TraceGains Embeds Carbon Intelligence into Food Supply Chains

WESTMINSTER, Colo. – April 01, 2026 – As regulatory pressure and consumer demand for sustainability intensify, food and beverage (F&B) companies are grappling with the immense challenge of tracking their environmental impact. In response, TraceGains, a prominent provider of supply chain solutions, today launched Carbon Insights, a new capability designed to automate and embed carbon footprint data directly into the industry's complex operational workflows.

The new solution aims to provide unprecedented, ingredient-level visibility into a product's carbon emissions, addressing a critical blind spot for an industry where, according to McKinsey, only 30% of companies can see beyond their immediate suppliers. By integrating this data at the point of sourcing and formulation, TraceGains is enabling brands to move beyond cumbersome, manual ESG reporting and toward proactive, data-driven sustainability.

The Rising Tide of Compliance

The launch of Carbon Insights arrives at a pivotal moment for the F&B sector. A wave of new regulations is transforming environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting from a voluntary initiative into a legal mandate. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has finalized rules requiring public companies to disclose climate-related risks and, for many, to report on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions starting in 2026.

More stringent measures, like California's recent climate laws, go even further, mandating the reporting of Scope 3 emissions—the indirect emissions that occur across a company's entire value chain—beginning in 2027. This is particularly significant for the F&B industry, where Scope 3 can account for up to 87% of a company's total carbon footprint, encompassing everything from agricultural practices to transportation and packaging.

Across the Atlantic, European Union directives like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the forthcoming Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) are setting aggressive targets for waste reduction, recyclability, and detailed sustainability disclosures. This global regulatory patchwork puts immense strain on already stretched compliance and product development teams, who often rely on fragmented data and manual processes.

"Most environmental impact originates in the supply chain, yet many organizations are still relying on fragmented data and manual processes to understand it," said Emma Karp, Senior Product Manager, TraceGains. "With Carbon Insights, we're embedding carbon data directly into operational workflows, so teams can move faster, reduce risk, and make smarter decisions without wasting time chasing down data."

From Farm to Shelf: Unlocking Granular Visibility

Carbon Insights is designed to tackle the data challenge head-on by building upon TraceGains' existing networked platform, which connects over 1,500 brands with a global ecosystem of more than 100,000 supplier locations. The new capability delivers automated, item-level carbon intelligence, allowing formulators and sourcing managers to see the environmental impact of individual ingredients as they build a product.

This granular approach enables companies to identify carbon "hotspots" within their supply chains—ingredients or suppliers with a disproportionately high environmental footprint. By having this data readily available within their daily workflows, teams can compare materials, evaluate suppliers based on sustainability metrics, and make informed choices that align with corporate climate goals. This shifts sustainability from a backward-looking reporting exercise to a forward-looking product development strategy.

The solution directly addresses the challenge of understanding Scope 3 emissions, which have historically been difficult to measure due to the complexity and opacity of global supply chains. By automating the collection and integration of this data, Carbon Insights helps companies create precise supplier sustainability dashboards and more accurately report on their overall environmental impact, meeting the demands of both regulators and an increasingly eco-conscious consumer base. Research shows that a majority of consumers, particularly millennials, are willing to pay more for sustainable products, making transparency a key driver of brand loyalty and market differentiation.

A Unified Ecosystem Through Strategic Partnerships

A key strength of the Carbon Insights offering lies in its integration of specialized technologies from strategic partners. Rather than building every component from scratch, TraceGains has created a powerful ecosystem that combines best-in-class data sources within its unified platform.

The system is powered by environmental intelligence from DitchCarbon, an AI-driven platform that monitors and aggregates supplier emissions data, and Sustained, which provides detailed product and ingredient lifecycle analysis. DitchCarbon's technology provides supplier-specific emissions factors normalized to global standards, while Sustained delivers the high-resolution lifecycle data needed to understand the footprint of individual ingredients.

This integration extends beyond raw materials to include packaging, a critical component of a product's total environmental impact. Through a collaboration with Esko, another company under the Veralto corporate umbrella, TraceGains connects ingredient and formulation data with packaging specifications. This allows brands to holistically manage their carbon footprint from source to shelf, optimizing both product and packaging to reduce waste and meet emerging regulations like the EU's PPWR.

This collaborative approach, fostered by parent company Veralto, aims to create a single, connected digital thread for product development. By unifying ingredient specifications, packaging data, and compliance information, the platform helps reduce errors, accelerate time-to-market, and embed sustainability as a core tenet of innovation rather than an afterthought. The result is a more resilient and transparent supply chain, future-proofed for an era where environmental accountability is non-negotiable.

Redefining Sustainability in a Competitive Market

While a number of companies offer carbon accounting and ESG reporting software, TraceGains differentiates itself by deeply integrating sustainability into the core operational fabric of the F&B industry. For its client base, which includes more than half of the world's top 100 food and beverage manufacturers, this means sustainability data is not siloed in a separate dashboard but is an active component in sourcing, compliance, and R&D.

This "Source-to-Shelf" approach provides a holistic view that many standalone solutions lack. Instead of simply measuring a carbon footprint for an annual report, the platform enables real-time, sustainable decision-making. By leveraging its long-standing expertise and deep data foundation in the F&B sector, the company provides a solution tailored to the unique challenges of food production, from agricultural variability to complex multi-tiered supply chains.

The launch of Carbon Insights cements sustainability as an integral aspect of how modern food products are sourced, developed, and brought to market. By transforming ESG from a compliance burden into a strategic advantage, TraceGains is equipping brands with the tools needed to build not only more sustainable products but also more resilient and profitable businesses in an increasingly transparent world.