Picnic: Scalable Nature Intelligence for Retail
Picnic is a leading online grocer, managing a massive catalog of 15,000 products. Sustainability at Picnic is driven by a lean ESG team consisting of Anna Krotova and Jorrit Vervoordeldonk. While the team is highly experienced in sustainability, they were still lacking quantitative nature and biodiversity insights as the basis of their nature strategy.
Challenge
Assessing nature impact across 15,000 changing products
For a high-volume retailer like Picnic, understanding the environmental impact of the value chain is a monumental task that exceeds manual capacity:
- Every product consists of multiple ingredients, each with its own unique impact and risk profile.
- Assortments are subject to constant change and seasonality, making static, one-off consultancy assessments outdated quickly.
Solution
A scalable platform from products to ingredients to countries of origin
Spirefly provided a scalable data platform for the mapping of products → ingredients → countries of origin. Spirefly performed impact- and risk calculations across nine critical nature topics, including water stress, deforestation, and vulnerable ecosystems.
Key features included:
- A dashboard with data visualizations of high priority products and suppliers
- A workspace where the team can interpret, discuss, and build on results in the context of industry practices, legislation, and business strategy.
Result
A data-driven nature strategy and faster supplier engagement
Baseline impact and risk assessment data on supplier and product level enables Picnic to:
- Build its nature strategy on data-driven insights
- Develop initiatives and pilot projects that have a strong contribution to halting biodiversity loss
- Streamline, focus and speed up supplier engagement
“Spirefly is built on a really thorough theoretical background on the topic of nature. On top of that it provides a practical step-by-step guidance on how to perform impact measurement and execution. It has everything you need!”
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