How Butternut Box creates value and business sustainability with Sweep

Background

Butternut Box is Europe’s largest fresh dog food brand, with a mission to “deliver health and happiness to dogs and their humans all over the world”.

The company was founded in the UK by two friends, Kevin Glynn & Dave Nolan, after seeing the positive effects that home-cooked food had on Dave’s rescue dog, Rudie.

Today, Butternut Box is B Corp certified and feeds dogs in seven different markets across the UK and Europe, via a direct-to-consumer retail model.

In April 2023 the company integrated with Polish brand PsiBufet, one of the leading fresh dog food companies in Central and Eastern Europe.

It has a dedicated manufacturing facility, Rudie’s Kitchen and Ace’s Pantry in the UK, and is currently building a second manufacturing facility in Poland. In July 2024 Butternut Box also launched a fresh cat food brand, Marro.

Challenge

Butternut Box operates around three pillars of sustainability: Planet, People and Product.
These pillars encompass management of environmental impacts, including carbon footprint, water usage and waste, as well as responsible sourcing and packaging throughout their supply chains.

Group Sustainability Manager Alisa Heimann points out that, as a food company, climate change threatens Butternut Box’s ability to source its own raw ingredients in the future – meaning that it is in the company’s direct self-interest to do what it can to limit these risks:
“We are a food company. So if we don’t do something about climate change, it’s going to affect our ability to source our own ingredients in the future”.

Other reasons the company is tackling its ESG impact include protecting its reputation with customers, standing out as an employer, keeping up with growing compliance demands, and staying attractive to investors.
“We’re a fast-growing company that has received funding from investors. They wouldn’t be as interested in us if we weren’t looking at our impacts, our sustainability. It’s important because they have customers who also care about where they invest,” says Alisa.

Before partnering with Sweep, Butternut Box had already realised some key sustainability objectives, including reducing the carbon intensity from its gas usage by 6.5% in 2024.
This was mainly achieved by investing in cutting edge “heat recovery” technology, which recycles “waste” heat from a new cold storage and fulfilment centre to heat the water to boilers used to steam cook the meals.

However, tracking those achievements was still a manual, spreadsheet-based process. For a growing company like Butternut Box, this was becoming unmanageable.

Solution

Butternut Box set out to find a sustainability data management platform which met several criteria:-

• Faster and more accurate emissions calculations, providing data feeds on a regular basis
  
• The ability to share data, progress reports and carbon models beyond the sustainability team, to inform better operational and strategic decision-making
  
• Strong Scope 3 measurement and management capabilities, in order to more accurately track the carbon reductions being achieved by suppliers, better reflect them in Butternut Box’s own carbon footprint, and empower the company to take action to reduce them
  
• Data which can be audited by third parties, such as for Science-Based Targets certification

Modeling and customizability

Alisa and her colleagues created an in-depth evaluation process. This included a task for candidate platforms to model the actual emissions of Butternut Box recipes by linking their product carbon footprints to the amount of each recipe actually produced each week. Alisa shares that “a lot of the platforms that we looked at couldn’t do this modelling. Sweep was one that could.”

Butternut Box also highlights Sweep’s customisability, describing it as “a platform that would grow with us. Sweep isn’t a black box platform. It’s very open and very transparent.”

Snowflake integration

Sweep’s integration with Snowflake also proved to be an important factor, as Butternut Box uses Snowflake as its ‘data warehouse’: “Sweep already has a very powerful data integration link to Snowflake. This will make it much easier to upload historic data. Going forward, we’re going to be able to have much more dynamic data feeds into Sweep itself.”

ESG data and CSRD compliance

Looking beyond simple carbon emissions data, Alisa Heimann underscores that Butternut Box intends to use Sweep to collect and manage a much wider range of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data, saying:
“We’re not just using Sweep as a carbon accounting platform, but also to collect ESG data. We’re very much looking forward to having it as a central repository of all of our environmental, social and governance data.  If you add up all this functionality, like audit logs and AI-driven reporting, it’s going to set us up for some of those really complex, involved regulatory reporting requirements, such as CSRD.”