CarbonCloud partners with food service challenger Out of Home​

The pressure in the food industry increases every day, as consumers, regulators and retailers are demanding more sustainable products.

The latest actor to respond is Out of Home, a digitally native food service challenger in Sweden. The company competes with the likes of Sysco and Martin & Servera to deliver the best purchasing experience for kitchens and the hospitality industry. Out of Home has taken a different route from its competitors by only providing premium brands instead of developing its own brands. The company also has a fixed pricing model which is open to producers and customers alike.

“We have focused on price transparency since the very beginning. Now we are adding climate transparency and enable our customers to make the best purchasing decisions for the climate”, says Jacob Hillestad, CEO of Out of Home.

The CarbonCloud platform has automatically calculated the climate footprint of Out of Home’s entire assortment of 5,000 products. The platform combines machine learning and science-based LCA algorithms to produce the climate footprint measurements. Earlier this year, CarbonCloud entered a similar agreement with the Sysco subsidiary Menigo.

“This would have been impossible for any food producer a year ago, but we have the technology now and the response from the market has been incredible. It feels completely natural for an up-and-coming company like Out of Home to join us on this journey”, says David Bryngelsson, CEO and co-founder of CarbonCloud.

Conventional life cycle assessments (LCA) are laborious requiring a synthesis of a scientific foundation, data collection and considerable adaptations to each individual case. The climate footprint calculation of a single product can take months. LCAs are typically performed with a different methodology for different products, resulting at dubious comparisons between footprints at best.

CarbonCloud calculates all products with the same methodology by standardizing and automating the process, allowing buyers to compare products on a fair, equitable basis.

“The lack of comparability in the existing climate calculations of food products defeats the purpose of customers making any use of this information for . If a buyer can choose between two tomatoes of similar quality – one with a footprint of 0.5 kg of CO2e per kg of product and the other with 0.8 kg of CO2e per kg of product – the choice is easy”, says Jacob Hillestad.

CarbonCloud also allows all actors within the value chain to connect with each other on the platform through a network architecture. This means that suppliers can work together to reduce emissions and ultimate lower Out of Home’s climate footprint.