A world-renowned luxury hotel partnered with Carbon Maps to measure the environmental footprint of its food purchases and gain a clear picture of its most impactful ingredients.

By transforming thousands of supplier delivery notes into structured data, the group was able to quantify the carbon impact of its entire food purchasing portfolio, setting them up for their next sustainability initiatives.

About the Hotel

This luxury hotel is one of the world’s most prestigious, celebrated for its architecture, fine dining, exceptional service, and heritage of culinary excellence. Its kitchens, bars, and event spaces serve thousands of guests every year — sourcing hundreds of ingredients from local artisans and premium suppliers.

In line with its broader sustainability commitments, the hotel sought to better understand the environmental footprint of its gastronomy. Based on Carbon Maps' analysis, food purchases represent 60-70% of Scope 3 emissions for most food & beverage players, and the hotel wanted to build a robust data foundation to inform its carbon reporting and future menu innovation.

The Challenge

The group didn’t have a consolidated purchasing spreadsheet. All purchasing data existed only as supplier delivery notes in PDF format — thousands of them, spread across multiple restaurants, bars, pastry kitchens, and banquet teams.

This presented a huge barrier: before any carbon analysis could begin, someone would have needed to manually read, copy, and re-enter data line by line from each invoice into a central spreadsheet — a process that could have taken weeks or months for one of their employees and still risked errors or inconsistencies.

With Carbon Maps’ AI-powered extraction tool, this step was fully automated. The generative AI system could read PDFs directly, extract key fields (product name, weight, origin, label, quantity), standardize the data, and upload it into the platform — all in a matter of hours instead of months.

Carbon Maps’ Approach

To meet these goals, Carbon Maps deployed its Product Carbon Footprint solution to analyze the hotel’s full purchasing dataset, starting directly from supplier delivery notes (PDF format).

1. Automated data extraction

Over 7,000 supplier PDFs — representing nearly 100,000 lines of purchases — were processed using Carbon Maps’ generative AI extraction tool. The system automatically identified key attributes such as product names, weights, labels (e.g., organic, AOP, MSC), and origins, which were then verified and standardized for analysis.

2. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) modeling

Using emissions factors from reference databases, Carbon Maps modeled the environmental impact of each product, expressed in kgCO₂e/kg. This method allowed the group to establish a reliable baseline of its culinary carbon footprint — covering over 770 tonnes of purchased products in total.

3. Data analysis and visualization

The results were readily available on the luxury hotel’s account on the Carbon Maps platform, enabling teams to explore:

• Impact per point of sale (restaurants, bars, pastry shop, banquets, etc.)
• Impact per category, supplier, and label
• Share of emissions linked to specific ingredients and sourcing origins

Key Findings

Across the hotel’s culinary operations:

• Total analyzed volume: 772 tonnes of food
  For a flagship, multi-outlet luxury hotel, that equates to roughly 2.1 tonnes per day, indicating a procurement flow where modest specification shifts can meaningfully influence impact at scale.

• Total carbon impact: 2,386 tonnes of CO₂e for one year
  This is comparable to ~654,000 average meals in France (ADEME benchmark 3.65 kgCO₂e/meal), a format that leadership and client-facing teams can readily interpret when setting reduction targets and planning communications.
  

• Top contributing ingredients: beef (9.7%), dark chocolate (5.9%), poultry (5.7%)
  The concentration of emissions in a few ingredients suggests that targeted actions—supplier data improvements, sourcing adjustments (origin, farming practices), and recipe refinements—can deliver outsized reductions without broad menu disruption.

• Labels and origins (e.g., BIO, AOP) show notable shares of impact
  Because label/origin choices can materially shift a dish’s footprint, refining emission factors by label/origin improves accuracy and supports procurement in maintaining quality while favoring lower-impact options.

With Carbon Maps, the luxury hotel has:

• Digitized procurement data into a usable dataset — converting thousands of PDF delivery notes into structured, exportable product records within Carbon Maps (single source of truth).
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• Transformed unstructured supplier data into a detailed, product-level carbon footprint, calculated at scale.
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• Gained a clear baseline of emissions across all culinary operations for reporting and tracking.
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• Identified priority ingredients and suppliers for impact reduction (e.g. beef, chocolate, poultry).
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• Built the foundation for future eco-designed menus and transparent client communication, planned for the next phase.
  
  

This collaboration marked a first step in turning the hotel’s sustainability ambitions into measurable action, bridging the gap between culinary excellence and environmental responsibility.