Platforms for managing emissions and accounting for carbon emissions are widely available by now. Startups monitoring emissions issues, however, have a tendency to start with the easiest target first: the direct greenhouse gas emissions from sources that belong to a business. Within the climate industry, these are referred to as “Scope 1.” GHG emissions from a company’s energy use are referred to as “Scope 2” emissions. Now, Scopes 1 and 2 together only make up around 25% of all emissions worldwide. The remaining emissions fall under Scope 3, which are difficult to trace since they are concealed inside supply chains.
Businesses are beginning to address these emissions from the supply chain. As an illustration To address the emissions, Clearly recently secured $4.3 million in a seed round.
supply networks connected to the transportation industry.
Another illustration of this is the fact that Belgium’s GHG emissions are equal to the 113 million tons of CO2 emissions produced by Nestlé: The supply chain emits more than 107 million.
Investor interest in a different “vertical” play is growing now. This time, it takes the form of a firm that aims to decarbonize the agricultural supply chains.
Root assists food and beverage corporations in gathering firsthand information about their agricultural supply chains. Co-founders Eric Oancea and Maurice Hensl introduced the RootOS platform in October 2023. As of right now, dairy factories and fast-food restaurants are among the platform’s clients, however the business has not disclosed who its clients are yet. To far, it has collaborated with over 10,000 farmers.
Thus far, Root has raised €8.million early round, spearheaded by Point Nine’s Christoph Janz, with involvement from HelloWorld, Arc Investors, Project A, and other startup operators like Mike Rötgers, CTO of Cargo.one, and former P9 employee Robin Dechant.
Farmers are asked a few basic questions, and Root claims that teams from food businesses’ procurement and sustainability departments utilize their platform to gather verified primary data from them. The remaining information required for calculating GHG emissions is then obtained from already-published publications and additional data sources.After that, Root models the environmental impact of every product, giving businesses visibility into the “emission hotspots” throughout their supply chains.
According to Oancea, emissions-tracking firms such as Normative, Sweep, and Watershed are excessively “one-size-fits-all.” According to Oancea, “what these companies are doing is calculating, say, on average, one piece of aluminum has a carbon footprint of five kilograms of CO2.” They accomplish this by using industry benchmarks and secondary data. Alternatively, a liter of milk has a 2-kg carbon impact. However, such figures are very different in practice.
He states that the food business needs to move “towards a system or a process in which you as a company actually start collecting activity data from your supply chain” instead of relying on climate consultancies that utilize market benchmarks or generic software solutions.chain.
Naturally, that calls for extreme granularity. For example, the hundreds of thousands of farmers that might supply McDonald’s release CO2 depending on an overwhelming number of factors, like the number of cows they have, what they feed them, what kind of fertilizer they use, etc.
According to Oancea, these factors “will lead to gigantic differences in greenhouse gas emissions between suppliers, and it’s impossible to make better decisions to reduce the carbon until we get there and we collect data from these suppliers.”
According to him, procurement managers and sustainability managers at large food corporations utilize Root’s platform to communicate with their suppliers, including farmers. It has the ability to connect to a farm management information system and retrieve pertinentIt is not possible to cut carbon emissions by making better judgments without the data from these sources.
According to him, procurement managers and sustainability managers at large food corporations utilize Root’s platform to communicate with their suppliers, including farmers. It has the ability to connect to an information system for farm management and retrieve pertinent data. “We input it into our carbon calculator, and each provider receives a customized score that accurately reflects the conditions on their farm.”
Currently, Root is only accessible in a few Eastern European nations and the German-speaking DACH market, but this year, the company intends to launch throughout all of Europe.
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