Archer-Daniels-Midland Company

Archer-Daniels-Midland Company is a Humankind 100 company whose ranking is based on its Humankind Value, a proprietary metric that provides an estimate of the overall dollar amount a company creates for investors, consumers, employees, and society at large.

Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., known as ADM, is a food processing and commodities trading company. Its ingredients are used in food, drinks, and animal feed worldwide. It processes raw ingredients like cereal grains and oil seeds to make them ready to add to food products.

Ticker: ADM

Humankind Value: $125.3 B

Revenue: $71.6 B

Market Cap: $50.4 B

(All values are in US Dollars, where M=Million, B=Billion, T=Trillion.)

ADM is responsible for positive Humankind Value, largely because of Crop Production ($332.5 B) and Economic Value ($36.3 B). Our modern food systems result in relatively stable and low prices, and thus profits, that do not reflect the full life-sustaining value of food. Out of the companies we have analyzed, ADM makes the top ten in the Crop Production category, which contains our estimation of 6,898,824.7 equivalent years of life that are not lost to a reduced quality of life or to death. ADM produces economic value by offering to consumers goods and services that they value, paying employees for their labor in producing these goods and services, and providing value for shareholders. ADM has room for improvement with respect to Biofuel Production (-$119.7 B) and Calorie Conversion (-$57.1 B). Biofuel Production is attached to this company because of its direct business activities. Crop Production, Economic Value, and Calorie Conversion are mostly or entirely a result of supply-chain relationships. The direct Humankind Value for this firm, in a vacuum, is negative. But with our supply-chain methodology, a more complete and positive picture of its total impact can be seen.

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We take a quantitative, data-driven approach to estimating the economic impact that companies have on investors, customers, employees, and society at large, rolling social responsibility into a single dollar value that we use to represent what a company is contributing to humanity. As far as we can tell, we're the first ones doing it this way.

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A company’s Humankind Value is an estimate of how much value the company creates for humankind, is published annually, and is current as of April 29, 2022. It is based on a quantitative analysis that calculates the comprehensive economic value of a company based not only upon its financial performance metrics but also on the costs and benefits to society from conducting its business. This calculation also attempts to take into account the Humankind Value of the company’s critical supply chain partners. The components of the calculation include: (i) Investor Value, which is the estimated value to investors on the basis of multi-year profitability; (ii) Consumer Value, which is the estimated value to customers based on the offering of a product or service; (iii) Employee Value, which is the estimated value to employees based on their salaries, bonuses and benefits; and (iv) Societal Value, which is the estimated unaccounted costs and benefits to society from the operation of the company’s business.

Humankind Investments calculates a single dollar value of a company’s Humankind Value, which is intended to capture the aggregate worth of a company based upon its economic impact on humanity, defined as investors, customers, employees, and society at large. It’s important to understand that this single dollar value of Humankind Value for a company is not a precise measurement of the economic impact that companies have on humanity – rather, it represents a best faith estimate based on our internal model of how these companies behave and what the estimated impact on humanity of their behavior is. In other words, we’ve created a simplified mathematical representation of the real world, and are using that to derive this single dollar value for a company.

Humankind Investments believes that certain themes, including but not limited to hygienic products, industrial crop production, clean water, healthcare R&D, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and medical services, all contribute to maintaining and extending human life. The Humankind Research Team works to estimate how many lives each of these themes, and other themes, are maintaining and lengthening, by synthesizing a broad range of independent data sources, such as nationally recognized data providers, scientific and academic papers, data gathered by government agencies, non-government organizations (NGOs), and other research entities, as well as financial statements and other public disclosures released by companies (10-K, 10-Q, presentations, conference calls), etc. Our researchers first estimate a human impact for a particular theme – estimates for the particular number of life-years added by the Humankind 100 companies are derived from proprietary Humankind Research Team work, described in the preceding sentence. Responsibility for the impact of that theme is then assigned to the companies that, according to the Humankind Research Team’s work, are contributing to the theme, either directly or indirectly. Our research process works to quantify the value of a human life and the value of a year of life well-lived based on economics research that aims to create an economic estimate of the value of a human life. This dollarization, or quantification, allows the impact of the themes we research to be compared in like-terms. Estimates for the number of life-years maintained and lengthened by the Humankind 100 companies for a particular theme are provided in the aggregate for each Humankind 100 company. We have provided examples of the estimates of the numbers of life-years maintained and lengthened for some, but not all, of the themes studied by our researchers. Other themes studied by our researchers can result in different estimates of life-years maintained and lengthened.

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