For food brands, CPGs and retailers, product-level sustainability comprises a majority of your company’s overall environmental and social impact. The agricultural practices involved in growing or raising the ingredients in your product all have an impact on the surrounding environment, ranging from land use change and water usage, to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and the use of synthetic chemicals.

HowGood draws on 17+ years of research and 600+ data sources to bring you comprehensive, ingredient-level insights into your product’s sustainability impact. The Product Impact page in Latis is your go-to dashboard for understanding the impact of an individual product.

You can favorite any metric to display in your Favorites tab. Here’s what metrics and insights are available on this page:

1.a) HowGood Impact Score

The HowGood Impact Score is a score out of 100 that provides a comprehensive assessment of your product's impact on our planet and communities. It takes into account the impact of a product across eight core sustainability metrics. You can see how your product scores on each metric in the Impact Details section.

Click here to read more about how the HowGood Impact Score is calculated.

1.b) Sales Category Comparison

You can also see how your product’s HowGood Impact Score stacks up against the industry standard, by comparing it to the food industry as a whole, or your specific product category.

1.c) Sustainability Attributes

Sustainability attributes are characteristics or indicators of the sustainability of a product based on a multi-faceted assessment of factors, including farming practices, certifications, and other ingredient sourcing information. They offer a straightforward and reliable way for both retailers and customers to assess products on attributes they care about, and provide insight into how a product performs relative to others in its category.

You can explore alternative ingredients, sourcing locations, processing locations, standards, vendors and ingredient inclusion percentages, to see whether your product is eligible for any of HowGood’s sustainability attributes, including:

1.d) Impact Details

The Impact Details section shows how your product stacks up against our eight core metrics. Your product is assessed for each metric on an impact spectrum, which ranges from red on the negative end, to green on the positive end. You’ll also find the corresponding score on a scale of 1-10 for each metric.

Read more about our Processing, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Land Use, Water Usage, Soil Health, Labor Risk Exposure, Animal Welfare and Biodiversity metrics.

Understanding your product’s greenhouse gas emissions is important, as human-induced GHGs are the primary driver of global warming, climate change and its impacts around the world - including habitat and biodiversity loss, food insecurity, drought, desertification, severe storms and wildfires.

The Product Impact page displays four Carbon Footprint metrics that assess your product’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs):

2.a) Carbon Footprint (Cradle-to-Farm Gate)

This metric shows your product’s raw GHG emissions from farm to farm gate, measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per kilogram of product.

2.b) Carbon Footprint (Cradle-to-manufacturing Gate)

This metric shows your product’s raw GHG emissions from farm to manufacturing gate, measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per kilogram of product.

2.c) Carbon Footprint (FLAG emissions)

This metric shows your product’s combined GHG emissions as a result of Land Management practices (on-farm emissions), Land Use Change and Carbon Removals, in line with the GHG Protocol’s Land Sector and Removals (LSR) Guidance for Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) reporting purposes.

2.d) Carbon Footprint (Land Use Change)

This metric shows your product’s GHG emissions as a result of Land Use Change, in accordance with the GHG Protocol’s LSR Guidance.

2.e) Carbon Life Cycle

This section gives you a breakdown of your product’s carbon footprint across 12 stages of the full carbon life cycle, measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per kilogram of product.

Carbon Footprint (Carbon Removals)

This metric shows your product’s carbon removals, in line with the GHG Protocol’s LSR Guidance.

Read more about our Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Farm to Gate) and Carbon Life Cycle metrics.

See how your product scores on any of HowGood’s nature metrics, including:

See how your product scores on any of HowGood’s people metrics, including:

The Formula Details section provides a breakdown of impact at the ingredient-level. You can assess the impact of each of the ingredients in your product across each of the eight core metrics, in addition to Land Use Change and Carbon Removals. This will give you more granular insight into the overall impact score of your product. Each ingredient’s score is color coded according to where it falls on the impact spectrum, helping you to quickly identify high risk ingredients and metrics.

5.a) Abatement Strategies

The Abatement Strategies panel provides AI-powered recommended sourcing locations, standards, and agricultural practices that will yield the lowest carbon footprint for each of the ingredients in your product. It also shows your Potential Carbon Footprint (Cradle-to-farm gate) if you were to adopt these recommendations.

You can leverage these recommendations by sharing them with your procurement team, and speed up your product carbon reduction efforts!

In the Packaging tab, you can account for each layer of packaging that is used in your product, and achieve a more accurate assessment of your product carbon footprint.

Read more on how to model packaging emissions.

In the Sales & Distribution tab, you can assign values to the following fields to more accurately model your product’s carbon footprint across each stage of the carbon life cycle:

Read more on data inputs for different stages of the carbon life cycle.

In the Workspaces tab, you can assign your product to a particular workspace, and enter the volume of this product purchased in metric tons per year.

Note: Entering Metric tons / year ordered will make your product’s ingredients automatically reflected in the Materials tab of Latis, if you are contracted for Materials.

In Other Info tab, you can enter a vendor name for your product, and see a snapshot of your product’s data health, including:

The Transportation tab enables you to input more granular transportation data to inform the emissions attributed to the transportation stage of your product’s lifecycle. You can specify multiple routes of transport, including starting, ending and transfer points, and the mode of transport used.