Retailers and foodservice buyers are pushing emissions reporting down their supply chains, and for most growing food businesses the hardest number to produce is the one from their own production. You can't report, or reduce, what you can't measure, and measuring is a capability you can rent rather than build.
Somewhere in the renewal pack from your largest customer, or the onboarding questionnaire from the retailer you're trying to win, there is now a section about carbon. It might ask for a figure. It might ask what you're doing to bring it down. A few years ago you could leave it blank. Increasingly you can't, because the buyer has their own target to hit, and your production sits inside it.
That's what Scope 3 means in practice. A supermarket or a large contract caterer doesn't just report the emissions from its own sites and vehicles. It has to account for its supply chain, and if you supply it, you are its supply chain. Your production becomes a line in someone else's numbers, which is why they come asking for yours. The question is no longer whether you'll be asked. It's whether you'll have an answer when you are.
For a lot of a food business's footprint, an answer is reachable. Office energy, deliveries, packaging, these leave a paper trail you can assemble. The part that tends to defeat people is production itself: the energy burned turning ingredients into product, the water it draws, and the waste that comes off the line. For most operators those numbers are estimated, benchmarked off an industry average, or quietly left as a gap. And an estimate is exactly what a serious buyer's sustainability team is learning to reject.
Here's the thing worth sitting with. Your production footprint is, in principle, one of the more measurable parts of your whole operation. It comes down to things you can actually meter: the electricity your production draws, the water it uses, the waste it produces, and the greenhouse gas emissions behind them. The reason it so often goes unmeasured isn't that it's unmeasurable. It's that the measuring rarely gets built, especially when you're producing in space you don't control.
This is where renting production infrastructure quietly changes the picture. When you build and run your own facility, metering and reporting is one more system you have to specify, install and maintain, and most operators, reasonably, have more urgent calls on their capital. When you produce inside a kitchen built to be shared, it can already be there. Karma Kitchen measures electricity in kilowatt-hours, water in cubic metres and waste in tonnes, and reports the greenhouse gas emissions behind them, broken out for your own unit and available monthly if you need it. The number you hand your buyer is then your actual production, measured, not a figure reverse-engineered from a sector average.
That's the real differentiator, and it's worth being precise about why. It isn't that a rented kitchen is automatically greener than one you'd build. It's that a measured kitchen gives you data you'd otherwise have to construct, and data is the precondition for everything else: reporting it, defending it under scrutiny, and reducing it. You can't set a reduction target against a number you've guessed.
The energy underneath those figures helps the story too, as long as it's described honestly, because a buyer's team will check. The kitchens run largely on electricity: ovens, cooking equipment and extraction draw grid power, while hot water and space heating come from air source heat pumps rather than gas boilers. Around 40% of that electricity is zero-carbon today, with a target of 80% within ten years, and one site, Wood Green, still runs gas for part of its hot water and a couple of units, so this is steady electrification rather than a finished net-zero claim. The practical upshot is the one that matters for your reporting: because the main production load is electric, your footprint keeps falling as the grid gets cleaner, without you changing a thing.
Waste tells a similar story, and it's often the easier win to evidence. Food waste sent to landfill generates methane; waste processed on site doesn't. Karma digests food waste on site rather than sending it to landfill, and sends used cooking oil for conversion into biofuel rather than down a drain. The value isn't only that it's better. It's that it's counted, in tonnes, which turns a vague green intention into a diversion figure you can actually put in a report.
Step back and the pattern is the one that runs through every argument for renting production rather than owning it. The capability, in this case the measuring and reporting of your own environmental footprint, is expensive and fiddly to build yourself, needed by almost everyone who's scaling, and far more efficiently provided once, at the level of the building, than reinvented by every operator inside it. It's the same logic that moved computing to the cloud and logistics to third parties, applied to the kitchen. You don't stand up a metering and reporting function because a retailer asked a question. You produce somewhere that already has one.
None of this makes the carbon question go away. It will keep moving down the supply chain, from the biggest buyers to the mid-sized ones, from a nice-to-have to a condition of the contract. What it changes is your position when the question lands. Instead of scrambling to estimate a number you've never had to produce, you read it off a report. That's the difference between treating sustainability as a compliance headache and treating it as something you can stand behind, and increasingly, win work with.
If you're weighing where to produce as you scale, the measurable footprint belongs on the list of things a production decision quietly settles, alongside the capital, the consistency and the speed.
Getting asked about your production's footprint? Talk to us about what we can report for your unit →
