State of Sustainability Podcast

Solo Episode: Product Carbon Footprints — The Story So Far

SAIF: Before we get into this episode, a quick reminder that we are hosting the State of Sustainability Summit in London on October 14th. We host the summit three times a year in London, Chicago, and Amsterdam. It is the best place to meet peers across food and beverage, FMCG, CPG, and packaging, working through problems like PCFs, the future of regen ag, and everything else we cover on this podcast. Details are in the show notes, or drop me an email at saif@altruistiq.com.

Welcome back to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm your host Saif Hamid, founder and CEO of Altruistiq.

Today we are revisiting one of the foundational topics of this podcast: the product carbon footprint, or PCF. I haven't discussed PCFs on the show for at least a year, possibly two. I got a little bored of it and moved on to other things. But it is time to come back, both as a primer for newer listeners and as a "story so far" for those already deep in the weeds.

What Is a PCF?

To understand the PCF, you need to understand the two academic traditions it emerged from, which historically had very little to do with each other.

The first is corporate carbon footprinting under the GHG Protocol. This grew out of Kyoto Protocol-style carbon budgeting at the country level: if countries have carbon budgets, what does that mean for industries? What does it mean for individual companies? The result was the top-down corporate footprint that most sustainability professionals now live with.

The second is life cycle assessment (LCA). LCA came from environmental science and academia. It takes a product and maps its full life cycle — creation, use, end-of-life, potential reuse — and calculates the full range of impacts across that journey: carbon, water, toxicity, social impacts, and more. LCAs were expensive and were typically done as one-off academic exercises, not as repeatable corporate workflows.

These two traditions co-existed without really talking to each other. A company like Nestlé might have done dozens of LCAs on products for internal R&D purposes, and separately maintained a corporate carbon footprint — but the two were not expected to reconcile. If you think of yourself as a non-specialist coming to this fresh, you would rightly ask: you're selling mayonnaise, you have an LCA on mayonnaise, you have a corporate footprint, surely these should connect? And until recently, they didn't.

The PCF is what bridges them. A PCF is the carbon slice of an LCA — just the carbon element, mapped across the product's life cycle. In theory, you should be able to stack PCFs across all your products and reconcile them with your corporate footprint, or at least ensure they use the same underlying emissions factors.

This reconciliation exercise — getting PCFs to feed into or align with the corporate footprint — is one of the major activities now underway at many large companies.

How the PCF Got Here: The Role of PACT

The race to standardise PCFs began roughly three to five years ago, and a lot of the early innovation was driven by PACT, an initiative spun out of the WBCSD — the World Business Council for Sustainable Development — which includes most of the major FMCG companies and a wide range of others.

PACT was trying to solve two problems simultaneously.

The first was standardisation. If multiple companies are all creating PCFs — using different consultancies, different software platforms, different methodologies — the results won't be comparable or stackable. If Unilever asks a packaging supplier for a PCF and a soap noodle supplier for a PCF, and both PCFs were built on different assumptions, they cannot be combined reliably into a finished product footprint. PACT was working toward a common methodology that would make PCFs function like interoperable Lego bricks.

The second was data exchange. Once you have a shared standard, you need a shared mechanism for moving PCFs between organisations — a standardised API that allows requests and responses to flow seamlessly across the supply chain without recreating the data collection burden at every step.

Several years later, usable versions of both — a conformant methodology and a working API — have now emerged and are being adopted across the industry. At Altruistiq, we are one of the platforms used for creating and sharing PCFs, and the numbers we see are now in the thousands annually. The trajectory is clearly upward, in both PCFs created and PCFs exchanged.

Why PCFs Are Useful

The theoretical case for PCFs is that they are a better tool for actually driving change than the corporate carbon footprint.

Corporate footprints are useful for understanding where emissions sit in aggregate, but once you get past electrification and energy decarbonisation, they become hard to act on. Most of the impact sits in Scope 3 Category 1 — purchased goods and services — built on generic, sector-level emissions factors. It is difficult to use these lumped-together numbers to have specific, actionable conversations with individual suppliers about individual changes.

A PCF gives you a product-level view that reflects the actual activities that went into making something. You can tell a packaging supplier: here is the footprint of the packaging you supply us, here is where the carbon is concentrated, here is the conversation we want to have about what you change. Internally, you can bring colleagues into a discussion structured around products they already understand rather than around GHG Protocol methodologies they do not.

The practical case, as I observe it in use, is mainly about making Scope 3 more specific, more accurate, and more defensible. Most large companies have now recognised that the generic emissions factors underpinning their Scope 3 are too broad to be meaningful. The push is to replace generic sector averages with supplier-specific PCFs — a specific mayonnaise PCF from a specific supplier, rather than a global average mayonnaise factor. That specificity is the primary driver of current adoption.

The Honest Challenges

False precision. This problem haunts PCFs just as it haunts corporate footprints. Finance colleagues will look at a PCF and expect financial-grade rigour. It does not have that. You cannot say whether a given corporate footprint is accurate within 10%, 20%, or 30%, because 100% accuracy is a theoretical concept, not an achievable standard. PCFs are still built on emissions factors, which are themselves proxies. A supplier-specific mayonnaise PCF is built on generic edible oil and egg factors. Progress is real, but the underlying uncertainty remains, and it is important to be honest about that internally.

As a practical consequence: if you ask three different solution providers to build a PCF for the same product, you will get three different numbers. They may be within 10% of each other, or 30%. Even under a shared PACT-conformant methodology, different teams using different underlying emissions factor databases will produce different results. The right response is to establish your own internal baseline and track consistently against it, rather than fixating on cross-organisation comparability, which is still more aspiration than reality.

Supplier burden. Getting PCFs from suppliers shifts the data collection problem upstream. Rigorous PCFs cost money — in time, in service fees, in organisational capacity. Suppliers that lack the capability to build credible PCFs face a real investment requirement, and the quality of what comes back varies enormously depending on supplier type, geography, and category.

Carbon tunnel vision. A PCF gives you the carbon picture for a product. It does not give you the water picture, the biodiversity picture, or the social impact picture. This was a bigger criticism a few years ago, when sustainability agendas were broader. Today, many teams have consolidated onto carbon by necessity — reduced budgets, reduced headcount, reduced scope. But the gap will become visible again as other metrics return to the agenda.

Tension between ambitious requesters and standardisation. The largest, most sophisticated PCF requesters often want more than PACT currently covers — broader data types, more granularity, additional environmental dimensions. But the more they push for richer data, the more they either force the standard upward in ways that price out smaller suppliers, or they pursue bespoke approaches that fragment the ecosystem. Both outcomes work against the shared standardisation that makes the whole system valuable.

Procurement alignment. Most PCF requests flow through procurement, and procurement teams are not always equipped to understand what a PCF is, why it matters, and what good looks like. Upskilling a category manager to have a meaningful carbon conversation with a glass manufacturer — including questions about hybrid furnaces, electrification timelines, and recycled content — is a meaningful educational investment. Getting procurement and sustainability teams aligned on what constitutes a sufficient PCF, before the programme runs and not after, is the most common failure point I observe.

What the Best Programmes Look Like

On the requester side, the most ambitious programmes set a clear target: what share of Scope 3 do we want covered by supplier-specific PCFs, and by when? They build a robust process for sending requests, chasing responses, reviewing quality, and deciding what meets the bar. They leverage CPO-level sponsorship — I have seen this at both Diageo and Unilever, and it makes a material difference. When suppliers know that the request comes from the Chief Procurement Officer and reflects a strategic commitment, not just a sustainability team exercise, engagement improves.

The other consistent theme in the best programmes is aligned internal education: sustainability professionals and procurement professionals agree upfront on what a good enough PCF looks like, so that data collected to procurement's standard is not rejected by sustainability as insufficient for external reporting.

On the supplier side, I observe roughly three camps.

The first is a small group of trailblazers — suppliers who genuinely understand that PCFs are a strategic asset, not a compliance burden. They are building PCF programmes across their entire product portfolio, developing roadmaps for footprint reduction, and pitching those roadmaps to customers as part of long-term strategic partnerships. Kerry Foods is one of the best examples I have seen. Their presence at events like New York Climate Week and London Climate Week is not a PR exercise — it is a fully integrated commercial strategy, with the full executive team pitching carbon as a route to higher-value, longer-tenure customer relationships. The move from commodity ingredient supplier to strategic innovation partner is real, and PCFs are one of the tools that make it credible.

The second camp is fast followers: suppliers who see what the leaders are doing and are moving in that direction without yet going all-in. They are building capabilities, engaging with requests, and positioning themselves as proactive partners even if they are not yet defining the standards. In an environment where major buyers are consolidating their supplier bases, being seen as proactive and coachable is commercially valuable — it can protect or grow share of wallet even without being the cheapest option.

The third camp, which is by far the largest, is everyone else. For most suppliers, PCFs will eventually become a table-stakes compliance requirement rather than a differentiator — just as quality assurance certifications once were. The cost will come regardless. The only question is whether they absorb it early and capture the strategic upside, or absorb it later having missed the window.

If you were looking for a general primer on PCFs, I hope this has been useful. If you have questions, reach out at saif@altruistiq.com — the address is in the show notes. And if you want to meet in person, join us at the State of Sustainability Summit on October 14th in London, where we will have a dedicated panel discussion on the future of the PCF.

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