Albert Heijn, the leading Dutch grocery retailer, has made history by becoming the world’s first grocery retailer to start sharing transparently the climate impact of 1100 of its private label food and beverage products with consumers via its stores and app. This initiative gives customers the first insights of the CO2e impact of their purchases.
To accomplish this, Albert Heijn collaborated with Vienna-based ClimateTech Startup, inoqo, an AI driven SaaS platform dedicated to food decarbonisation. inoqo enables food retailers, brands, and suppliers to assess and reduce emissions across food supply chains at scale. By leveraging inoqo’s platform, Albert Heijn can also identify hotspots within the products and together with its suppliers take actionable steps in reducing them, thereby making progress towards its net-zero emissions goals.
Why is this initiative pioneering?
Several leading grocery retailers started to communicate the impact of their Food & Beverage products based on category average values. By generating highly scalable ingredient-level impact assessments, inoqo avoids using category-level data, which often oversimplifies the complexities of emissions related to products. This approach is a game-changer in the transition to a more sustainable food industry.
Transparency in grocery shopping
With the support of inoqo, Albert Heijn is making the impact of consumer choices in the supermarket more transparent. “We are introducing something quite unique, innovative, and straightforward: a score that reveals the climate impact of products, known as the Product Climate Footprint (PCF). It provides a detailed insight into how each food and beverage product contributes to climate change. Thanks to the inoqo platform, we have been able to assess a large number of products in a relatively short period. inoqo’s methodology enables us to provide an increasing amount of primary data over time, which is crucial to identify further opportunities to reduce the impact of our products,” says Albert Heijn Sustainability Manager Jens Gronheid.
Accelerating sustainability goals
Despite many organisations setting sustainability goals, reducing emissions related to food production remains a significant challenge. inoqo offers a solution that grows in accuracy over time, enabling grocery retailers to kickstart the assessment of their entire Food and Beverage assortment starting with data available to them today. They can then enhance the assessment with additional primary data, thus increasing granularity, comparability over time, and actionability.
“This pioneering step is poised to set a new standard for transparency and sustainability in the grocery retail industry, inspiring other retailers to follow and accelerate their own journey towards Scope 3 emission reduction.”, says inoqo co-Founder and CEO Markus Linder.
The methodology used by Albert Heijn can be found at this link.