Scope 3 emissions are being measured but many food companies lack confidence in the numbers. Don’t worry, says Anya Doherty.
Last week I took part in a panel at Sustainable Foods 2026 – Engaging suppliers on scope 3 emissions. There were two audience questions worth picking up on.
The first was: how many of you are measuring your Scope 3 emissions? To this one, nearly all hands in the room went up.
The second: how many of you have got confidence in the Scope 3 data that you have at the moment? Not a single hand went up. Not one.
If I have one take away from the conference, it’s that there needs to be hands up in the room next year for question two. I think we can achieve this by prioritising three things.
First of all, we need to accept that our Scope 3 methodologies, databases and even baselines will be changing. Every year. That’s just a fact of this being a nascent industry.
So, instead of being frustrated or defeated by this, let’s just design the systems to work with this and accept it’s part of the ride. Change is going to occur in databases and in methodology, for example, so let’s just build our systems to flow with this!
This year I think we’ll also start to see a lot more interoperability between systems, and it should increase our confidence in our Scope 3 assessments as data will start to flow from suppliers to buyers on a much bigger scale. It’s on us as providers to work together (competitors and friends alike) to ensure that we let information flow through the system and don’t put up barriers that will hurt us all.
And finally, I wonder if we reframed question two. How many of you know what your top three actions are to reduce emissions? I feel that more hands would go up – a lot more. We must ensure our pursuit of good Scope 3 data never loses sight of the entire point of measuring emissions – which is to reduce them.
I think we can all take huge confidence from the fact that the top three to five actions usually cover quite a large portion of a food company’s footprint. In lots of ways, we already have enough information to take action, and that should give us all confidence.
Anya Doherty is CEO and founder at Foodsteps.
Great points from Anya, especially regarding the need to reframe the data confidence issue towards actionable steps. As we’re looking at increasing interoperability between systems this year, I’m curious if you’ve seen any specific frameworks that successfully bridge the gap between supplier primary data and these changing databases? I’ve been reading some notes on methodology shifts over at https://www.facebook.com/slinkin.denis/ and was wondering if that approach to data validation aligns with what Foodsteps is seeing in the current foodservice landscape?