Princes Group: From data collection to acting on decarbonisation initiatives in 8 weeks

About Princes Group 

The Princes Group is a leading food and beverage company that offers an extensive range of canned and packaged goods, including fish, meat, sauces, pastes, ready meals, fruit and fruit juices. 

As a company with a global footprint and a complex supply chain, Princes have strived to minimise their environmental impact by adopting sustainable sourcing, participation in global consortiums for sustainable fishing practices, promoting responsible packaging, and supporting ethical and transparent supply chains. 

In line with these commitments, Princes partnered with Terrascope, an end-to-end decarbonisation platform, to further advance their sustainability initiatives and build a more sustainable value chain. 

The Challenge 

Princes was looking to take big steps forward in their sustainability journey. They wanted to set emissions targets in accordance with the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) and get ahead of upcoming regulations in the UK, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Moreover, Princes was committed to sharing product level emissions of their products in line with the increasing expectations of UK supermarkets, and to developing future products with emission labels.

The Terrascope Solution

In order to be able to share product level emissions data with their key customers, Princes leveraged the data models and machine learning capabilities of the Terrascope platform to create emission estimates for their entire products portfolio. To enable the appropriate balance of speed and accuracy, Terrascope automates the breaking down of each product SKU into its recipe, raw ingredients and manufacturing processes, and then estimates the emissions for each component. To improve the accuracy of the initial estimates, Princes could then make requests for actual recipe and ingredient data from suppliers.

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Building an impactful decarbonisation program

Emissions analytics revealed that Princes' top five business activities accounted for over 60% of their overall emissions, with the top 30 activities accounting for 99% of the reported emissions.

These insights allowed Princes to focus their emission reduction efforts on a few, highly material activities and related ingredient supply chains. Two meat ingredients contributed cumulatively to 23% of the total emissions, with one having an emission intensity over 17 times higher than the average intensity of all other ingredients.

Princes is exploring sourcing strategies for key ingredients from geographies that enable lower emission intensity (such as from Canada), and collaborating with suppliers to implement changes to on-ground practices. With a more comprehensive and granular understanding of product and ingredient level emissions sources, Princes can now focus on targeted procurement activities to help achieve their sustainability targets.

 

The Value for Princes Group

By partnering with Terrascope, Princes unlocked value in two distinct ways:

Operational Efficiency

Moving to a end-to-end decarbonisation platform enabled Princes to move from kick off to acting on decarbonisation initiatives in eight weeks.

A Comprehensive Solution for Managing Climate Performance

Terrascope helped Princes establish a repeatable emissions measurement & reporting process, with a robust data management foundation to meet increasing granular disclosure requirements such as SBTi FLAG. Moreover, creating visibility into Scope 3, supply chain emissions allowed Princes to pinpoint the specific activities and ingredient hotspots that if addressed, would make the biggest impact.

Competitive Advantage

By getting to detailed product level emission data early and using those insights to inform product R&D and procurement decisions, Princes is not only preparing for future data requests from supermarkets and regulators, but also building for future business opportunities.