CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
How Tazaki Foods, the UK's leading Japanese food importer, footprinted over 1,000 SKUs, uncovered reformulation opportunities, and began turning emissions data into supplier conversations.
When your customers include major supermarkets and leading restaurant groups, sustainability expectations are significant, and growing. For Tazaki Foods, the UK's leading importer and distributor of Japanese and East Asian food and beverages, requests for product-level emissions data were accelerating faster than their ability to respond.
The challenge wasn't commitment, it was capability. Tazaki had no carbon footprint baseline for their product range, and establishing one across a diverse, global supply chain represented a substantial undertaking.
Food footprinting is inherently complex. Ingredients originate across continents. Processing steps vary by product. Emissions are distributed throughout the chain, some stages visible, many not. For a business like Tazaki, with hundreds of distinct product lines spanning multiple origins, the technical challenge is considerable.
What they required was a platform capable of managing that complexity without overburdening their team. After evaluating available options, they selected Sustained for its ease of use, expert onboarding support, and the granularity of its product-level insights.
"Being able to visualise emissions in detail, broken down by raw material and by process, gives our suppliers exactly the insights they need to understand where emissions are coming from and what they can actually do about it."
Maasa Kanai, ESG and Sustainability Strategist, Tazaki Foods
With over 1,000 SKUs now footprinted, the insights extend well beyond compliance requirements. Tazaki is using the data to inform operational decisions, from ingredient-level reformulation opportunities to the evaluation of lower-impact packaging alternatives.
The granularity is critical. Understanding that a product has a high footprint is insufficient, you need to identify which specific ingredient or process is driving emissions, and whether viable alternatives exist. This level of detail transforms sustainability data from a reporting obligation into a product development asset.
Perhaps the most significant development is what's happening beyond Tazaki's own operations. Impact breakdowns, by raw material and by process, are now being shared directly with suppliers. Rather than asking suppliers to act on a vague directive to "reduce emissions," Tazaki can provide specifics: precisely where emissions arise, what the data indicates, and what constitutes a meaningful reduction pathway
That specificity is what makes the data actionable, not just informative.
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