Hofseth was founded in 2002 on a simple but ambitious idea: that more of the fish should be processed close to where it’s farmed. Over more than two decades, the company has grown into an integrated seafood business covering the value chain in salmon and trout production, all within a few hours in north-west Norway.

The roots of the business go back to the earliest aquaculture pioneers in Norway, and that heritage shapes how Hofseth operates today. The company's ambition is to become the world's most sustainable seafood producer, guided by a belief that healthy seafood should never come at the expense of people, the environment, or fish welfare.

The challenge: A wide mandate, a complex starting point

When Ole-Johnny Ødegaard joined Hofseth as VP Procurement two years ago, the business had grown across multiple factories and sites, each operating with a degree of independence. Every site had their own suppliers and their own agreements. There was some cooperation between sites, but nothing structured.  

He explains, "My role was to see the whole picture and try to leverage Hofseth as a whole, not only looking at each and every factory or site as separate entities.”

To get there, he first needed to understand where money was being spent and who it was being spent with. At the time, that meant working with an internal colleague to extract data from the ERP system into Power BI.

Contracts were another challenge. Different parts of the business held and managed their own agreements without a centralized overview. He started looking for a way to fix that.

That search led him to Ignite.

Why Ignite: A platform that could tick off many boxes

What started as a need for a contract system quickly opened up into something broader.

Ole-Johnny says: "When I came in contact with Ignite, we saw that your system could do more. In the end, you kind of ticked off a lot of boxes.” Spend visibility, supplier management, and sustainability reporting could all come together in one place.

As a Norwegian company, Hofseth is subject to the Transparency Act (Åpenhetsloven), which requires businesses to carry out due diligence on human rights and working conditions across their supply chain. Their supply chain is diverse, ranging from small Norwegian family businesses to global companies with sub-suppliers all over the world.  

As their VP Sustainability, Ren Meinhart, explains: "We can't treat all of them the same way. Some relationships carry far more risk than others, and focusing the same level of effort everywhere would mean we're not actually focusing at all." Ignite gave them a way to manage that complexity alongside everything else, without adding another system.

Before committing, Ole-Johnny wanted to hear from people actually using the system. What came back confirmed what he was hoping for: Ignite worked across the different use cases he cared about, and the company behind it was responsive and genuinely invested in its customers.

What changed: A clearer picture across the whole business

With Ignite in place, Ole-Johnny got to work across several areas of the business.

Spend visibility

For the first time, it was possible to see how spend was distributed across the whole business, structured by category and broken down across all sites.

With over 1,000 suppliers in the base, Ignite's AI-suggested classification did a lot of the heavy lifting to get there. He explains: "If I was going to look at this every year, it would have taken a lot of time. Now the data is there right away."

That visibility made it possible to act. Where one factory might have been buying from five or ten suppliers for the same product, it was now easy to spot and consolidate.

And when new suppliers come in, Ignite helps keep the classification current without having to start from scratch each time. "It gives us a lot more clarity and structure and it makes my day a lot easier in terms of where to focus."

Contracts

Contracts were centralized in Ignite, replacing a situation where agreements had been sitting in inboxes and shared folders across the business.

With everything in one place, it became straightforward to see which suppliers had frame agreements and which didn't, track upcoming renewals, and take a structured approach to renegotiations rather than letting agreements roll over by default. Ole-Johnny says, "It’s a lot better than what it used to be."

Having that foundation in place, he has been able to identify and realize savings across the business.

Supplier risk

Working together, Ole-Johnny and Ren used Ignite's risk ratings as a baseline to prioritize across a complex and diverse supply chain.

As Ren puts it: "Ignite gave us a systematic way to prioritize. The platform helps us see which suppliers we have the most substantial relationships with and gives us a ranking of risk based on where they're based and what sector they operate in.”

For suppliers in the elevated-risk tier, the team layers on their own sector-specific due diligence: reviewing annual reports, ESG disclosures, press coverage, and sending targeted questionnaires. All of that research sits alongside Ignite's risk ratings in one place, making it easy to access, update, and present to auditors and regulators.  

"We're covering more than 90 percent of our annual spend under a documented assessment process," says Ren, "and we can show auditors and regulators exactly why each supplier received the level of scrutiny it did."

Key results

• 97% of spend now classified

• 10% savings realized on addressable spend, driven by their procurement initiatives and supported by the visibility Ignite provided

• 95% of contracts centralized, giving full control over renewals and renegotiations

• 90% of annual spend covered under a documented supplier risk assessment process

Asked what he would tell a peer taking on a similar role, Ole-Johnny says: "It would save them a lot of time on structuring the data and presenting it in an understandable way. Ignite is really on top of things: always trying to develop the system, eager to get feedback from customers, and quick on responses and issues.”