Unilever-owned mayo brand Hellmann’s has rolled out an AI-enabled tool that uses an ingredient scan to produce recipes that can help households use up food and reduce waste.

Launch your camera app, scan your fridge, and your phone will tell you what you can cook tonight.

That’s the promise of Hellmann’s new Meal Reveal tool, which leverages AI tech from Google Cloud to allow households to use up the ingredients they have lying around and decrease the amount of food that’s binned. It was unveiled in the UK during climate action charity WRAP’s Food Waste Action Week (March 18 to 24).

Hellmann’s aims to tackle the UK’s huge food waste problem: excluding the inedible parts of food, about 6.4 million tonnes of food that can be eaten goes to waste in the country every year, according to research from WRAP. Households alone account for 73% of this figure, throwing away £17B worth of food – this includes nearly three million potatoes, a million whole bananas, 1.4 million tomatoes, and the equivalent of 25 million slices of bread.

This translates to 95kg per person or 247kg per four-person household annually. All this despite 7% of the British population – or 4.7 million adults – living in food poverty, and food waste accounting for 4.3% of the UK’s overall GHG emissions.

Something has to change, and that’s what Hellmann’s Meal Reveal app is trying to do. “People never set out wanting to throw food away. Food waste is an unintended consequence of our busy lives, where we look in the fridge after a long day and see disparate ingredients but nothing to eat,” said Hellmann’s global VP Christina Bauer-Plank. “We saw an opportunity here to create a straightforward, easy-to-use tool.”

Using AI-generated recipes to cut food waste

Hellmann’s designed Meal Reveal in response to what it calls ‘fridge blindness’, a common contributor to household food waste. It refers to situations when you have a full fridge of ingredients, but you can’t see or imagine what meals to make. It’s an extension of the mayo maker’s Make Taste, Not Waste campaign, which was launched in 2018.

The international initiative has entailed challenges like the four-week-long Fridge Night, dedicated Super Bowl ads for four years running, as well as a partnership with Ogilvy for use-what-you’ve-got recipes and a Smart Jar that revealed hidden messages when placed in fridges at 5°C or lower (following a study that revealed three million UK fridges are running too warm, and spoilage can be delayed by three days if food is chilled below 5°C).

Meal Reveal provides “time-saving and convenient” solutions to consumers “struggling to make sense” of how the food in their fridge can be turned into a meal. Here’s how it works: users scan food in their fridge using their phone cameras, sharing it in the app either via video or uploading images. The generative AI tech then identifies the ingredients, and matches them with recommended recipes for a quick, simple meal.

“Meal Reveal is powered by the latest Google technology where a simple scan of the leftover ingredients lets you see the delicious potential in your fridge, in the palm of your hand,” explained Bauer-Plank. The Unilever-owned mayo giant says it “inspires more than 200 million people across the world to be more resourceful with their food” every year.

The app leverages Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to identify individual ingredients. Its search tool combines with Unilever’s proprietary algorithm to filter through a recipe database, coming up with dishes that may not seem obvious, encouraging culinary creativity. This extends Hellmann’s longstanding partnership with the tech giant.

“We were excited to create the innovative solution Meal Reveal to a persistent challenge of seeing the possibilities of the food in our fridge,” said Laurence Lafont, Google Cloud’s strategic industries VP for EMEA. “In its nascent stage, the more people use Meal Reveal, the more the tool will learn ingredients in our fridges and help provide the best recipes to use up what we already have.”

Public-private partnerships key to tackling food waste

The Meal Reveal launch came around the same time WRAP and the UNEP released their 2024 Food Waste Index Report, which revealed that about 32% of food across the global supply chain goes to waste, racking up $1T in economic losses, just as 783 million people go hungry and a third of the population faces food insecurity.

Alarmingly, households around the world throw over one billion meals every day (which is a very conservative estimate), equivalent to 1.3 meals daily for every person impacted by hunger. In 2022, households accounted for 60% of total food waste, amounting to 631 million tonnes. The commercial food sector isn’t faultless, though, with the foodservice industry responsible for 290 million tonnes (28%) and retail accounting for 131 million tonnes (12%).

Apart from the food insecurity issues, food waste also has a major climate footprint, contributing to 8-10% of global emissions (five times higher than the entire aviation industry). Additionally, with over a quarter of agricultural land transferred to produce food that is eventually wasted, intensive farming displaces wildlife too.

The 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework linked the problem with biodiversity loss and set out a goal to cut food waste in half by 2030. Similarly, one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals targets a 50% reduction in per capita food waste and a decline in food loss across the supply chain in this period.

However, only 21 countries – including Cabo Verde, China, Namibia, Sierra Leone, and the UAE – mention food waste or loss reduction in their nationally determined contributions towards global climate goals. “With the huge cost to the environment, society, and global economies caused by food waste, we need greater coordinated action across continents and supply chains,” said WRAP CEO Harriet Lamb.

Nations like the UK, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and South Africa have significantly cut food waste since 2007. “If countries prioritise this issue, they can significantly reverse food loss and waste, reduce climate impacts and economic losses, and accelerate progress on global goals,” noted UNEP executive director Andersen.

The Food Waste Index outlined the importance of public-private partnerships in tackling the food waste epidemic. But these require support, whether that’s philanthropic, business, or governmental, said Lamb. “Actors must rally behind programmes addressing the enormous impact wasting food has on food security, our climate, and our wallets,” she explained. “To take a collective approach is to recognise that no one actor can solve the problem alone, and that collaboration can create a movement that is more than the sum of its parts,” the report stated.

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With online bank-checking tool Bank.Green, you can figure out whether you’re banking with fossil fuel backers. 

2024 might just be the year when more of us can choose wisely when it comes to where we bank. Thanks to a sustainable banking campaign called Bank.Green, people can search whether they are supporting banks that continue to invest in dirty energy despite the climate crisis. 

Bank-checking tool

The bank-checking tool, which was first launched in 2021, allows users to search up their bank, generating a result on a red-to-green metre. There are multiple categories, ranging from Worst and Bad to OK, Good and Great. At the top of the green scale are banks rated Great, which have agreed to not provide any financing to fossil fuels and have backed up their claims with third-party verification. 

Most of the data comes from investigations by NGOs such as the Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack and Reclaim Finance, as well as Bank.Green’s research. 

If you search for HSBC, Bank.Green gives a red rating and provides information about the US$144.9 billion the corporation has funnelled into coal, oil and gas between 2016-2022. The bank also holds the title of being the second most generous financier of fracking in the UK and the largest backer of coal within Europe. 

Related: HSBC’s greenwashing tactics – the banking industry’s dubious sustainability claims

Where you put your money matters

The reason why your banking choices matter is because the money entrusted to banks is currently being used to fund dirty energy and other climate-wreaking projects. 

“Without your money, banks cannot make these loans and investments,” reads Bank.Green’s explainer. “It is up to you to choose – safeguard your money with banks that support fossil fuels, or those that do not.”

The impact of the banking industry reemerged in the headlines lately, thanks to award-winning actress Olivia Coleman’s satirical video campaign produced by Make My Money Matter. In the advert, the actress starred as Oblivia Coalmine, a “latex clad oil exec paid for by our pensions”. In the UK, £88 billion of the nation’s pension savers money is used to back fossil fuels. 

As a non-profit organisation, Bank.Green hopes to raise awareness about the banking industry’s role in the climate crisis. According to data from the Banking on Climate Chaos report led by global environmental NGOs including the Sierra Club and the Rainforest Action Network, more than $5.5 trillion has been poured into the fossil fuel industry between 2016-2022. 

Just 60 of the world’s top banks were responsible for the staggering figure, with names like HSBC, SMBC of Japan and ING among some of the worst offenders. The latter, ING based in the Netherlands, invested more than €7 billion between 2016-2017, as per data from Fair Finance International. 

Related: How to get your portfolio into climate shape

What is a sustainable bank?

But all this scrutiny amounts to little real impact unless consumers make the change. Unless banks face monetary pressure to halt their investments in fossil fuels, it is unlikely that the industry will move towards greener practices. 

Bank.Green says that it hopes to help guide money away from unsustainable banks by generating practical solutions, like switching to what it has dubbed a “fossil-free bank”. Under the non-profit’s Fossil-Free Banking Alliance, banks that have ended their connections to coal, oil and gas are identifiable with a certification badge. 

Among some of the banks certified include the online-only Clean Energy Credit Union based in Colorado, and Texas-headquartered Green Dot, currently the world’s largest prepaid debit card company by market cap. 

“There are a lot of fossil-free banks out there that don’t have a way of shouting about it yet,” said Bank.Green co-founder Zak Gottlieb, at the time of the alliance’s launch in late 2022. “Fossil Free Certification is the simplest way to signal to customers, professionals in the banking sector, and the general public that a sustainability-conscious financial institution is putting its money where its mouth is.”

However, fossil-free banking options remain sparse in places like Asia. Hong Kong, for instance, is devoid of a single bank certified under Bank.Green’s scheme. In these cases, the non-profit advises consumers to apply pressure through a pledge or raise sustainability concerns directly with their financial provider. 

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Matt Rogers, co-founder of the popular Nest Labs smart thermostat, is now putting his focus on food waste with the launch of a novel kitchen device called Mill.

Mill is a kitchen device that dehydrates a range of food scraps not typically compostable, such as animal ingredients. The device dehydrates the scraps overnight, leaving an odorless powder.

Once the Mill bin is full, consumers send the grounds back to the company, which it’s repurposing for agricultural purposes including as chicken feed.

Tackling food waste

The Mill system costs users about $33 a month to return their scraps. But as concerns over food waste escalate, it could prove to be an affordable solution in cities like Los Angeles where failure to properly dispose of food waste will bring hefty fines.

Like Nest, users will have options to interface with Mill via an app. They can monitor how much is going to their bins, which Rogers says is aimed at helping them adjust their shopping habits so that they produce less waste and also save money on their grocery bills.

“We’ve kind of gotten used to the way things are, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” Rogers told CNBC. “So when you come at it with fresh eyes, you actually end up building an entirely new system.”

If Rogers can do for food waste what he did for home energy awareness, the implications will be substantial.

Rogers says just like Nest reframed the way people look at home energy use, Mill will help change perceptions around food and food waste; United Nations data estimates about one-third of all food is wasted every year.

The impact isn’t just a food sovereignty issue, though. Food waste is also a leading contributor to climate change, driving methane emissions from landfills. On average, 22 percent of waste sent to landfills is food.

“Waste is one of these areas that we’ve kind of taken for granted but doesn’t have to exist,” Rogers said. “It’s super important in the climate fight, people need to realize how bad it is that we throw food in the trash and it becomes methane in landfills.”

‘Large-scale impact’

Rogers has also put his weight behind climate-focused philanthropic efforts, including a stint as Chairman of the NGO Carbon180, which is focused on reducing carbon emissions. He also chairs the Advanced Energy Institute.

Mill is starting as a home device, but Rogers and co-founder Harry Tannenbaum believe there’s potential to implement its tech into municipal programs to help cities meet their net-zero targets via large-scale waste diversion.

“We’re in this for large-scale impact,” Rogers said. “We want to build a big business that also is good for the planet, and we want this to be for everyone,” he said.

“If we start to think about things differently, actually, this is where individual actions can drive systemic change,” Rogers said. “That’s a really big deal.”

In early 2021, compostable phone case brand Pela debuted their own home food waste machine dubbed Lomi and managed to attract over US$6.8 million from more than 18,000 backers via an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. The company says the kitchen countertop appliance converts food scraps, cloth and bioplastics into soil within just 24 hours. 

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Climate TRACE, the global non-profit coalition working to make meaningful climate action faster and easier by independently tracking greenhouse gas emissions, has released data on more than 70,000 polluters.

Last month, during the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, the Al Gore-backed NGO Climate TRACE ( TRACE stands for Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions), which launched in 2020, announced it had identified more than 70,000 of the top pollution producers on the planet.

The organization, co-founded by the former Vice President, reported that its findings are the “most detailed facility-level global inventory of greenhouse gas emissions to date.” It included sites across mining, waste, refining, agriculture, shipping, and manufacturing industries.

World’s top polluters

More than half of the world’s top 50 polluters are oil or gas-related fields and facilities; fossil fuels are already the leading source of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The report also found that the top 500 polluters of the more than 70,000 identified, are responsible for 14 percent of 2021’s total global emissions.

The organization says globally, emissions from oil and gas production are “significantly underreported,” with its data showing that of the countries required to report regularly to The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, emissions are as much as three times higher. 

“The climate crisis can, at times, feel like an intractable challenge – in large part because we’ve had a limited understanding of precisely where emissions are coming from,” Gore said in a statement. “This level of granularity means that we finally have emissions data that enable us to act decisively. It also means we can prioritize efforts to achieve the deep cuts in greenhouse gas pollution we need to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis.”

The magnitude of the report shows Climate TRACE’s potential in bringing more accountability to key industries about their contributions to climate change and their decarbonization efforts.

Climate TRACE vs. polluters

The leaderless coalition of researchers and tech companies says its data are free and public, a structure founding member Gavin McCormick says is “essential” for earning trust.

“The release of this massive dataset represents the combined efforts of more than 100 contributing organizations worldwide,” McCormick said in a statement. “Between us all, we’ve been able to estimate the emissions of nearly all the largest emitting facilities on the planet.”

The organization, which started as a student project led by McCormick at UC Berkeley, has spiraled into a critical voice in the climate fight.

“We started it for fun,” McCormick told Protocol. “It was very much by accident. There was no founding vision, no deep-seated belief that what we were doing would save the world.”

Beyond the backing of Gore, it’s also supported by John Doerr who recently donated $1.1 Billion to Standford for its new Climate School. Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, has also supported Climate Trace as has Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic venture Schmidt Futures.

Climate TRACE is using AI — it applied for funding through Google’s AI Impact Challenge — using satellite data to help clarify climate data around emissions sources. The coalition now includes more than 50 organizations including businesses, research labs, and non-profits, working to detect and track global emissions in real-time.

The new report follows Climate TRACE’s first major release last year, the world’s first global emissions inventory that’s searchable by sector and country.

“That’s the first time that’s ever been done, and the work has continued and intensified,” Gore said.

The organization is also focused on circumnavigating self-reporting, the standard for most industries. Gore says those reports are often out of date by more than five years and include “large omissions.”

“All of the present data sources on greenhouse gas emissions, other than Climate TRACE, are derived from a single bottleneck source,” Gore said. The organization has already found inconsistencies between reported emissions and its own detection data.

“Our work is far from done,” McCormick says, “but I’ve been thrilled to hear from climate negotiators, corporate sustainability teams, investors looking to decarbonize, climate scientists, and even activists that this information is already a game changer that can help them make better decisions and decarbonize faster.”

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VEG3, a New Zealand-based company, has announced the release of what they describe as the “world’s first artificial intelligence marketing assistant for vegans”. In the future, will AI tools replace content writers?

The AI-powered software is capable of creating all kinds of content formats, from blog paragraphs to emails to press releases to social media posts- and all this in just a few seconds. All you need to do is prompt it with a keyword or a subject matter. The tool can even create complete vegan recipes and respond to anti-vegan comments with ready-to-post arguments.

It’s deceptively simple to use, and even the most web-challenged folks should be able to manage. “We’ve worked hard to make VEG3 easy to use, even for non-technical users”, explains Sam Tucker, founder of VEG3. “There’s no programming involved and you don’t need any experience using an AI tool.”

It takes just a couple of minutes to sign up for a free account, which gives you 5,000 credits a month, or about 3,000 words of copy. Beyond that, plans go from $39 a month to $499 a month. The software is currently in its beta version and prices reflect the launch period.

“VEG3 was trained on tens of thousands of examples of marketing copy from plant-based businesses and animal rights charities, so it’s capable of writing a wide range of different types of content” says Tucker, who build the software himself.

We took the tool for a test drive and were relatively impressed with the results. While the output will likely not win a Pulitzer anytime soon, the tool is fairly robust.

We input “We need to eat more vegan meat” into a Blog Paragraph Generator, and within 15 seconds, the tool generated the following text as shown in the screenshot below.

One controversial feature is the choice of ‘how creative’ the tool’s generated content can be. Users can select for their response to be ‘Accurate & Factual’, ‘Standard (Recommended)’, or ‘Creative & Obscure’. Are options 2 and 3 open to be interpreted as less factual? It’s unclear. We tested all three. Below we share the results. Reassuringly, neither of the three seems like fake news.

The results for ‘Accurate & Factual’:

“Nutritionally, vegan meat is much more valuable than chicken. Chicken has very little protein compared to other meats and it’s not a good source of any amino acids — plant proteins our bodies need. So most chicken protein comes from soybeans, which are a complete source of dietary protein, cutting down on several steps in the food chain (and chickens). The soybean industry uses 20 times as much land and emits 190 times more carbon dioxide than poultry production. Yowzer! Plus, the UPside Partnership estimates that you save 113 grams of CO2 emissions for every 1,000 calories consumed when topping grains instead of eating beef or chicken.”

The results for ‘Creative & Obscure’:

“Livestock production is one of the largest contributors to climate change. As demand for meat continues to grow, so does greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Plant-based foods have the potential to tackle these issues as they require less land, emit less methane and require fewer resources than traditional animal proteins. Furthermore, research suggests that a ‘protein transition’ towards more vegetarian food could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 18%— this equates to about two thirds of what needs to be done globally.”

Green Queen reached out to Tucker to explain what the differences between the three were and here is what he told us: “Basically ‘Accurate & Factual’ means the AI will generate content that is closer to the type of content that exists in the database it was trained on, and ‘Creative & Obscure’ means the AI will generate content that is less like the type of content it was trained on. ‘Creative & Obscure’ is best for brainstorming creative ideas, ‘accurate & factual’ is best for reducing the likelihood of mistakes and ‘Standard’ is a balanced approach that tries to get the best of both worlds.”

The last few weeks have seen a host of AI art generation software released, from DALL-E to Google Imagen, and pundits are questioning what this means for the future of digital art. Who does the work belong to? Are there royalties involved? What does this mean for human artists? As Abbey Bamford asks in Design Week in a piece about whether these tools represent a thread for the design community: “Could we possibly artificially codify and implement the messy, organic, chaotic process of creativity?”

These questions will no doubt come up for written content creators too. If social media posts and blog articles can be reliably written by an algorithm, how will journalists and writers differentiate themselves?

According to a press release, VEG3 will be adding a host of new features over the next few months and will continue to train its artificial intelligence models based on feedback collected during the beta testing phase.

“We expect that our tools will not only be able to help you with writing your marketing copy today, but will also be able to automate a much wider range of marketing tasks in the near future” adds Tucker.

“Ultimately, the goal is to make VEG3 the only marketing tool you need to run a successful plant-based business.” 

Lead image courtesy of Canva.

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Hong Kong-based ombnichannel food app KIN has just closed a $3.7 million pre-Series A funding round with participation confirmed by Tony Yeung, Chris Liu, Optimus Capital, and more to connect consumers more intrinsically to their food choices while eliminating waste and the negative environmental consequences of food delivery. KIN is powered by a learning algorithm that identifies what consumers want the most, thereby removing everything else from the supply chain and adapting to market conditions, in real-time. 

KIN was launched in April and uses AI and automation to alter the existing food service landscape. It offers a menu of dishes for takeaway or delivery, which are specifically targeted to vertical populations’ observed preferences. It has been developed to service high-density areas, with Taikoo Place being announced as the first physical location. The area plays host to more than 50,000 individuals daily, allowing KIN to unveil a plan to serve one million chefs and food content creator curated meals within its first 12 months of operation and five million by 2024.

A new way to eat in Hong Kong

The central idea of KIN is the notion of food communities. These designated areas, all comprised of vertical communities with office workers and domestic residents included, allow food delivery zones to be reduced. This removes the need for any methodologies that contribute to the climate crisis. Walkers are the only delivery operators for Taikoo Place. The communities also provide the app with real-time data and allow for fast adaptation to remove recipes and meals that are not proving popular. This is how food waste is negated, with ingredients not being sourced when unnecessary.

Taking an integrated approach to sustainable food sourcing. KIN creates a perimeter for ingredients procurement. Communities will each house an on-site kitchen, aligned with the KIN charter. This ensures that all ingredients come from local farms or regenerative locations, via carbon-mitigated transport and from within the APAC region. Sustainable packaging can be managed centrally as well. The ultimate aim is to move away from food as an industrialised model, making it more personal, local and intrinsically less wasteful. For the buildings signing up to the KIN model, it is hoped that they will become increasingly attractive to prospective tenants. 

“Among the many amenities that we offer at Taikoo Place, diverse F&B choices are ranked as one of the most important factors for our working population,” Priscilla Li, general manager of Taikoo Place said in a statement. “The extensive culinary selection available from KIN, coupled with an advanced app for ordering, as well as arranging takeaway and delivery, will enhance the overall dining experience for the Taikoo Place community, and make us as a Global Business District, even more attractive.”

Funding a food revolution

KIN’s $3.7 million pre-Series A raise has been earmarked for platform improvements and expansion into other multi-use vertical population areas. Taikoo Place is a pilot location that should, if successful, lead to other communities being established quickly.

“This latest financing ensures that we can continue to develop technologies to change the way we eat and refine our smart food ecosystem. By 2050, 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. So, if we want to target climate change from a food perspective, we need to change the way cities eat and we need to do it systemically.” Matt Reid, co-founder and CEO of KIN said in a statement.

“The food industry is in crisis. We believe we need to create systemic change to drive real meaningful impact. Our mission is to create technologies to change the way we eat. KIN enables whole districts to have access to exciting food from food innovators, made with regenerative agriculture, seamlessly available, digitally-led with carbon-free delivery. This is the first integrated food solution that learns what a building wants to eat. We have built KIN to be highly scalable and plan to expand into every urban vertical community.”

Tackling Hong Kong’s waste problem

A report published last December stated that Hong Kong is in the midst of a single-use packaging crisis. Largely attributed to takeaway culture and the Covid-19 pandemic increasing uptake of convenience foods, packaging waste now litters the streets. The report suggests that courses of action could include using recyclable packaging, consumers providing their own containers, restaurants loaning containers and home compostable packaging. 

Deliveroo Hong Kong stepped up in March this year and announced a new HK$2 million investment to incentivise sustainable packaging for its partner restaurants. Locations will be able to buy discounted sustainable containers to offset the costs of moving to different packaging solutions. 

All photos by KIN, unless stated.

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Carbon calculation startup Plant FWD has closed a $10 million Series A, co-led by Acre Venture Partners and Congruent Ventures as well as existing investors BBG Ventures, Precursor, Concrete Rose, and January Ventures among others. The startup has earmarked the funding for continued development of data, new product creation and enlarging the climate science team.

Founded by Zume Pizza co-founder Julia Collins, Planet FWD aims to provide carbon footprint data to companies that want to find meaningful routes to reduction. The startup secured $2.7 million in its seed funding round in 2020 which supported the launch of its Moonshot Snacks brand later in the same year. Total funding to date stands at $16.8 million.

Founded out of necessity, grown by strategic acquisition

While developing the Moonshot range, Planet FWD came to the realisation that producing a carbon-neutral product is extremely difficult. This led to the development of a carbon-assessment platform for use by itself and fellow CPG brands.

“We want to expand our carbon footprint at the product level for a box of crackers, and that was really hard,” Collins told Tech Crunch. “We wanted to understand our corporate level footprint as a company and that was really hard. We wanted to understand how to reduce our emissions, and that was really hard. We wanted to understand how to purchase very high-quality, carbon offsets, to get to carbon-neutral, and again, it’s really hard.”

The Planet FWD platform was designed to simplify all the integral processes. It’s slated as a one-stop measurement, reduction, neutralisation and reporting system. The technology allows companies to get an overview of their Protocol Scope 3 emissions across their entire corporate value chain, to identify where reductions can be made. Products are then passing conscious consumption onto the end-user. It is estimated that 89 percent of all emissions from consumer products are classified as Scope 3.

To grow the platform, Planet FWD acquired climate tech startup CleanMetrics, last year. This helped contribute to what Collins refers to as the “largest life cycle analysis database for agricultural production systems in North America”. The new funding will expand beyond existing products to include predictive emissions modelling and enhanced customer support.

Tapping into a changing market

More companies than ever are looking to take ownership of their emissions across their entire supply chains. As carbon labelling begins to pick up pace and consumers understand the need to audit their shopping habits, brands are looking to align with transparent impact systems. 

“The emerging regulatory landscape is causing an acceleration of companies really needing better solutions for carbon management and that regulatory framework or those regulatory frameworks are being bolstered by the emerging consumer appetite, sustainable and climate-friendly products,” Collins told Tech Crunch. “Retailers paying more attention are prioritizing brands that are motivated, sustainable and willing to stand behind it. And then of course, new ESG is becoming an important part of the way that companies are able to access financial instruments.”

Brands can access full breakdowns of individual product impact, tailored emissions reduction plans and vetted carbon offsetting schemes. The right to embellish products with the Planet FWD carbon logo is granted alongside. To date, Planet FWD has worked with 25 brands, including Pangaia, Kashi, Just Salad and Healthy Hippo.

What’s in a label?

Earlier this month, Foodsteps, a UK-founded sustainability platform bagged $4.1 million to build its team ahead of anticipated growth. The startup offers companies a way to calculate and label their products according to the environmental impact of each item. So far, the restaurant sector has proven keen to start offering diners a snapshot of what their food choices mean. Large chains including Wagamama, Pizza Express and Ask Italian are all confirmed as being onboard.

UMass Amherst is looking to make carbon labelling an everyday deciding factor when choosing products by including it on its campus menus. The Boston college is setting a precedent for other institutions to follow after a survey in 2021 revealed that 88 percent of its students use the climate crisis as a guiding force when making purchases.

Lead image of founder Julia Collins. All images by Planet FWD.

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Singaporean climate tech startup Handprint, which uses SaaS model to integrate sustainability-focused infrastructure into corporate platforms, has just closed a $2.2 million seed round as investors get more and more excited about impact assessment tools. The company’s ultimate aim is to offer businesses an easy way to improve their impact on the planet. Consumers are given access to positive initiatives that can be leveraged through their relationship with said businesses. The Handprint platform means corporate clients are able to choose a verified impact project to align with. This can then be incorporated into their services and tracked, over time, to asses long-term effects.

Handprint‘s round was led by payments network Thunes. A number of angel investors also participated. Investment is earmarked for technology development. The link with Thunes will allow for integrated payment solutions alongside, with hard-to-reach communities being able to benefit from the Handprint model.

How the platform works

Launched in 2020, Handprint is the brainchild of academics and engineers with a penchant for digital sustainability. It was designed to act as a seamless addition to existing corporate structures, thereby taking nothing away from functionality but adding responsibility. 

The concept is relatively simple. Companies sign up, choose an impact project that is a natural fit with their focus and oversee the results. Projects can be embedded into various parts of a business model, including payment processing and e-commerce tools. Handprint claims that by using blockchain technology and, where appropriate, satellite imagery, it is able to reduce costs normally associated with impact projects. It has cited an 80 percent saving, which it says allows more money to reach beneficiaries. Handprint is clear that it does not manage any of the projects itself.

“Handprint onboards NGOs across a wide variety of impact types and geographies. We work with impact partners with deep local expertise and help them raise funds for the amazing work they do,” Mathias Boissonot, CEO at Handprint, told Green Queen. “As of yet, we do not manage projects directly, we do help our partners with guidance on how to monitor impact in the long run. On our side, we fully manage project set-up, monitoring & verification, and the impact service is managed by an impact partner, that can be an NGO or a social enterprise.”

Handprint in action

Positive impact can be leveraged in a variety of formats. So far, handprint has helped businesses to increase and improve their sustainability efforts. It claims that up to 75 percent of consumers look to engage with companies that are regenerative. Further, 85 percent of people believe companies have a responsibility to regenerate the planet. Handprint has positioned itself as a go-between for doing exactly this.

Successful integrations include tree planting linked to digital RSVPs for online events, advertising budget reallocation and consumer donations at checkout. For the most part, businesses pay for the Handprint model, though certain partners allow their customers to make direct contributions. The differentiation is made between those that buy impact services and the ones that integrate the tech into their own services. 

What’s the USP?

The startup claims to set itself apart through transparency. It lays bare where money is distributed and offers verifiable environmental impact metrics, through a proprietary dashboard. The feature has been designed to facilitate easy report generation, accounting and impact tracking.

As a business, the Handprint platform naturally profits from its NGO onboarding service. Discussing how the platform makes money, Boissonot told Green Queen, “I love to answer that question because I think our business model is a USP and is quite disruptive compared to what exists in this space. Most competitors in the space buy impact (trees, carbon credits) and sell them at a significant margin (30-50%). Coming from the NGO world, we have decided from day one to maximize what goes to the NGO and only monetize our value-added layers.”

The layers incorporate three revenue structures: a monthly subscription to add web integrations, impact monitoring services and content creation for partner NGOs (generated using five percent of funds raised). 

Tech for good on the rise

The increase in apps and web integrations focused on positive impact highlights the need for more ethical business models. Consumers are waking up to the power they hold and are starting to flex it by choosing to shop and engage with businesses they deem positively impactful. In a bid to support responsible consumption, developers are creating increasingly accessible interfaces.

Last month, Provenance, a London-based marketing tech startup, revealed it had closed a $5 million investment round. The funding will be used to further improve its platform that highlights brands’ sustainability credentials, at the point of sale. Users of the platform can search for companies and gain an understanding of how they offset their impact, what social projects they sponsor and understand the footprint of products being considered. It is part of the modern wave of ‘transparency tech’ seeking to educate and empower consumers.

A key driver for the sector, abillion, the vegan social app, has sought to encourage conversation and knowledge sharing about brands since 2018. Most recently, the platform announced it is offering users the opportunity to invest and own shares in the company. The move is cited as the ultimate democratisation of a social platform, designed to bolster community engagement and leverage brand reviews for positive social impact.

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Provenance, a sustainability marketing tech outfit based in London, has announced the closure of a $5 million investment round. Led by Working Capital Innovation Fund and NordicEye, other participants included musician Peter Gabriel, The Brandtech group, and Digital Currency Group. The investment will be used to continue software development of Provenance’s flagship e-commerce platform that confirms companies’ sustainability claims at the point of sale. Alongside, wider brand marketing and consumer outreach will be undertaken.

The platform actively audits commercial claims. Being net-zero, offering sustainable packaging, ensuring fair working conditions, and even being female-owned are all verified. The aim of the platform is to marry conscious consumers with brands that fit their ethics and ethos, without shoppers having to do the research themselves. The ultimate aim is to eradicate greenwashing and support considered purchasing.

Leading by example

Provenance is female-founded by Jessi Baker; she started the company in a bid to cut through the fog of eco claims that many big and even smaller brands make. It comes as four out of five people claim to be reimagining their shopping habits, with sustainability issues causing the pivot. This shows promise but highlights another problem: that 53 percent of people say they can’t spot greenwashing when presented with it. This is where Provence aims to fill in knowledge gaps.

“We are fighting greenwash with transparency tech, and helping brands unlock commercial value from their positive social and environmental impact,” Baker said in a statement. “This [new] funding will help us grow our team and product to empower 1 billion citizens to choose products that match their values.”

Facilitating widespread change 

Both consumers and brands are designed to benefit from the Provenance platform. Consumers enjoy easy shopping, safe in the knowledge that any green claims have been independently verified, with said verification published on the platform. Evidence is tied to each brand’s ‘Proof Points’, which are clearly displayed.

Meanwhile, brands gain access to a bank of committed ethical consumers, thereby expanding their sales base and garnering new fans. Provenance has reported a 27 percent conversion increase for brands and a 2.8 times increase in engagement. The platform represents a win for both, which is why investors were impressed with the model.

“Shoppers are increasingly voting with their wallets for the world they want to see. But they’re also wary of greenwashing, and brands that are making genuine progress on sustainability are struggling to win the deserved commercial returns on their ESG initiatives,” Christian Tarp, partner and CIO at co-lead investor Nordic Eye said in a statement. “This scalable solution is helping brands increase engagement, conversion and trust in today’s key battleground of e-commerce.”

Provenance is active in 18 markets so far. Europe, North America and APAC represent initial launch locations. Within the last year, the platform has cited consumer base growth that has tripled the number of live users. Large brands participating include Unilever, Fonterra, Douglas and Cult Beauty. In 2021, the startup won the ‘Green Retail’ award at the Douglas ‘Beauty Futures’ pitch competition, beating out 196 other companies. 

Pushing back against illegitimate eco claims

Despite the majority of consumers not being able to identify greenwashing, there is a widespread desire to see the practice eradicated. In January this year, the U.K. revealed it will be cracking down on brands found to be breaking consumer protection law. Any companies found guilty of misleading claims will be liable for the costs to revise advertising campaigns and could face legal action, under the new Green Claims Code.

Earlier this month, Changing Markets Foundation took its campaign to end greenwashing one step further, by protesting outside London Fashion Week. Launching a website alongside, the organisation is seeking to shine a light on greenwashing in fashion, with major offenders hung out to dry via its ‘virtual launderette’.

Lead photo of CEO and founder Jessi Baker. All photos by Provenance.

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Transparency is coming to the chocolate industry via blockchain technology, and it could help to mitigate longstanding human rights and labor issues.

Despite commitments from the world’s largest chocolate producers, including Nestlé, Hershey’s, and Mars, unfair wages and human rights labor violations are still commonplace in the cocoa industry. But new blockchain technology from the Swiss-Ghanaian startup Koa could help cocoa farmers.

Koa has developed upcycling uses for the white pulp that surrounds cocoa beans. It creates an additional revenue stream for Ghanaian cocoa smallholders. The company is currently working with more than 2,000 farmers and has plans to add 10,000 more by 2025.

Chocolate blockchain

According to Koa, new partnerships with Germany’s Seedtrace and South Africa’s MTN Group will allow for “tamper-proof” transparency across the value chain that records payments to farmers, specifically small cocoa farmers.

The mobile payments are verified and stored on a blockchain, becoming publicly available. “Instead of having a person enter information on the blockchain, it links the data from mobile money transactions,” said Francis Appiagyei-Poku, finance and administration director at Koa. “This combination allows us to verify additional farmer income, deliver full proof and increase trust among stakeholders.”

The announcement comes after decades of promises by the industry leaders to better support their farmers. Labels including Fair-Trade have helped make a dent in chocolate’s labor issues, but Koa says this is the first time customers can see verifiable proof in real-time showing that farmers not only received full payment, but also fair wages.

“We want to get rid of long, non-transparent supply chains,” Anian Schreiber, Koa managing director and co-founder, said in a statement. “Instead of claiming good practices, we put our cards on the table to let the consumers witness each transaction to farmers.” 

Seedtrace has developed a system that it says removes any room for error, ensuring customers the ability to view the payments to farmers.

“We verify each transaction and store it on an open, low-emission blockchain,” said Seedtrace CEO Ana Selina Haberbosch. “Together with Koa, we thereby set new standards assuring that the information is verified, cannot be manipulated and is accessible in real-time for all stakeholders.”

Ethical chocolate

Demand for ethical chocolate has never been higher. Earlier this week U.K. chocolate brand Cadbury opened a vegan pop-up in London. It’s giving away free samples of its Plant Bar.

The “Mean Tweetshop” campaign includes wrapping the bars in packaging covered in “mean Tweets” from skeptics about dairy-free chocolate. Cadbury uses almond paste instead of milk. It says it hopes the dairy-free chocolate can convince even the most vocal critics.

“The Mean Tweetshop is a true celebration of Cadbury Plant Bar and we feel that this is a chocolate that anyone can enjoy, including the sceptics,” Michael Moore, Marketing Manager at Cadbury, said in a statement. 

“We hope that some of those who have been quick to judge plant-based products are brave enough to come down and try one for themselves, they really are that good!”

Lead photo by Etty Fidele on Unsplash

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