Supply Chain

HowGood Augments Ingredient Sustainability Database with OP2B’s Regenerative Ag Metrics

Brands and retailers using HowGood’s Latis platform can now further improve product impacts using uniform metrics and thus contribute to a global agricultural transition.

Published 3 years ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: Pat Whelen/Pexels

Today, HowGood, a SaaS data platform with the world's largest database on food and personal care product sustainability, announced the integration of One Planet Business for Biodiversity’s (OP2B) new Regenerative Agriculture framework. The framework adds to the metrics available for food brands and suppliers to measure product impact in HowGood’s sustainability software, Latis.

With more than 33,000 ingredients, chemicals and materials assessed, HowGood’s Latis database helps brands, retailers and restaurants to quickly determine the impact of any ingredient or product against key environmental and social impact metrics including greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, labor risk, animal welfare and more. Latis customers include the majority of brands within Danone North America — one of the Top 15 food and beverage companies in the US. In October 2020, Chipotle became the first restaurant chain to partner with HowGood, when it launched its Real Foodprint platform — through which Chipotle customers can access sustainability data for the ingredients in their favorite dishes. HowGood aggregates information from Chipotle’s suppliers and over 450 unique data sources — including peer-reviewed scientific literature, industry findings, and research from government and non-governmental organizations — to evaluate the average impact of Chipotle’s 53 real ingredients on the environment and animal welfare.

Conventional agriculture is a primary source of environmental degradation, accounting for 70 percent of global fresh water use and a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is associated with 80 percent of global deforestation — not to mention the depletion of nutrients from our food. OP2B, a coalition of leading global businesses committed to transforming agriculture to protect and restore biodiversity, recently launched a Regenerative Agriculture framework to enable companies to effect positive environmental change and to provide consistency across the industry when scaling up regenerative ag practices — a slowly but steadily growing movement that sees farmers incorporating techniques that restore soil health, reversing the degradation and nutrient depletion caused by decades of subsidized monoculture farming — throughout value chains. Not only are more and more organizations looking to regenerative ag to optimize their food and textile supply chains, the carbon-sequestration capacity of regeneratively farmed soil is being touted as one of our most promising solutions to the climate crisis.

Now, HowGood customers will be able to measure their products against eight additional, science-backed impact indicators outlined in the OP2B framework:

soil organic carbon content;
blue water withdrawals;
number of crops per hectare per crop cycle;
percentage of natural habitats;
pesticide usage – Environmental Impact Quotient;
fertiliser usage – Nitrogen Use Efficiency;
farmer household annual income; and
key social indicators for farm community.

With this information, global brands and retailers using HowGood’s Latis platform will be able to make changes to product development at the ingredient and supplier level, to improve product impact using uniform metrics and thus contribute to a global agricultural transition.

“We are delighted with HowGood’s decision to adopt and implement our Regenerative Agriculture framework in their Latis platform,” said Florence Jeantet, Managing Director at OP2B. “This decision will certainly facilitate and accelerate the uptake of regenerative practices within corporations' supply chains and contribute to our common goals of providing consistency across the industry — driving the deployment of regenerative farming practices, informing corporate strategies, and measuring impact in a clear and transparent way.”

“OP2B has provided the industry with critical guidance for improving our agricultural systems and restoring soil health. The integration of their Regenerative Agriculture framework into Latis is a great step forward in helping the global retailers and brands who use our platform to accurately measure and improve product sustainability,” said Alexander Gillett, co-founder and CEO of HowGood. “We’re excited to be able to provide our customers with access to OP2B’s standardized metrics and help encourage the transition to regenerative agricultural practices within corporate value chains. The better companies understand the impact of their products at a micro-level, the more effective changes they can make to reduce harmful practices and bring transparency to the food industry.”