Emissions Database

HowGood’s data is aligned with all major sustainability and climate reporting frameworks:

This alignment allows you to confidently navigate the complex landscape of sustainability reporting while demonstrating your commitment to a greener future.

HowGood sources impact data from thoroughly-vetted agricultural life cycle assessments (LCAs). Although LCAs were initially developed for industrial applications rather than agricultural products, they remain valuable for assessing environmental impacts. However, due to the limited number of comprehensive agricultural LCAs relevant for the food industry, relying solely on LCAs may not provide a complete picture of environmental impact across the entire sector.

Sustainability teams often leverage individual ingredient or product LCAs, which will provide an in-depth analysis, but one that is static, specific to a single source location, and cannot be applied at scale across their portfolio. Our platform uses these vetted traditional agricultural LCAs while incorporating data from a myriad of other peer-reviewed sources to create a Dynamic LCA that is nuanced, dynamic, and can provide like-for-like comparisons across countless ingredient alternatives.

The foundation of HowGood’s data is a diverse and continuously updated collection of more than 600 data sources, including peer-reviewed journal articles, academic conference proceedings and texts, aggregated commercial databases, targeted industry studies, NGO research, government publications, and Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs).

At HowGood, our primary focus lies in agricultural production, allowing us to dive deep into the intricacies of the highly specialized industry. Our carbon lifecycle maps from cradle to grave, with a focus on the farm-to-farm gate level. For many food products, as much as 70 to 90% (Crippa et al., 2021)  of the product impact is determined before it leaves the farm gate, so by concentrating our efforts around on-farm impact, we ensure that our platform delivers the most relevant and accurate data for companies involved in food and beverage production.

Our system boundaries encompass various aspects of the agricultural supply chain, from raw materials to processing, packaging, and transportation. This comprehensive scope enables us to provide a holistic understanding of a food company’s sustainability footprint. Our modeled analysis also allows us to make the most likely assumptions and provide the best default values for these additional stages of the carbon lifecycle, especially when companies may not have all the necessary data. As a result, HowGood delivers relevant and actionable insights, empowering businesses to make informed decisions that drive positive change throughout the entire value system.

In focusing our research specifically on agricultural production, HowGood follows a highly-targeted proxy selection process (when a data provider uses a similar crop in place of one for which data is not available) that prioritizes the relevance of species and geographic characteristics. While large databases commonly use very broad proxies, our selection process avoids the pitfalls of these overly-generalized analyses.

One leading research paper found that some large databases use a value for peanuts as a proxy for all tree crops (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). One is an annual legume while the other is a long-living, perennial, tree crop each with significantly different environmental impacts.

It’s also not uncommon to see “fruit juice” as a proxy for everything from strawberries to guavas, or “sweeteners” used for both cane sugar and stevia.

Because sourcing locations can be difficult to determine, databases often rely on “global averages” rather than producing location-specific impact factors for a given ingredient.

In HowGood’s database, using wheat as an example, we have 21 specific geographies available – the value ranging from 0.13 to .7 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of wheat. In other words, depending on which of the 21 geographies your wheat is sourced from, (not accounting for ingredient concentration), its carbon emissions could range anywhere from 0.13 to .7 kg of CO2 emitted for every kilogram of wheat produced. (For more on ingredient concentration, see Figure X)

At HowGood, we understand the importance of crop- and location-specific data in accurately assessing the sustainability of agricultural products. That’s why we emphasize location-specific granularity, avoiding the use of global averages that could potentially lead to misplaced carbon reduction strategies, inaccurate public reporting, or incorrect spending on carbon offsets.

Our platform delivers crop- and location-specific data, utilizing predictive sourcing locations derived from documented global import/export information. Throughout the innovation and reporting process, you have the ability to use HowGood’s predicted ingredient sourcing locations or enter your own when you have it available. This means that vendor and source location data is not required for producing a highly-accurate impact report, though HowGood can ingest it when preferred.

For customers with primary data available, we offer the ability to ingest that data and ensure that insights are tailored to your unique supply system dynamics. Users can integrate data from commissioned Life Cycle Assessments and studies, utilize HowGood’s Agricultural Practices Survey to gather vendor sourcing information, allow vendors to upload data confidentially via HowGood’s Sustainability Data Portal, and export data from third-party primary data software programs. Ingested data can also include specific manufacturing processes and  energy consumption, enabling highly-specific reporting.

When available, primary data ingestion increases the accuracy of impact insights by getting even more granular and reflecting on-the-ground practices, allowing you to make informed decisions with confidence.

Latis not only offers the most granular data, it also delivers a scalable solution that adapts to the ever-evolving landscape of sustainability for small, midsize, or enterprise-level companies.

Our database is kept up to date by a team of in-house agricultural and carbon specialists, data scientists and researchers, reflecting the latest developments and research in the field. By adhering to industry-standard methodologies, our platform ensures that you are well-prepared for upcoming regulations and reporting requirements.

Sustainability reporting can become an extremely time- and resource-intensive endeavor. LCAs, for example, require a detailed level of primary and secondary research which necessitates hiring a special consultant costing in the $50,000 to $200,000 range–and that’s per product. HowGood brings all of this cutting-edge research and continuously-updated data to the fingertips of a single user of the Latis platform. This gives sustainability teams access to exponentially more vetted data, saving valuable working hours and financial resources.