3 initiatives boosting the accuracy of Scope 3 reporting in food and ag

Scope 3 emissions are a headache in food and agriculture. Large supermarkets stock tens of thousands of products containing multiple ingredients. And food companies have supply networks that span large farming cooperatives and smallholders in developing nations. 

Obtaining primary emissions data from every node in this network is impossible, forcing companies to rely on “spend-based” accounting — use of crude emissions factors to convert dollars spent on an item into an estimate of the emissions generated in its production. This obscures emissions hotspots and makes it difficult for companies to collaborate with suppliers on emissions-reduction projects.

Thankfully, change is afoot. A growing number of initiatives are now focused on making detailed, supplier-specific data available for more and more ingredients and products. Here are three recent developments worth keeping an eye on.

UK retailers are using digital twin technology to track supply chains

Several major U.K. retailers, including Tesco and M&S, track supply chain emissions using technology developed by Mondra, a London-based startup. Retailers link product management systems with Mondra, which creates a digital twin of the company’s supply chain, analyzes the ingredients and draws on a database of emissions factors to calculate carbon footprints for specific products. Mondra defaults to generic emissions factors, but suppliers can log on to the system to add primary data. 

Two years after launch, 90 percent of all grocery market sales in the U.K. involve a product that’s covered by Mondra, said Ian Piddock, the company’s head of product marketing.

Once retailers have visibility across their supply chains, they can then identify potential emissions cuts. Piddock said that Tesco, an early partner on development of the technology, has used Mondra to reformulate its private-label lasagna ready meal to reduce the emissions associated with the product by 18 percent.

By the end of 2026, Piddock expects retailers to begin reporting reductions in total Scope 3 emissions that they have achieved using the system.

Granular data is being integrated into carbon accounting platforms

HowGood is a food systems intelligence company that maintains a database of 90,000 agricultural emissions factors. It’s won customers such as Nestlé and Chipotle by researching specific regions and suppliers to produce increasingly granular data on ingredients. 

“We have over 250 sweeteners in the database that you can pull from,” said Michael Streitberger, HowGood’s head of partnerships. “When you select sugar, you’ve got 40 plus locations of where you could source that sugar, all with different emissions factors and metrics.”

Companies use HowGood’s data to assess the emissions associated with potential new projects. Thanks to a partnership announced earlier this year, customers of Watershed, a leading provider of carbon accounting software, are also using it to compile Scope 3 inventories and identify emissions hotspots that can be the focus of reduction efforts. 

The Watershed link-up is one of around a dozen such partnerships that HowGood has with carbon accounting systems from Persefoni, Salesforce and others.

Retailers unite to simplify data requests

Many retailers want better emissions data from suppliers, but exactly what they want differs from company to company. If retailers could coalesce around an agreed-upon set of questions, suppliers could avoid duplicate efforts and prepare a single set of answers for all to use.

That was the goal of a project by the Consumer Goods Forum, a global trade group for the industry. Working with the consultancy BCG, the forum’s Climate Transition Coalition, which includes Ahold Delhaize, Tesco and other retailers, began by looking for commonalities between the data requests that the companies were making to suppliers. 

“These went from one retailer asking ‘Are you SBTi validated?’ to another asking 160 questions in an Excel file,” said Sharon Bligh, the forum’s director of health and sustainability.

The diversity meant that a single unified data request was deemed impractical. But the coalition was able to agree on the Common Data Framework, which launched in June. The framework defines three levels of sustainability maturity — dubbed Foundational, Expanded and Granular — and specifies a single set of questions for suppliers for each level.

The Foundational and Expanded questionnaires allow data to be aggregated by supplier or commodity, for example, whereas Granular retailers require suppliers to report data from specific plots of land. When verifying the information, Foundational requesters accept self-reported data, while third-party certification is required at the Expanded level and satellite imagery or other more specific data for Granular reporting.