NPD Sustainability Lab
Explore and compare the impact of product, ingredient, and packaging choices to support smarter, more sustainable product development and sourcing decisions.
What is NPD Lab? : Build healthier and more sustainable products from concept stage
The biggest sustainability decisions are often made long before a product reaches the market. Yet, product development and private label teams often lack access to sustainability insights when they need them most, early in the innovation process.
FoodFacts NPD Sustainability Lab enables teams to assess, compare, and optimize product concepts from the start,
integrating climate, biodiversity, water, and nutrition insights into product creation and assortment decisions.
With this you can answer questions like:
In practice : Instant sustainability insights during product development
Product scenario testing & digital twins
Test recipes, ingredients, packaging, and sourcing options in real time and create digital product concepts before launch.
Benchmarking & multi-impact scorecards
Compare new product ideas or supplier alternatives against your portfolio, competitors, and industry benchmarks using sustainability and health scorecards covering carbon, biodiversity, water, and nutrition.
From insight to product improvement
Turn results into action by optimizing recipes, packaging, and sourcing decisions while understanding trade-offs between sustainability, health, and performance.
Cross-functional innovation & portfolio alignment
Enable collaboration across product development, sustainability, purchasing, and private label teams, while ensuring new products align with portfolio and sustainability goals.
FAQ : Frequently asked questions
What can I test in the NPD Sustainability Lab?
The NPD Sustainability Lab allows you to evaluate and compare different product concepts, formulations, ingredients, packaging options, and sourcing choices at early stages, long before the product reaches the store shelf. By simulating different scenarios, teams can understand how decisions affect sustainability and health performance and identify the most impactful product alternatives.
Can I compare products against competitors?
Yes. Product concepts can be benchmarked against existing company products or external benchmarks to
understand relative sustainability and health performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
When benchmarking against competitor products, the comparison is based on publicly available product information,
such as ingredient lists, nutritional data, and packaging information. This enables companies to evaluate relative
performance and identify improvement opportunities while ensuring transparency around the data used.
Can I evaluate packaging and ingredient alternatives?
Yes. Users can test the impact of different ingredients, formulation, packaging, and sourcing alternatives. This helps teams understand trade-offs between sustainability, health, cost, and product performance when evaluating different options.
How does this connect to Product Carbon Footprints and portfolio analysis?
The NPD Sustainability Lab builds on FoodFacts' product-level sustainability data, including Product Carbon Footprints. New product concepts can be assessed using the same methodologies and indicators as existing products, enabling consistent comparison with your portfolio and supporting decisions from early product development through portfolio optimization.