Our environmental impact, in numbers

By some estimates greenhouse gases emitted across the whole food supply chain, i.e. the production, processing, packaging, transportation, disposal, etc. account for around 13.7 billion metric tonnes of CO2, or 26% percent of all greenhouse gases produced ([1]). This already large number is getting larger every year as we have more people to feed. If we want to make any meaningful impact to slow the effects climate change, vast changes will need to be made to all industries including food.

TamaTama Tamale is a first attempt at baking in the idea of carbon costs into the basic business structure of the company, so that we can reduce our environmental impact incrementally time. We want to judge every decision made not only it's revenue and cost merits but also its carbon cost. In the same way any business must watch and keep its costs down, we want to keep our carbon costs in line. A first step towards this goal is calculating an estimated marginal carbon cost of each tamale, i.e. how much more carbon is released into the atmosphere by producing one additional tamale.

We, however, do not claim to be either perfect or endeavor to be blue sky idealists. Our overarching goal is to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible by displacing a maximal amount of high carbon food with low carbon alternatives. This is not possible if we, for example, sacrifice taste in order to reduce our carbon footprint by 0.1%, resulting in no one buying our product; or launching a money losing campaign which inhibits our company's growth. Thus we define our mission in a set of points, in order of importance:

Displace the maximal amount of high carbon food with low carbon alternatives
Reduce our own marginal carbon costs and operational carbon costs
Reduce the amount of waste produced by our company and its products

We will strive with all three points so long as less important point does not interfere with a more important point.

We will be documenting the environmental impact analysis, and the process of setting up such a company on our blog.