Blueberry Pie
Every pie leaves the bakery carrying two bills: the dollars on the purchase invoice, and the carbon baked into the recipe. This review sets them side by side.
One pie. Two ledgers.
Procurement tracks the invoice to the cent. The carbon ledger usually goes unread. Both are added up here, on the same 20,000-pie production year.
Where the money goes.
Every pie carries $4.28 in materials, about $85,600 a year at current volume. Split by category, blueberries + dairy & fats are well over half of every dollar.
Where the carbon goes.
The 1.82 kgCO2e per pie, split two ways: by life-cycle stage, and by the ingredients that drive it. Raw materials carry more than three-quarters of the footprint.
Dairy & fats(sour cream, margarine and eggs) make up roughly 40% of raw-material emissions and 31% of total prouct emission. The animal-agriculture inputs punch far above their weight on the carbon ledger.
The two ledgers disagree.
Share of spend against share of carbon, category by category. If money and carbon tracked together, every pair would match. They do not.
Not every dollar is equal.
How much carbon rides along with each dollar spent. Carbon intensity per procurement dollar varied more than 3x across ingredient categories.
A tale of two blueberries.
The same fruit, in the same pie, from two origins. The cheaper berry carries the heavier carbon, and the gap is almost entirely freight.
What to take away.
Product Carbon Intelligence enables:
Carbon reporting tells you what happened.
Carbon intelligence helps shape what happens next.