Thesis
Retail decarbonization in Europe would not scale on email attachments. It needed a shared, trusted data layer between manufacturers and retailers.
When OpenClimat was forming, climate reporting was becoming mandatory theater: spreadsheets, PDFs, bilateral requests, and no common language. Retailers needed supplier data. Manufacturers needed a way to show progress once and be believed everywhere.
There was no obvious European product owning that network. That is the kind of infrastructure gap where a category leader can lock in.
Why this mattered
- Climate action in retail is a coordination problem, not a slide-deck problem.
- Harmonized, verified data creates trust on both sides of the supply chain.
- The winner becomes the default rails for climate collaboration.
The bet
OpenClimat's value proposition is a centralized platform where manufacturers share climate data in a form retailers can use - and where progress becomes comparable, not anecdotal.
The thesis is European leadership in the climate-data network for retail: the infrastructure layer everyone eventually has to plug into.