Innovative Carbon Software Launched to Measure Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Food Service

Collaborating with Compass Group, the world's leading food and support services company, FirstCarbon Solutions developed and launched the web-based software tool to support Compass Group’s Carbon FOODPrint tool kit. Carbon FOODPrint is designed to help Compass Group’s food operations staff lower their environmental impact and operational costs and currently boasts users including well-known companies such as SAP, and colleges, including Auburn University and Green Mountain College.

The Carbon FOODPrint toolkit, a very efficient and easy-to-use program, allows chefs and managers to create customized strategies to reduce their operations’ carbon footprints by decreasing waste disposal, and energy and water use. Our team developed and hosted the web-based software application as part of our Sustainability Workbench platform which has been invaluable to the Carbon FOODPrint toolkit. The innovative online technology allows cafes to benchmark and measure the improvements made throughout the café, which can be shared with clients for annual reports, sustainability indexes, and disclosure to public programs such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a FirstCarbon Solutions partner.

Teaming with Compass Group during the critical “Phase 2” step of this project, our sustainability and software experts helped enhance the Carbon FOODprint toolkit with sustainability metrics with innovative dashboard applications for food service industry clients. The significance of FirstCarbon Solutions’ contribution was supported by Marc Zammit, Vice President of Sustainability Initiatives at Compass Group, as he explained that the web-based tool was created in response to his clients’ growing interest in having a strategic planning tool to measure, manage, and lower their operation costs and food service carbon footprint. He also affirmed that Carbon FOODPrint has established “an opportunity to provide clients with cost effective solutions to lower the environmental impact of their food services.” He also stated that because of FirstCarbon Solutions’ software, “managers will now have the information they need to make the best choices for their business, their clients and the environment.”

As part of the collaboration with Compass Group, our team collected thousands of pieces of data on the production, packaging, and transport of individually purchased food items, serving materials, and cleaning chemicals required to manage a foodservice operation “from cradle to customer.” The Toolkit couples this information with site-specific operational data from individual cafes to provide up-to-date dashboards the carbon, energy, water and wastes associated with all aspects of a food service operation (facilities, kitchen operations, kitchen services, and menu engineering).

FirstCarbon Solutions’ President, Robert Francisco further explained the importance of this project, stating that “Compass Group’s Carbon FOODPrint proves the point that sustainability and profitability are not mutually exclusive [and that] with this innovative technology developed by FirstCarbon Solutions, Compass Group will help redefine sustainability within foodservice operations by providing cafes unprecedented visibility into the impact their operations have on the environment and helping teams create behavioral changes that will have long-term impacts and improvements.”

Chet Chaffee, our Director of Supply Chain and Life Cycle Assessment added, “The software platform that FirstCarbon Solutions Group developed in support of the Carbon FOODPrint toolkit benchmarks the carbon, energy, water and waste footprints of each participating unit, and provides insights on where to make changes to maximize sustainable efficiencies across the operation. To my knowledge, such a comprehensive, systematic and technically sound program, that considers all of these aspects of food operations, has never been tackled before.”

Carbon FOODPrint toolkit is currently generally available to all 9,900 Compass Group cafes in the United States. To learn more about how your company can utilize Carbon FOODPrint, request a consultation: