European labelling systems added to sustainability database
Sustainable food rating company HowGood has announced it will combine the EU’s Nutri-Score and French Eco-Score labelling systems into the metrics available in its sustainability intelligence software Latis.
The Latis tool can be used to verify the impact of any ingredient or product against environmental and social metrics, such as biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, labour risk and animal welfare.
Latis claims to bring environmental and social impact data into the product R&D process through instant data analysis for over 33,000 ingredients and materials.
Both Nutri-Score and Eco-Score are European scoring systems that award grades to food products on a scale of A to E. Nutri-Score measures nutritional value and is calculated by measuring the amount of calories, fat, saturated fatty acids, carbohydrates, sugars, protein, salt, and fiber per 100g of a food product. Eco-Score measures a food product’s environmental footprint by summarizing 15 environmental impacts based on life cycle analysis.
According to HowGood, combining these systems will assist its efforts to respond to what it called growing concerns about public health, the environment and demand for transparency in the food industry.
By having nutritional and environmental measurements readily available in Latis, HowGood customers “can better understand how any changes made in the product development process can impact these scores to ensure their products are universally considered healthful and environmentally friendly”, the company said.
According to a 2020 global survey from Accenture on how COVID-19 impacted consumers, one-in-three consumers now rank sustainability as a top three purchasing criteria and are making positive changes to shop more health-and-eco-consciously.
HowGood claimed its Latis platform helps brands and retailers prioritize sustainability by allowing them to rapidly determine the impact of any ingredient or product against key environmental and social impact metrics like greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, labor risk, animal welfare, and more. With the addition of Nutri-Score and Eco-Score prediction capabilities, brands and retailers can quickly and accurately determine how their internal decision-making around sustainability will translate to consumer-facing labeling for environmental impact and nutritional value.
“We’re excited about the integration of Nutri-Score and Eco-Score into Latis to help global brands and retailers align the deep sustainability insights offered through our platform with consumer-facing labeling,” said Ethan Soloviev, Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood. “Brands are taking big steps to improve their carbon footprint and reduce risk from their supply chains, and we’re excited to aid them in those goals by aligning those insights with marketing considerations, bringing front-of-pack labeling insights directly into the hands of product developers and procurement teams.”
French food giant Danone said the insights it gathers through the Latis platform are instrumental in helping it ‘rapidly and holistically' understand the impact of our products as we create them.
“We anticipate the integration of labeling like Eco-Score and Nutri-Score will help us further improve not only our impact, but also our communications and transparency around consumer health and the environment,” said Alice Lesaffre, Director of Open Innovation & Partnerships at Danone. “We look forward to leveraging this data to further demonstrate to our customers our commitment to providing them with products they can trust and feel good about.”
