Improve the environmental performance of your products with Mondra

The Mondra BRC Coalition has been established to standardise the way that product footprinting is done across food value chains. By providing a common understanding of UK food sector emissions across the supply chain, we will enable the standardised approach to external reporting and supply chain collaboration to Net Zero. Mondra’s tech platform will allow for supply chain actors to measure, improve and communicate product environmental performance in a cohesive and interoperable way. The Coalition is made up of Industry (brand owners and supplier manufacturers), environmental NGOs, UK Government, technology providers and sustainability advisors. View the full list of the Mondra-BRC coalition participants taking the first steps to a more decarbonised food chain.

The 2023 roll out of Mondra’s platform is focused on Retailer private label. However, in late 2023 we will be releasing functionality to enable the footprinting and performance improvement of your ‘own brand’ products, should you carry any. This will provide Scope 3(C1) reporting across your full product range.

In 2022, Mondra won an Innovate UK government grant to pilot the system with Tesco, M&S and a number of their suppliers. With the support of the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the outputs of this pilot were presented to the wider Retailer and Supplier community, and so was born the Mondra BRC Coalition.  Mondra’s unique approach to enabling collaboration throughout the value chain on a single, inter connected platform, was seen to be the ‘missing link’. Mondra now provides the means to scale a standardised approach, as defined by the industry and informed by inbound regulation. 

Once you sign up to the free 30 day trial, you will receive a confirmation email with an indicative date for when your service will be live.  This will be at the point that your Retailer customer(s) invite you to the platform. Once live, the service will provide out-of-box environmental analytics for the private label products you serve to the Retailer(s). You will receive 5 user licenses to try the full suite of features and tools for 30 days.  

The Mondra BRC Coalition is working collaboratively with UK Government Environment agency, DEFRA via the Food Data Transparency Partnership (FDTP) and partners, WRAP and IGD, to formalise the mandatory rules on Scope 3 accounting and environmental product labelling for the UK. Recommendation papers are going into Government in Summer 2023, with public consultation expected in early 2024. The standard that under pins Mondra’s platform is closely aligned with these initiatives and will evolve to ensure compliance in line with the emerging policy landscape.

Whilst you are highly likely to be receiving an invite from your retailer-customer to join the Mondra Platform in the coming months and refine data points for the SKUs that you serve them under the freemium model, there is also an option to have your own brand products modelled for environmental performance for full scope 3 accounting and reporting.

Whilst this pathway does not go through the retailer-invite channel that allows us to extract data from brand compliance systems, we would need to manually manipulate your data to make it compatible for the hypermodelling engine. We have created seed data templates that, once populated, plug into the system and are run through the hypermodelling engine to generate results. The templates focus on capturing data around products basics and volume, recipe structure and sites, and packaging. We offer full training and support as part of the data capture process to ensure the data is captured correctly and as easily as possible which will simplify the onboarding experience for own brand products.

Central to the Coalition’s mission of standardising product footprinting for collaborative decarbonisation of supply chains, is the roll out of Mondra’s automated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and environmental insights platform. We are deploying the platform across UK grocery retail in 2023 and suppliers are being invited by the retailers to sign up and make use of the Freemium insights suite with an option to pay a monthly subscription that unlocks NPD/EPD tools to improve product performance faster, with real-time collaboration with their downstream customer. As we roll out in 2023, spaces to be part of the programme are limited. By joining today, you will be an early adopter, which gives you a head start on building environmentally competitive products for your customer. Defending existing business, winning new business, and getting ahead of inbound regulation in this space to de-risk your business as we move into the Net Zero economy. See our Early Adopter Benefits Package.

If you already hold environmental data on your products, you will have the opportunity to bring this into the platform with clear direction on how to do so, whilst honouring minimum methodological requirements to ensure comparability. In particular, the platform allows for the ingestion of primary farm data, and the means to declare which calculator was used in the process. Over time, and in line with government-driven initiatives, the industry will be calling for standardisation of how farm data is collected and processed. In the meantime, the platform offers the means to put your current data investments to good use, whilst being transparent on the calculation method and tools used.

Following your free 30 day trial, you will have the option to continue on the Freemium Service or paid monthly subscription. The paid service unlocks a number of value-added features to enable deeper insights and product development functionality. The monthly subscription for the paid service is £600 per month, per processing site. Understand what you get from free and paid subscription. You can cancel your subscription at any time by giving 30 days’ notice.

As the trial period nears conclusion, you will be contacted by a Mondra Customer Success Manager to gather your feedback and understand which service you wish to carry on with. There is an option to continue on a Freemium service (no fees), or a monthly subscription of £600 per month, per processing site. To understand the platform feature set, please click here. You can cancel your subscription at any time by giving 30 days’ notice.

The data that powers the environmental product insights that you receive on day 1 of the live service belongs to your Retailer customer. As part of the ‘Data Refinement’ journey, you will be asked to confirm certain aspects that relate to your production practices & sourcing. You will also have the opportunity to fold in existing environmental data from farm, should you have access to it. These refinement efforts will lead to an adjustment in your product environmental performance scores. When you are ready to, you can ‘publish’ these updated performance scores. Publishing scores in this way, makes them available to your downstream customer. The system only shares the refined environmental impact data and we do not share any underlying activity data.