Earlier this month, we launched the CarbonCloud Supplier Engagement Solution, aimed to help food and beverage companies collaborate with their suppliers to decarbonize their supply chain. In this article, we’ll explain how it works and how the features can help food & beverage companies gather activity data from their suppliers.
About the solution
Food supply chains are complex, making Scope 3 emissions difficult to measure and primary data costly to obtain. The CarbonCloud Supplier Engagement Solution, designed specifically for food and beverage companies, simplifies this by enabling you to:
- Quickly get started and assess your Scope 3 emissions using secondary data
- Invite and collaborate with suppliers across the whole value chain to gather activity data
- Identify emission hotspots and drive decarbonisation across your supply chain
👉 Learn more about the CarbonCloud Supplier Engagement Solution
How does it work?
The solution helps you get started quickly with an initial Scope 3 emissions assessment by:
- Allowing you to add or integrate basic information about your products and ingredients to the platform
- Using AI and a comprehensive library of high-quality secondary data to generate a reliable estimate rapidly
When you’re ready to improve data accuracy and collaborate on decarbonisation, the platform supports you by:
- Providing tools to invite and manage your suppliers at all tiers
- Enabling suppliers across the supply chain to input their own activity data
👉 Curious to learn more? Read our Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) guide and Corporate Carbon Footprint guide.
Navigating the platform: Key areas
There are four main areas to help you manage your data and supplier relationships:
Invites
This section is where suppliers will find requests from you to provide primary data. They can see a list of product invitations that they have been invited to contribute information.
From this tab, suppliers have the option to accept or decline these product invitations. Accepting an invitation will add the product to their list of ‘Sold Products’. Declining will remove it from their products.
Sold Products
Sold Products tab lists the goods that you sell to your customers.
Similarly for your suppliers, this tab lists the goods that they sell to you. It provides access to the carbon footprint status of these products and allows suppliers to update activity data related to them. When you first see a product here, its initial footprint might be based on secondary data.
For each product, you can view the footprint breakdown showing emissions across various sources, including a FLAG (Forest Land and Agriculture) breakdown. For agricultural produce, a more detailed breakdown of farm activities is available.
Suppliers can update various types of activity data for their sold products through dedicated sub-tabs:
- General: Update basic information like the product name, category, and countries of production and sale.
- Packaging: Update activity data related to packaging materials used. The emissions for packaging is initially calculated based on the country of production, but they can add specific information to replace default estimations. They can add multiple packaging materials.
- Transport: Update activity data for transportation routes. Similar to packaging, the emissions for transport is initially based on production and sale countries, but suppliers can add specific transportation routes, including mode of transport and distance, to replace default estimations. They can add multiple routes.
- Energy: Update activity data regarding energy usage in the production of the product. Suppliers can add specific information about energy types and amounts used to replace default estimations. They can add multiple energy sources.
- Ingredients: Update the ingredients used in your product. Adding ingredients is crucial for improving data accuracy.
- Suppliers can add ingredients from their existing list of purchased products (which act as ingredients in your sold products) or create a new purchased product to add as an ingredient.
- They can then update the amount of each ingredient used per kg of output.
- For each ingredient, they’ll also be able to assign a supplier, who can then be invited to provide their own primary data.
Purchased Products
This section manages the goods purchased to make your own products. This also applies to your suppliers. A key function here is to connect these ingredients with their respective suppliers.
The Purchased Products page lists the purchased items. From this list, suppliers can select a specific purchased product (which acts as an ingredient in your sold products) for the purpose of inviting their supplier.
When viewing a purchased product, they can navigate to the “Suppliers” sub-tab to select or create a supplier to associate with that product. This connection is essential for gathering upstream activity data to improve data accuracy.
Suppliers
This tab is dedicated to managing your upstream supply chain partners. You can manage your supplier details and track their contributions. Similarly, your suppliers can use this tab to manage and track the contributions of their own suppliers.
Once a supplier is added to your library, you can then invite them to provide primary data related to the purchased products you associate with them. The platform shows the invitation status, indicating if the invitation has been sent and accepted.
Once accepted, the supplier owns the product (the ingredient you purchase from them) within the platform and can contribute their own primary data.
Dig deeper
By providing a structured way to collect, manage, and share product and supplier data, this supplier engagement solution aims to make achieving supply chain sustainability goals more accessible and efficient for food industry professionals like you.
Curious to explore how it could work for your business? Get in touch to see it in action.
