Ndustrial: Turkey emissions tracker eyes cost and energy concerns amid Thanksgiving festivities
28 Nov 2024 | Ndustrial
North Carolina-based Ndustrial has launched a “first-of-its-kind” turkey emissions tracker to address the rising consumer demand for greater accountability regarding the environmental effects of their purchases. Jason Massey, co-founder and CEO, discusses the tool’s functionality and the strategic Thanksgiving launch. He also shares how AI helps disaggregate energy profiles of different products to enhance transparency and reduce energy intensity in supply chains.
Hi, this is Inha Noreen, a journalist at Food Ingredients First.
In time for the Thanksgiving festivities, North Carolina-based Industrial has launched a first of its kind turkey emissions tracker, which provides information on emissions and costs associated with the farm to table journey of the festive world.
To tell us more about it, we are joined by Jason Massey, Industrial's co-founder and CEO.
Welcome, Jason.
It's a pleasure to have you with us.
Thanks for having me.
This will be fun to to talk about a turkey tracker.
Yeah, indeed eager to know more.
So can you tell us what was the main motive behind designing an emissions tracker for Turkey and why is this the right time to launch it?
Sure, so our company, just a quick background, we've been doing energy management and active energy controls in supply chains, specifically third-party logistics, 3PL cold chain.
And a few things were happening.
One, the pandemic really shined a light on the importance of supply chains, especially around food.
And I think coming out of the pandemic, we've seen a few other things.
One of our customers had the largest IPO in the United States, this past year, a company called Lineage Logistics.
And As we were doing more and more work in that, that cold chain, that supply chain, the data that we had access to, through the warehouse management software allowed us to really look at the energy intensity kind of per product, per, you know, turkey, per, you know, chicken breast, per, you know, 1000 pounds of frozen strawberries in California.
So we really got to see at a much more granular level what the energy intensity of, of, of that was.
And then the, the other reason was we started working with the transport refrigeration units, the, the TRUs as they become electrified, we're looking at how do we appropriately install infrastructure at these warehouses to make sure we can reduce the cost of energy to, to freeze those or keep those, that food frozen in the, in the trailer.
And reduce emissions at the same time.
So we, we start to see a lot of these dots come together and obviously with Thanksgiving in the United States, it was a good time to kind of show that entire supply chain and as you know, scope 3 emissions is often a very Hard set of numbers to, to, to track down and so because we have a lot of primary source data, we, we thought it'd be fun to, to kind of show this in, in the form of that turkey tracker.
OK, that sounds really interesting.
And do you think consumers are really interested and concerned about knowing about the, about the key reasons for the emissions from Turkey?
I think they are more and more.
I think if you can, storytelling is really important, you know, especially in a very data-driven world, and so if you can connect all these dots for them and, and they can see that holistically.
Then they can start, you know, making different decisions on which food suppliers they may buy from if they, they got this level of, of transparency.
But I ultimately think what we see is Obviously, there needs to be awareness, but if you can reduce the energy intensity in the supply chain, if I can convert, you know, those trailers and those TRUs from diesel to kilowatt hours, ultimately, I should help reduce the cost of those turkeys, right?
So it, it can be kind of an anti-inflationary approach versus just, I feel good about buying this turkey because it's got a lower carbon footprint.
That turkey, in theory, if you can reduce the energy intensity across all parts of that supply chain, that should lead to it maybe not a lower cost of the turkey, but maybe the turkey's price increase won't be so steep year after year.
OK, and can you tell us more about how this emission tracker works and what is the role of AI in it?
Sure, mostly the AI is around just the early models that we were building to disaggregate the different products, to build the data models that we could look at, that we could isolate.
It sounds trivial, but you can isolate in the data set.
A turkey from a chicken breast, right?
And then may assign its energy profile based on the product skews.
So that's really where a lot of the early machine learning models and, and AI would come into something like this turkey tracker.
And then the rest is really just knowing where it goes.
And, and the turkey tracker for us was really meant to be representative.
We changed, changed names of locations and things like that.
But really supposed to be kind of a representation of what we see on a daily basis in the supply chain.
OK, thanks for explaining that so.
And at this time of the year, you will see a large amount of turkey being bought during the Thanksgiving season, and there are also consumer environmental concerns.
So do you think there are other companies that are focusing on turkey emissions?
And if not, why do you think that is?
I think there are ESG reporting software companies and, and the food producers, you know, the big brands out there are working diligently to, to understand their supply chain emissions.
We know through our customer base.
That they are being asked, the third-party logistics cold chains are being asked by the major food producers, not just do you track your own carbon footprint, they're asking, what is my carbon footprint inside of your warehouse.
And so I think for internal sustainability reporting, they're doing that.
I think the, the reason you don't see this as prevalent.
Is to the primary source data.
It, it's hard for there to be kind of one company or just a few companies that actually see each different data point at the supply chain and we're very fortunate to be able to connect multiple dots because of our data relationships that we have with our customers.
OK, that's great.
And apart from turkey, do you plan to use this emission tracker for other foods?
Sure, our goal is this to not just be something fun to look at just during Thanksgiving, but ultimately, you know, our product team is building a lot of API interfaces, UI that would allow us to disaggregate the carbon intensity by the product, by the customer and the supply chain.
It may not get fully rendered in that, that cool map box thing that we, we did.
But you'd be able to see it's, it's footprint again, different products, across different seasons, across different times of the year, in a much more granular way and, and our goal is to make that very easily accessible to our customers' customers and then our customers and whatever ESG software that they want to deploy to make that data readily accessible, easy to get so that We can kind of like put a dent in the scope 3 emissions side of this equation.
OK.
And in future, what kind of advancement do you see in this field, and are there any upcoming collaboration with the food industry that you'd like to share?
Yeah, so, a, a big area for us is tackling emissions where we can.
I'd mentioned the, you know, what's referred to as the TRU, the Transport Refrigeration unit.
So we're working with a lot of, chicken producers in the Southeast to make sure that when they do have an electrified TRU which are becoming more prominent in the supply chain, when they dock at a warehouse or their trailer is sitting out in the yard.
That it has a plug to plug in so you can turn the diesel off and turn the kilowatt hours on.
So we have an active effort in building out a lot of infrastructure in the supply chain to make sure that, that we can electrify that.
And what's really neat about that is The emissions, the, the smell of all the diesel at the yards that starts to dissipate and go down, and then you can actually hear yourself talk when you're out in the yard instead of all these diesel gin sets running on these trailers.
It's actually a much more pleasant work environment for, for the folks at the, at the warehouse.
