How ECOM Values are shaping First Mile’s strategy for 2026

Following the successful launch of the ECOM values last year, a brilliant workshop session took place to kick off the year, led by Lori Nirenstein, with the global First Mile team. 

The First Mile team are geographically widespread and came together for a strategic workshop in Amsterdam to focus on planning, methodology and alignment to kick off a busy 2026. Given that the team’s work is driven by business requirements and supporting commercial value, incorporating ECOM’s key values into ways of working is vital to ensuring success. 

The identification and implementation of key tools to add value to our business is critical to future-proof our technology and to support ECOM to remain competitive. Projects within First Mile are designed to strengthen ECOM’s commercial position by supporting traceability, improving our data insight and reporting capabilities, and helping us meet client and regulatory requirements. In addition, they help ECOM to continue to grow our strong connections with our suppliers, encouraging them to continue partnering with us, all while enabling compliant trading. 

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the two core values that we focused upon in our workshop were Collaboration and Innovation. In order to meet its objectives, the team must collaborate widely, reducing siloed team efforts, and solve business problems in a cross-functional way. Working closely with both global and origin teams is non-negotiable to implement the right tools across our coffee and cocoa businesses all over the world. 

The ECOM values are something we all have in common, and they are a key framework to guide us towards our OneECOM ambitions. To this end, we analysed where Collaboration and Innovation are working well currently, and where there are opportunities to take these even further in 2026 to support operational excellence at ECOM from First Mile, to CTRM, and beyond. This includes the sharing of critical information, requirements, and design inputs, as well as making sure that the necessary scope and delivery of new platforms are well understood and aligned. The team’s feedback after the session highlighted the opportunities this kind of workshop approach helped to define. Chris from the Ghana team shared, “The workshop helped clarify how we engage with a global stakeholder network to better support platform adoption, improve client offerings, ways of working and drive compliance through living the values in practice.” 

In terms of Innovation, the team has developed a First Mile Product strategy and roadmap aligned to identified business needs, plus improved feedback loops to help ensure that new technologies we implement at ECOM meet our business needs today and into the future.