About Bel Group
Bel Group is a major player in the food industry through portions of dairy, fruit and plant-based products, and one of the world leaders in branded cheeses, known for brands like The Laughing Cow ®, Babybel ®, and Kiri ®. The Group’s corporate mission is to provide everyone with healthier and more sustainable food. Operating in more than 120 countries, Bel works closely with a global network of dairy farmers to source the highest quality milk for their products.
As part of its commitment to climate leadership and long-term sustainability, Bel set Science-Based Targets (SBTi) to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2035. For food and beverage companies like Bel, the majority of these emissions fall under Scope 3.1 – emissions from purchased goods and services, including agricultural production of raw materials. Achieving their SBTi reduction target hinges on reducing farm-level emissions at scale.
The Challenge
A frontrunner in sustainability, Bel began collecting farm-level activity data in 2018. However, the company faced many challenges to collect reliable emissions data from its supply chain:
- Manual effort: Data collection relied heavily on manual processes. Local procurement teams and farm technicians spent hours visiting farms to gather data in person. Complex data collection assessments with poor localisation also reduced farmer engagement.
- Data quality and usability: As manual data entry is prone to human error, the emission data collected was unverified and fragmented, managed via excel spreadsheets.
- Low coverage: Despite the significant time investment, the data captured represented only 10–20% of Bel’s annual milk purchase volume. This hindered identification of the most effective reduction measures possible.
- Limited actionability: Extensive amounts of raw data are difficult to work with. Bel’s procurement teams across the different regions had used local tools and devised their own ways of working over the years to analyse carbon data and create reduction plans at farm level. However, consolidating emission data and estimating the impact of reduction scenarios was difficult and inefficient for Bel’s global team.
The Solution
To address these barriers, Bel partnered with Root Global, the European market leader in emissions management for dairy, meat, and crop processors, and Cool Farm Tool, one of the world’s most established scientific methodologies for farm-level emissions calculations.
Root’s platform integrates Cool Farm’s trusted methodology to ensure audit-ready, FLAG-compliant emissions calculations. This significantly reduced risk for Bel by providing robust assurance that both the data collected and the reduction scenarios modelled from it meet the highest credibility and compliance standards.
First rollouts across Bel’s farms in Portugal, Poland, and Slovakia demonstrated immediate impact:
- Fast, streamlined data collection: Farmers can now quickly complete assessments themselves, or via online collaboration with farm technicians. Root’s platform supports direct uploads of common farm documents, extracting the necessary data automatically.
- Improved farmer engagement: Every participating farmer receives a personalised emissions report for their farm. This improves transparency and builds support for emissions reduction across Bel’s supplier base.
- Verified, high-quality data: Root’s platform includes two layers of data validation, ensuring every data point submitted is credible. These data quality checks include region- and breed-specific boundaries, year-over-year comparisons, document verification and parameters like feed to energy ratio. A data quality flagging system informs procurement and sustainability teams about submissions which require closer inspection.
- Granular, centralised analytics: Root enables Bel’s sustainability teams to analyse and report emissions across farms and countries. The platform enables deep dives into specific emission sources – for example, homegrown feed, which can account for up to 70% of a farm’s total carbon footprint. Regional emissions performance is tracked and managed centrally, ensuring accountability and visibility for corporate leadership.
- Clear next steps: From the ability to simulate reduction scenarios to launching farm-level action plans, Root offers Bel both the data and tools necessary to take meaningful action to reduce Scope 3.1 emissions.
As the food and beverage industry moves towards decarbonisation, there is no clear blueprint to follow. Putting mechanisms in place to reduce farm-level emissions at scale presents many real-world, on-the-ground challenges. Throughout the process, the teams at Bel, Root, and Cool Farm Tool had to remain agile and collaborative, tackling problems as they arose. Rather than deploying an off-the-shelf product, Root and Cool Farm Tool stayed flexible, which proved to be an effective approach. The team at Root also engaged directly with farmers across three countries before launch – this resulted in customised developments such as:
- Updated fertiliser lists for specific regions (e.g. the Azores)
- Additional document upload functionality for Poland’s RW-1 STADO and Portugal’s SNIRA documents
- New regional emission factors to boost accuracy of emission calculations
The Future
The partnership with Root and Cool Farm will support Bel’s strategic shift from carbon accounting to measurable emissions reduction at scale. This highly tailored solution is designed to reach >80% annual coverage of Bel’s dairy supply, unlocking significant business value:
- Accelerated progress toward SBTi targets: Emissions reduction at scale across the value chain, successfully meeting both regulatory and downstream reporting requirements.
- Commercial advantage: Access to carbon-linked financial incentives and the ability to develop low-emission product innovation.
- Strengthened market position: Bel reinforce their international reputation as a sustainability leader.
Together, Bel, Root, and Cool Farm show that effective partnerships are the key to real-world climate impact. Even in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, committed collaboration can deliver meaningful results.
“Root’s solution facilitates Bel’s decarbonisation strategy across our supply chain. By integrating Cool Farm’s rigorous scientific methodology into Root’s enterprise-ready platform, our sustainability and procurement teams are equipped to efficiently collect, measure, analyse and monitor farm-level activity data, resulting in effective reductions of our scope 3 emissions.” – Brechtje de Schipper
Curious to learn more? Get in touch us here or join us at the 2025 Cool Farm Annual Event!
