How a retailer identified 5 KPIs to monitor 40,000 products

How HEMA Scaled Nature Assessments to 40,000 Products with Spirefly

Bridging the gap between corporate sustainability goals and daily retail operations is a major challenge. In this webinar recap, Josine oude Lohuis, Co-Founder and Product Lead at Spirefly, explains how Dutch retailer HEMA moved from a single pilot program to major public policy commitments.

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The Challenge of Nature and Biodiversity in Retail

While carbon footprinting relies on a single metric, nature and biodiversity assessments are far more complex. Sourcing teams must navigate up to 15 different environmental metrics across thousands of products while satisfying regulatory frameworks like CSRD, TNFD, and EUDR.

To solve this, HEMA partnered with Spirefly in 2022 to build a scalable, data-driven workflow.

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Step 1: Avoid the "Perfect Data Trap"

Many sustainability teams fail to act because they are waiting for flawless supply chain data. HEMA bypassed this bottleneck by growing their data capabilities and their organizational maturity at the exact same pace.

• Year 1 (Start Small): Focused on a single product category to identify major impact areas like fashion and water stress.
• Year 2 (Map Risks): Used basic material data to map and quantify regional water risks.
• Year 3 (Scale Up): Conducted a complete nature assessment across all 40,000 products, integrating country-of-origin and supplier data.

Spirefly's agentic AI platform supported this transition by cleaning messy, unstructured data from ERPs and supplier spreadsheets. This cut HEMA’s data processing timeline from four weeks to just four days, enabling continuous reporting.

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Step 2: Translate Complex Data into Business Actions

Data only works if buying teams can easily understand it. To prevent information overload, HEMA matched specific ecological hotspots directly to the business units that could influence them.

For example, the Food & Grocery team focused on soil pollution and land use for ingredients like coffee, cocoa, and pork. Meanwhile, the Fashion & Apparel team focused on water stress, tracing the cotton used in infant rompers back to high-risk areas in India.

Instead of dealing with abstract scientific data, buyers received a clear problem with a practical solution: shift to certified organic or regenerative cotton to mitigate regional water risks.

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Step 3: Turn Insights into Public Commitments

Relying on generic industry averages means your real-world improvements will not show up in year-over-year sustainability reports. HEMA used initial risk assessments to find high-exposure areas, gathered primary data only where it mattered most, and leveraged trusted certifications to raise their environmental standards.

This approach led to five public commitments:

• Preferred Materials: Transitioning material weight to recycled, organic, or regenerative alternatives.
• Wastewater Management: Implementing strict clean wastewater standards for Tier 1 suppliers.
• Supplier Efficiency: Working with high-priority partners on energy and operational efficiency.
• Enhanced Due Diligence: Scaling audits and sourcing through verified, high-impact value chains.
• Commodity Traceability: Mapping supply chains for deforestation-risk commodities to ensure EUDR compliance.

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Key Sourcing Takeaways

• Optimize for "Good Enough" Data: Build your internal team's capacity to act at the same rate that your data quality improves.
• Simplify the Message: Give each buying team one target metric, one audience, and one clear action.
• Model Decisions First: Use scenario-planning tools to test how sourcing changes will affect your goals before making public commitments.

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