Dive Brief:
- Sustainability research and carbon accounting company HowGood is teaming up with ESG data intelligence platform Sweep to help food and agriculture businesses better track carbon emissions generated by their products and incorporate that data into broader sustainability reporting.
- Under the partnership, announced Wednesday, HowGood will merge its database — which covers the carbon footprints of over 12 million products across food and agricultural supply chains — with Sweep’s artificial intelligence-powered platform. Sweep’s infrastructure includes compliance support for several major reporting frameworks and regulations, including Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the International Sustainability Standards Board and Global Reporting Initiative.
- The integration would allow businesses to “use ingredient- and product-level emissions data for scope 3 carbon accounting, supplier engagement and regulatory reporting, without manually transferring data between systems,” the carbon accounting platforms said in a June 3 press release.
Dive Insight:
The collaboration comes as U.S. companies, including those from the food and agricultural sectors, are increasingly expected to report their carbon footprints to comply with a bevy of disclosure frameworks and regulations, as well as stakeholder expectations.
California’s climate disclosure law, Senate Bill 253, which requires business entities operating in the state with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion to annually report their greenhouse emissions, goes into effect this year. Overseas, the European Union’s CSRD also applies to non-EU companies with parent entities or subsidiaries that meet certain revenue and employee thresholds in the bloc; the next wave of companies are expected to report by 2028.
HowGood and Sweep said these regulations place increased pressure on food and agriculture companies, in particular, to report emissions with greater specificity and clarity. The companies said that this can be difficult for a lot of businesses in the sector as a single food or agriculture product can involve multiple ingredients from different suppliers and countries of origin.
The partnership between HowGood and Sweep aims to help companies comply with growing disclosure requirements and support them at different levels of reporting maturity, the companies said in the release. This will include providing custom emission calculations based on product and sourcing data and assisting with primary data calculations based on direct supplier inputs and agricultural practices.
“Food companies sit on some of the most complex sustainability data in any industry, and too often it stays locked in spreadsheets and disconnected systems, too fragmented to report on with confidence,” Sweep CEO and Co-founder Rachel Delacour said in the release.
Delacour added that bringing both platforms together will give food and agriculture companies “a single, audit-ready foundation” that can be used to inform decision-making and be applied across reporting frameworks.
