This year marks a pivotal moment for the alcoholic beverage sector. Through coordinated, data-driven action, the industry is transforming Net-Zero 2050 from a distant ambition into an achievable target—and in doing so, providing a blueprint for the entire Food and Beverage (F&B) sector.
The Scope 3 Challenge: A Value Chain Blind Spot
For most F&B actors, the vast majority of emissions occur upstream, beyond their direct control. These “Scope 3” emissions are embedded in multi-tiered, global value chains that are notoriously opaque. Many producers and retailers lack visibility beyond their immediate Tier 1 suppliers; they often don’t know who their upstream sub-suppliers are, where they operate, or how many tiers deep their supply chain actually goes.
Meaningful decarbonization requires more than just internal policy—it requires profound collaboration. Buyers must incentivize suppliers to take action, and suppliers must be able to prove the impact of those actions in a way that is credible, quantifiable, and transparent. For a buyer managing thousands of SKUs, this requires a consistent framework to ensure every supplier is treated fairly and every reduction is verified.
Unlocking the Business Opportunity with Data
The solution to this collaboration bottleneck is data—specifically, data that is consistent, reliable, and granular.
When climate data is consistent across suppliers and time, it ceases to be a reporting burden and becomes a business opportunity.
- For Buyers: It allows for data-backed incentives, such as premium shelf placement or the launch of “climate-hero” product lines.
- For Suppliers: It justifies investments in sustainable production by providing a clear path to a premium market that values verified performance.
“The bottleneck for the F&B industry has long been a lack of consistency,” says David Bryngelsson, Founder & CEO at CarbonCloud. “While we’ve seen high-quality assessments of individual products, we haven’t seen them across an entire vertical. Without that consistency, the cost of comparing products is prohibitively high. This stalemate is finally ending, and it’s starting with the alcoholic beverage sector.”
A Movement Rooted in the Nordics
Meeting stakeholder and investor expectations
This movement was spearheaded by the Nordic alcohol retail monopolies. They launched an initiative to engage thousands of global suppliers in a single, consistent framework for calculating and sharing Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs)—covering the journey from the farm level to the consumer.
“We realized that we would never reach our climate targets without close collaboration with our suppliers,” says Sara Norell Murberger, Chief Assortment & Sustainable Purchasing at Systembolaget. “That insight drove us to develop tools that reveal real climate differences — for example, how similar glass bottles can vary significantly in emissions. By creating this transparency, we want to support all types of climate-reducing investments and encourage the sector to join us. We are committed to creating business opportunities for those who invest in lower emissions. Additionally, we provide a tool that we hope will help producers prioritize and make smart, effective investments.”
Timelines and learnings from Systembolaget can be seen on their PCF web
A Global Ripple Effect
The momentum is not limited to the Nordics.
“We are a membership organisation spanning the wine industry globally,” says Dr Peter Stanbury, Research Director at Sustainable Wine Roundtable. “It is clear that for all our members, measuring and reducing their GHG footprint is a key priority. Clearly, data is central to charting that. However, it is not just the numbers themselves, it is about comparability of that data. Also vital is how data can be collected and communicated efficiently, and in ways that don’t put additional pressure on those managing vineyards who have a raft of other priorities”
“The way Systembolaget engages their suppliers on the CarbonCloud platform is an inspiring example of creating transparency within the value chain with significantly less efforts,” says Marcel Kerkmeester, Managing Director at LFE (Netherlands).
What’s Next for 2026?
2026 is set to be a transformative year. Large producers are now calculating their entire portfolios and engaging their own sub-suppliers, while retailers are expanding their outreach to importers and producers.
Following a successful 2025 that proved primary data collection is possible at scale for
The drink industry isn’t just following the path to Net-Zero—it is paving it.
