Scope 3 emissions are indirect greenhouse gas emissions that occur across a company’s value chain, outside its own operations. For food and beverage companies, they represent the largest share of total carbon output, covering everything from agricultural inputs and ingredient sourcing to refrigerated transport and product disposal. Understanding and reducing these emissions is increasingly central to credible sustainability reporting.
What are Scope 3 emissions and why do they matter for food and beverage companies?
Under the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, emissions are divided into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned operations. Scope 2 covers purchased energy. Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions across the full value chain, both upstream and downstream.
For food and beverage companies, Scope 3 typically accounts for the overwhelming majority of total emissions. Agricultural production, ingredient processing, cold chain transport, packaging, and end-of-life product disposal all sit outside direct operational control, yet all contribute significantly to a company’s carbon footprint. This makes Scope 3 both the most challenging category to measure and the most important one to address.
Which Scope 3 emission categories are most relevant to food and beverage operations?
The GHG Protocol defines 15 Scope 3 categories. For food and beverage businesses, several carry particular weight: purchased goods and services (covering agricultural inputs and raw materials), upstream transportation and distribution, waste generated in operations, downstream transportation and distribution, and the use of sold products.
Cold chain logistics span multiple categories. Refrigerated transport contributes through fuel consumption and refrigerant leakage. Disposable monitoring equipment, such as single-use electronic data loggers made from plastic and lithium batteries, adds to waste-related emissions. More than 80 million of these electronic data loggers are discarded annually, requiring e-waste disposal rather than standard recycling, which compounds the environmental cost of cold chain operations.
How can food and beverage companies start measuring and reducing their Scope 3 emissions?
Getting started with Scope 3 measurement means identifying where the largest emission hotspots sit across your value chain. Most companies begin with a spend-based approach, using financial data to estimate emissions by category, before moving to activity-based methods that use actual volume and distance data for greater accuracy.
Practical steps include:
- Mapping your full value chain to identify which Scope 3 categories are most material to your business
- Engaging key suppliers to collect primary emissions data rather than relying solely on industry averages
- Setting science-based reduction targets aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)
- Prioritising high-impact interventions, such as switching to sustainable packaging, reducing food waste, and replacing disposable plastic monitoring equipment in cold chain logistics with the most sustainable datalogger on the planet
Small, targeted changes in cold chain operations can produce measurable reductions across multiple Scope 3 categories simultaneously.
How Tapp helps food and beverage companies reduce Scope 3 emissions in cold chain logistics
Tapp has developed paper-based NFC data loggers that directly address Scope 3 emissions in upstream and downstream transportation and distribution categories. As the only provider of paper-based data logger technology, Tapp offers a concrete alternative to the plastic- and lithium-heavy devices that currently dominate cold chain monitoring.
- Up to 90% less e-waste compared to traditional single-use electronic data loggers, which require specialist e-waste disposal
- Lithium-free and made from agricultural-waste paper, reducing the environmental impact of both production and end-of-life disposal
- Readable via any NFC-enabled smartphone with no app, USB hardware, or dedicated infrastructure required
- EN 12830-certified accuracy maintained across all transport modalities, with no environmental trade-off
- Automatic cloud reporting via TappOS the moment a label is tapped, giving both sender and receiver instant access to temperature data
If you are a quality manager or sustainability lead working to reduce your company’s Scope 3 footprint in cold chain logistics, request a sample or get in touch with the Tapp team to see how paper-based monitoring can support your ESG targets without compromising compliance or accuracy.
