What if exchanging a product carbon footprint were as easy as sending an email?

A cross-industry project designed to make that possible got a boost last week — the latest in a busy year — when a leading source of food-sector emissions data said it would align with the initiative’s guidelines. 

The move added another partner to the growing number of organizations conforming with the product carbon footprint standard developed by the Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT). The list includes Procter & Gamble, Toyota, MasterCard and more than 100 other companies using the standard with suppliers; service providers such as SAP and Microsoft that have integrated it into software products; industry collaborations from automotive and other sectors; and several large auditors, including EY and Deloitte.

Current rules for exchanging footprint data vary between industries and companies — to use the email analogy, it’s as if different companies’ incompatible messaging protocols kept them from communicating with each other. The PACT standard is designed to eliminate existing barriers and create a global, industry-agnostic set of interoperable rules. That will allow buyers to more easily search for low-carbon products and sellers to compete on emissions.

The initiative, a project of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, launched the latest version of its standard in April. The update included new guidelines for calculating, standardizing and exchanging food-sector carbon footprints, paving the way for organizations from the industry to align with the rules. Last week, HowGood, a prominent food-and-beverage sustainability platform that contains more than 90,000 agricultural emissions factors, said its data now aligns with PACT specifications.

Going mainstream

One user will be HowGood customer Ahold Delhaize, a retailer whose U.S. chains include Food Lion and Giant Food. Grant Sprick, the company’s vice president for climate and environment, said that product carbon footprints provide more granular emissions estimates that reflect the decarbonization efforts of suppliers, and that PACT conformance would lower barriers for partners to create and share the data.

It will also h