Our partnership with Carbon Maps reflects a broader ambition for Trace One: helping manufacturers use the product information they already manage to understand and improve environmental performance.
A product's carbon footprint is only meaningful if it reflects the product a manufacturer and retailers is actually making. That sounds straightforward, but products change constantly. Formulations are revised during development, supplier specifications are updated, and a change in sourcing can alter environmental impact without changing the recipe itself.
Many food manufacturers and retailers already have systems to manage these changes. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) provides the record of what a product contains and how it has evolved, connecting formulation decisions with the specifications used to bring it to market.
Yet environmental assessment often takes place outside that process. Sustainability teams collect product information to calculate a footprint, sometimes recreating data that R&D has already captured. As formulations evolve, those calculations can become disconnected from the products they are intended to describe.
We believe this is an important opportunity to extend the role of PLM.
The food industry's environmental impact presents a particular challenge because much of it originates beyond the factory. Agricultural practices can make a considerable difference to the emissions associated with an ingredient. Understanding that impact requires detailed environmental modelling alongside an accurate record of the product itself.
This is the thinking behind our partnership with Carbon Maps.
By connecting Trace One Devex PLM with Carbon Maps, companies can use their existing recipe, ingredient and packaging information to calculate Product Carbon Footprints and Life Cycle Assessments without having to enter that data again.
Carbon Maps combines this information with environmental data covering agricultural production and supply chains, helping manufacturers understand where impacts originate and which changes might make a difference.
The immediate benefit is a more efficient way to calculate environmental footprints. The greater opportunity lies in bringing those findings back into product development.
If an assessment identifies an ingredient responsible for a significant share of a product's emissions, the manufacturer needs to understand what can realistically be done about it. Changing the formulation might offer an improvement, but the product still needs to meet its technical requirements. The environmental analysis might instead point toward a sourcing change that deserves further investigation.
PLM provides the context for those decisions. It holds the formulation against which alternatives can be considered and the specifications that determine whether a proposed change is suitable. Environmental modelling adds evidence about the consequences of making that change.
This becomes particularly important as a product moves through development. An alternative formulation may look promising during the initial assessment but require further adjustments after testing. Those adjustments can affect its environmental footprint, which means the calculation may need to be revisited before the product is approved.
Keeping the environmental assessment aligned with the correct formulation is essential if manufacturers want to understand whether the changes they make are delivering the intended improvement.
This relationship between PLM and environmental intelligence becomes even more valuable across large product portfolios.
Companies need to understand which products offer meaningful opportunities to reduce emissions and where to direct their development resources. Retailers increasingly need comparable environmental information to support their private-label programs and discussions with suppliers.
Both depend on reliable product data.
The difficulty grows when that information changes. Maintaining environmental assessments across an evolving portfolio requires a clear understanding of which formulation was evaluated and whether the underlying assumptions remain accurate.
PLM already provides the structure for managing the product throughout its lifecycle. Connecting specialist environmental intelligence to that record gives companies a stronger basis for maintaining assessments and using their findings in subsequent development decisions.
We also see AI contributing to this process. It can help product teams investigate alternatives and work with detailed supplier information more efficiently. But AI is only as useful as the information available to it. Accurate formulations and dependable specifications remain essential, particularly when recommendations need to be evaluated against regulatory requirements or environmental calculations.
That is why we see the future of PLM developing around a broader product intelligence ecosystem.
We have spent years helping manufacturers manage the information they need to develop and bring products to market. Increasingly, that information has value well beyond the original development process.
Our approach is to connect it with specialist expertise rather than expect one platform to perform every function. Carbon Maps brings the environmental science needed to understand food and agricultural supply chains, while Trace One provides the product information and lifecycle context that make those insights relevant to manufacturers.
There is still work to do in making environmental assessment a more continuous part of product development. But this partnership establishes an important connection between the information manufacturers already trust and the environmental questions they increasingly need to answer.
Ultimately, we want manufacturers to be able to understand the environmental consequences of a product change while that decision is still being made. PLM is well placed to support that because it already sits at the center of how products are developed, assessed and approved.
Our partnership with Carbon Maps extends what manufacturers can do with that information, bringing environmental impact into a process where it can help shape the product itself.
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