How you create PCFs for thousands of Products
If you have ever spent days assembling a single Product Carbon Footprint in a spreadsheet, you already know the feeling: this work should be easier. When we started out doing the first PCFs by hand, we realised quickly that the manual effort behind each one was holding the whole field back. That is what motivates us, to this day, to build Niatsu.
Let's break it down
A PCF follows five steps:
- Gather and process unstructured data
- Create a digital twin of the product
- Match emission factors
- Calculate the PCF
- Interpret and act
Step 1: Gather the data. You need ingredients, processes, production sites, and specification sheets. This is often trickier than it sounds, because not everything is readily available. Our approach is to work with the data you already have in your ERP system or in your technical datasheets, so you do not have to start from scratch.
Step 2: Build the digital twin. Next, all that information has to be turned into an accurate representation of your product. You can do this in Excel, or even on paper. Our platform instead creates a digital twin of ingredients, transports, processes, and packaging, and puts everything into the right relationships. For example: a tropical fruit needs to be transported to Europe before it enters production. The digital twin captures that journey.
Step 3: Match emission factors. For every input in the model, you need an emission factor: a value that represents the associated emissions of that step, such as the carbon equivalent of one kilowatt hour at your production site. This is one of the steps we have fully automated. Niatsu interprets your data and finds the best matching emission factor in our database, which was built intentionally for the food industry.
Step 4: Calculate. Once the steps and factors are connected, calculating the total emissions is straightforward. In Niatsu it happens with a click.
Step 5: Interpret and act. Now you have a PCF you can share with customers or use internally for reporting. In our view, this is the hardest stage. Turning the data into real action is up to you, your company, and sometimes your customers. We want you to have more time and energy for this part, because the real work is waiting here. Leave the accounting to us.
How does it scale?
If you have done a few PCFs in spreadsheets, you know this work does not scale. Past ten products, you start to drown in input data, emission factors, and reports. Niatsu offers different ways to integrate with your current data, depending on where you sit in the value chain.
For B2B manufacturers, we calculate the emissions of all your sourced products and feed the data back into your system, so each product can aggregate PCFs the same way it aggregates nutritional values, without Niatsu needing access to your final recipes.
For wholesale and retail, we model your products based on ingredients and additional product information from your Product Information Management system. This data can be processed through our API.
For cooks, we built Carbon Chef. It takes any recipe and turns it into a footprint.
The upsides and downsides of large-scale PCF calculations
The upside of scaling PCFs is that you build a detailed, consistent dataset of emissions across all your products, following the same methodology. That frees you up to focus on operational changes and emission reductions instead of pure accounting. Your customers benefit too, because you can serve them the information they need immediately.
The downside is that at scale, smaller mistakes will happen, and keeping an overview of every dataset becomes harder. Managing large quantities of data is a real challenge. We address it by including two ratings on every product: a modelling quality rating (how well we could create the digital twin) and a data quality rating (how well the emission factors match your product). These give you operational visibility into the analysis, even across thousands of products.
Want to see it on your own data?
If you are curious how Niatsu would handle your product portfolio, get in touch with us or try Carbon Chef for free.