Platform helps food businesses monitor their carbon emissions

A new platform helps all types of food businesses, including manufacturers and restaurants, to accurately track and improve their carbon usage

Spotted: Accurately determining the carbon footprint of a product over its lifecycle is a key challenge for businesses looking to make their operations more sustainable. As consumers demand increasingly accurate labelling of products, this requirement will grow. Startup Foodsteps was founded to help solve this problem, with a platform that allows businesses to accurately label the carbon footprint of their food products.

Foodsteps was founded by University of Cambridge graduate student Anya Doherty, whose academic work includes co-leading the largest experimental trial into carbon labelling for food yet conducted. Doherty created Foodsteps to apply that research to the food business. Foodsteps offers a variety of products to do this, starting with a platform that calculates environmental impacts across large and complex food operations.

The platform is designed to help food manufacturers and restaurants understand the environmental impact of food products, set recommendations for improvements and generate progress reports. Businesses can also download carbon labels directly from the Foodsteps platform to use on product packaging, menus and apps. It will also generate a “Food Story” for products, showing customers how sustainability improvements are being made for individual food items.

Foodsteps claims that its software platform makes it simple and affordable to calculate the footprint of food and drink products from farm to fork. They add that businesses can use their assessments to, “cover the full life-cycle of food and drink products, giving you insight into your upstream and downstream impacts.”

There is growing awareness of the need to track and reduce emissions from food production. As a result, there are also a growing number of innovations aimed at this space. At Springwise, we have seen developments such as lab-grown coffee, which prevents deforestation, and rooftop farms above supermarkets, that provide hyper-local food.