--- title: "Supply Chain Sustainability Software for Retail | Spirefly" description: "Retail impact lives in the supply chain. Spirefly measures carbon and nature across your whole assortment, finds the suppliers and ingredients driving it, and models a sourcing change before the buying round closes." url: "https://www.spirefly.com/solutions/retail" type: marketing license: proprietary --- # Supply chain sustainability software for retail assortments Spirefly turns thousands of products and millions of supplier data points into decisions a buying team can act on. ## The problem > "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!" > > Anna Krotova, Sustainability Lead, Picnic **The impact sits with your suppliers** Almost everything you are accountable for happens before the product reaches your shelf: the food you sell, the materials behind it, the suppliers you buy from. It is the part of the footprint you influence rather than control. **The data you have is a patchwork** Primary data for a few categories, spend-based estimates for others, and a supplier list with no ingredient breakdown at all. Waiting until it is complete means waiting forever. **The analysis never reaches the person deciding** Fifteen impact indicators across 15,000 SKUs does not tell a category manager whether to switch a rice supplier. Getting from assessment to decision takes translation, and that is usually where the progress stops. ## Accelerating sustainability for consumer goods - Grocery - FMCG ## Start with the data you have today Spend per supplier is enough to begin. It gives you the shape of the problem: which categories carry the most risk, which supplier relationships matter, where the biggest unknowns are. Ingredient-level data, purchase volumes, and primary data from suppliers add precision as you collect them, and all of it lives in one place. Spirefly shows you where better data would move the needle most, so the collection effort goes where it changes a decision. - **Primary supplier data**: Measured at source - **Ingredient-level data**: Recipes and bills of material - **Purchase volumes**: Physical quantities bought - **Spend per supplier**: The starting point that completes coverage ## Carbon + Nature: Catch the trade-off before you make it Nature is several problems at once. Land use, water use, biodiversity, and pollution each have their own methodology, their own geography, and their own supplier conversations. Spirefly runs all of them from the same dataset as your carbon footprint, aligned to SBTi FLAG, TNFD, and SBTN. Running them together is what surfaces a burden shift: the sourcing change that improves your carbon number while it quietly worsens your water footprint. Measuring carbon on its own leaves that invisible until someone else finds it. - Carbon and nature from one dataset, aligned to SBTi FLAG, TNFD, and SBTN - Land, water, biodiversity, and pollution scored alongside emissions - Burden shifts visible while the decision is still open ## Hotspots: Find the supplier behind the number Spirefly surfaces the hotspots on its own: the suppliers driving the most impact, the ingredients behind the totals, and the countries of origin carrying the highest nature risk. A grocer with thousands of SKUs sees within a run that meat and dairy carry the largest carbon concentration, and that a rice category sourced from a water-stressed region deserves attention before anything else. ## Scenarios: Model the sourcing change before the buying round closes Picnic found that the basmati rice it sources from Pakistan was an outsized share of its water footprint. In the same session, the team modelled sourcing that rice from Italy and saw a 24% reduction in the water footprint, before a single supplier had been contacted. The same mechanism answers the longer question. Test whether your current trajectory reaches your 2030 targets at the pace they require, model what happens if plant-based volumes keep growing or a key supplier moves to renewable energy, and see which levers actually move the number. ## Making it land: One assessment, four audiences A buying team weighs fifty criteria in every sourcing decision. Sustainability becomes one of them when it arrives in language they already use: category risk, supplier exposure, volume impact. Spirefly builds each view from the same underlying data, so the board sees progress against targets, the supplier sees its own contribution and what you are asking of it, and the auditor sees the trace back to source. Your team controls the framing and the numbers never diverge. ## What retail teams say about Spirefly > "I could use the results directly in my work. Unlike with general AI chatbots, I really felt that I could trust the data and information that was provided, and that it provided spot-on suggestions." > — Miranda Pierson, van Rees > "Spirefly helps us to make our ambitions actionable." > — Marieke Doolaard, Head of Sustainability, HEMA > "We see clear value in having visibility into supply chain impacts, and we're continuing to build scalable ways to access those insights." > — Anna Krotova, Sustainability Lead, Picnic ## Frequently asked questions **What is supply chain sustainability software?** Supply chain sustainability software measures the environmental impact a company causes through the goods it buys rather than the operations it runs directly. For a retailer that is where almost all of the impact sits. Spirefly measures carbon and nature across your full assortment, traces each number back to the supplier, ingredient, and country of origin behind it, and lets you model a sourcing change before you commit to it. **We already have a carbon footprint. Do we really need to add nature on top of that?** CSRD and EUDR require it for most retailers, and there is a practical reason beyond the regulation. The sourcing decisions that move your carbon footprint usually move your water and land use too, sometimes in the opposite direction. Tracking carbon alone hides those burden shifts. Spirefly runs carbon and nature from the same data, so you see the whole trade-off while the decision is still open. **We only have spend per supplier, not ingredient-level data. Is that enough to start?** It is enough to find the rough shape: which categories and supplier relationships carry the most risk, and where better data would change your answer. It is not enough for supplier negotiations or regulatory disclosure. In Spirefly, findings built on spend estimates carry explicit uncertainty flags, so you always know which findings you can act on and which need verification first. **Our assortment changes every season. How do you keep the model current?** You upload the updated purchase data and the assessment re-runs across the new assortment. Hotspot views, scenario results, and dashboards update with it, so the model always reflects the data you have loaded rather than a snapshot from the last reporting cycle. **What is the difference between Spirefly and paying a consultancy for a hotspot analysis?** A consultancy hands you a report. Spirefly gives you a working environment: you model sourcing changes, build a category dashboard, monitor progress against targets, and draft disclosure chapters from the same data. It also updates when your assortment changes, which a report cannot do. **We have financing tied to Scope 3 targets. How confident can we be in the numbers?** Confident enough to defend them. Assessments follow the GHG Protocol and SBTN, every figure traces back to its source data, and estimates are labelled with their confidence level. The numbers are built to be documented and reproducible, and where a figure is modelled rather than measured, Spirefly says so. **How do we get findings in front of buying teams who have 50 other criteria to weigh?** Build the category view in Spirefly rather than sending a report: which supplier relationships carry the most risk, which sourcing changes are worth exploring, framed in the terms buyers already use. Then go into the buying conversation with a question rather than a finding. That is how sustainability becomes one of the criteria in the decision instead of a document nobody opens.