.

Second, we must evaluate expected returns. We have a weighted-average cost of capital and need to beat that by a certain percentage.

Compared to our processing businesses, we don’t have significant CAPEX requirements in our trading business. The capital we employ is mainly working capital. If we get a decent return on our working capital, we don’t have to worry too much – but we must ensure that we get the returns!

Would rising interest rates affect your plans and strategies?

Absolutely. As the cost of capital increases, so too must our expected returns. However, with the current market volatility, our expected return is robust.

Higher interest rates mean we are getting more requests to extend credit to our clients. Risk management is vital in a more volatile market.

Do you lend money to your clients?

There is sometimes a spread – a margin – between our internal cost of capital and our client’s cost. Some companies may look to capture that margin, but it is not something we do. We are physical commodity traders. We are not a financial institution. I would not use the company’s balance sheet to play the role of a bank. We may offer credit line financing to a client, but only if that client is strategic to our business.

Commodity prices rose dramatically in 2022, and although they have since fallen, some smaller companies must have found it challenging to finance their margin calls on the futures exchanges.

It was challenging for some smaller companies, especially those specialising in origination. They buy the commodities at their origin and then hedge them by selling futures. When prices rise, they must pay variation margins on their short futures positions even though they have offsetting positions in the physicals. Even if a company is hedged, it will still have to pay variation margins on its futures positions. Of course, if futures prices fall, the exchanges credit their account with the money against variation margins.

I didn’t hear companies failing to make margin calls when futures prices rose. It shows that the system works and that the necessary finance is there. Remember that the trading companies were more profitable during this period, and I imagine that this gave the banks more confidence in supplying finance.

At ADM, we had no problem financing our trading during this period.

A financial controller must evaluate the prices of some difficult-to-price commodities. Is that an issue?

No, it’s not an issue. The markets we trade are liquid, and it is relatively easy to value our open contracts. In some cases, we look at the last trade or use external evaluations from brokers.

It was different when I was in energy, where some contracts were less liquid and difficult to mark-to-market – especially for the far-forward positions.

Do you have daily or real-time P&Ls (Profit and Losses)?

I am not a big fan of real-time P&Ls. Traders should focus on the markets and information flow and not on their P&L constantly.

Real-time P&Ls can be helpful in risk management, but I believe daily P&Ls do the job perfectly well.

Also, we are physical traders. Our function is to move products from areas of supply to areas of need to serve our customers, meaning there is a basis component in the price of the products (difference in value between the physicals and the futures). We can get real-time futures prices but can’t get a real-time basis. That reduces the value of a real-time P&L.

You are the CFO of a major trade house – how could your career develop from here?

I have no plan. I enjoy what I do today and get involved in new businesses. I am constantly learning. For example, I am involved in a new distribution business in Pakistan. I am on the board of this new venture. I meet new people, get to know a new culture and country and face new challenges. I told my boss to keep offering me new challenges.

What advice would you give to a) a young trader and b) someone considering getting into the business?

I would tell a young trader to spend time – at least six months – with your finance and operations teams. It will make you a better trader. It will also help you realise that you can have a great career and a lot of fun in a support function. You don’t have to be a trader to enjoy a fantastic career in commodities. Other jobs within a trade house can be just as satisfying as trading.

I would tell a young person thinking of joining the business that they must be passionate about the job. All the people here are driven. They think and breathe commodity trading all day long.

Thank you, Jerome, for your time and input.

© Commodity Conversations® 2023

This conversation is part of my upcoming book, “Commodity Professions – The people behind the trade”, due out at the end of this year.