A Behind The Scenes Look Behind Our Sourcing Standards with HowGood
Supporting regenerative agriculture and restoring soil health is at the heart and soul of White Leaf Provisions. We have built our business on the back of these farming principles, and are dedicated to providing more products for more people to enjoy the taste, quality and nutrition that they yield – while galvanizing more awareness and support around regenerative agriculture in the process too!
This past year, the incredible team at HowGood has become an essential partner of ours to both credential and further this often anything-but-straightforward mission. Partnering with HowGood has added an additional layer of transparency for White Leaf, starting at the farm level. We work closely with their team to dedicate a comprehensive Impact Score for each product, and in doing so, push the envelope on what we can do as a leading regenerative brand.
A little background on our sourcing standards….
Since day one, we set out to bring a line of regeneratively farmed products to market, providing a level of transparency and purity not yet seen in the US before to the baby and family foods category. Since we first began formulating our products, we have used the internationally recognized certification for all things biodynamic Biodynamic® and regenerative, Demeter, as our North Star. We spoke to countless Demeter-certified farmers and operations to gain a better knowledge of what they were growing and the quantities they were growing. We were able to partner with a handful of carefully selected national and international farms and processing facilities to allow us to bring our biodynamic products to market.
Never ones to rest on our laurels, we wanted to take our ingredient transparency and traceability a step further by partnering with HowGood
We were very interested in what comprehensive impact insights HowGood’s Latis platform could show us about our blends, and with big expansion dreams in mind, how it could influence our R&D in the future. We were especially impressed by HowGood’s environmental and social metrics that are able to measure biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, labor risk and animal welfare.
To begin, we started with the farm locations for each of our existing ingredients, the farming practices used, and our certifications. From there, through measuring eight core sustainability metrics – Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Water Usage, Biodiversity, Soil Biodiversity, Labor Risk Exposure, Land Use, Animal Welfare, and Processing – they provided deeper insights into the impacts of every White Leaf ingredient, and the carbon footprint of our finished products, providing us with an overall score for each.
Taking our mission a step further
We are continuing to work closely with the HowGood team to push the envelope on what we can do as a leading regenerative, biodynamic brand. We now have the opportunity to choose how we source our ingredients, and finetune both new products and current offerings – updating individual farm practices, increasing percentages of where ingredients come from, tweaking our geographic location of sourcing, etc. to see how the updates play out in the final score of our blends.
This has been a really exciting part of the process for everyone involved and we are honored to grow alongside Latis technology as it evolves and share with our consumers to empower their daily purchasing decisions!
We are also a proud winner of HowGood’s 2022 Climate Friendly Challenge! Our Carrot + Sweet Potato + Pea Blend has achieved the HowGood “Climate Friendly” attribute, given to products that have Greenhouse Gas emissions that are lower than 70% of all food products on the market. For more information on how HowGood measures food product impact, visit www.howgood.com.
