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- The Week in Low Carbon Commerce - Dec 11, 2023
The Week in Low Carbon Commerce
December 11, 2023
This week there seems to be a focus on food, as much of the retail-relevant news out of COP28, startup funding, and retailer moves relates to food.
Even this week’s podcast episode is about food as we meet the founder of a family-owned olive oil brand that’s navigating major weather-induced supply shortages and inflation.
By the way, since someone asked: yes, it’s possible to gift Decarbonize.co membership. Just drop us a note at [email protected] to get the ball rolling.
Keith
What’s Hot
🚜 At COP28, the World Economic Forum and more than 20 corporate and research partners launched the First Movers Coalition for Food to create aggregated market demand for sustainably produced and low-emission agricultural commodities. The group will make procurement commitments estimated at a value of $10-$20B by 2030. Danone, Tyson, Nestlé, Pepsico, and Bayer are among the participants.
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🌎 Also at COP28, the Bezos Earth Fund announced $57M in food-related grants to support work on climate change and biodiversity loss.
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♻️ Stina retired its Bag and Film Recycling Directory, citing a lack of industry support. The program was not affiliated with labeling programs like How2Recycle.
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📝 Impact Research asked 4,000 UK consumers to rank 130 brands, including 49 retailers, on their sustainability efforts. Consumers ranked the Body Shop, M&S Home, and Waitrose at the top. The survey also highlighted challenges that ecommerce retailers face in communicating sustainability efforts.
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Supermarket News covers other weather- and temperature-related impacts on produce sales.
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Retailers
📦 Ahold Delhaize appointed Alex Holt Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) and member of the Executive Committee, effective no later than June 1, 2024. Alex succeeds Jan Ernst de Groot, Ahold Delhaize’s Chief Legal Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer, who will retire May 31, 2024.
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📦 Lidl US released its first Corporate Social Responsibility report, including goals to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 70% versus a 2019 baseline by 2030. The Lidl Group companies have also required a group of suppliers collectively representing 75% of product-related Scope 3 emissions to set SBTi targets by 2026.
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Deals and funding
📈 France-based CarbonMaps, which offers climate data for the food industry, raised an additional €3M for its pre-seed funding round.
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From the podcast
Inflation was a hot topic in 2022 — and still is in many categories.
But few categories have seen the disruption that olive oil has due to supply challenges caused by droughts and higher temperatures.
In this week’s episode, we hear from Berk Bahceci, Founder and CEO of Heraclea, a family-owned olive oil producer based in Turkey.
Berk shares how his company has maintained supply chain stability and quality yield, the unique agricultural practices Heraclea employs, and potentially scalable solutions for the broader industry.
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