If you make a drink and sell it to a retailer, a distributor, or a trade buyer, you have almost certainly been asked questions you could not properly answer: What's the carbon footprint of your product? What’s the recycled content of your packaging? Where do your ingredients come from?

Until recently, those questions were easy to brush aside. A polished answer about your sustainability commitments, a mention of your B Corp journey, maybe a line about the light weighting of your bottle and you were through.
That is changing, the questions are getting more specific, and the people asking them are starting to require evidence.

We have a vehicle for that documentation: a Product Passport.

What is a Product Passport?

The alkatera Product Passport is a structured digital record that captures the environmental and sustainability credentials of a specific product. Not your company, not your brand, but an individual SKU.

It pulls together the data that matters to citizens, buyers, retailers, auditors, and regulators: the carbon footprint per unit, water use, packaging composition and recyclability, supply chain origin data, and any verified certifications associated with that product.

Think of it as the difference between telling someone your business is sustainable and being able to prove it, at product level, with traceable methodology behind every number.

In the EU, the Digital Product Passport (DPP) is being mandated under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). While drinks are not the first sector in scope, the direction of travel is unambiguous: product-level environmental data is becoming a condition of sale, not a nice-to-have, and it’s only a matter of time.

Even outside formal regulatory requirements, buyers are moving faster than legislation. Retailers in the UK and EU are already asking for this data. Some are making it a listing condition.

Why buyers are asking — and what they actually need

Buyers and procurement leads are under their own pressure. The brands and retailers they work for have sustainability commitments: net zero targets, Scope 3 disclosure obligations, sourcing policies etc. To meet those commitments, they need data from their suppliers. From you.

When a major UK retailer asks for your product's carbon footprint, they are not asking out of curiosity. They need to report it as part of their own Scope 3 emissions. If you cannot provide the data, they will either estimate it (usually unfavourably) or find a supplier who can.

The specific data points buyers are increasingly requesting include:

Carbon footprint per unit: ideally covering Scope 1, 2 and 3, using a recognised methodology such as ecoinvent. Not a rough estimate. Not a company-level number divided by units sold. A product-level lifecycle assessment.

Packaging data: composition by material, recyclability rating, recycled content percentage, weight per unit. This feeds into EPR compliance and retailer sustainability scorecards.

Water use: increasingly relevant for drinks brands, where water is both a direct input and a reputational issue.

Supply chain origin: for premium and craft products especially, buyers want to know where ingredients come from, and whether there is any third-party verification.

Certifications: B Corp, organic, Rainforest Alliance, and equivalents. But increasingly, buyers want to see the data behind the certification, not just the logo.

The problem with having no system

Most drinks brands, particularly at the craft and regional scale, hold this information across a patchwork of spreadsheets, supplier emails, certification portals, and the memory of whoever did the B Corp application two years ago.

When a buyer asks for product carbon data and you take three weeks to respond with a number you are not sure is right, you have already lost ground. When they ask again in six months and you give them a different number, you have lost credibility.

The brands that are winning conversations with buyers right now are the ones who can pull up a Product Passport on demand. A single, structured document or data record that shows the footprint, the methodology, the verification status, and the supporting data connected to a QR code or public URL.

What a good Product Passport contains

There is no single mandated format yet for drinks brands, but the emerging consensus across retail buyers, CSRD-aligned reporters, and B Corp auditors points to the same core data set:

Environmental data

- Carbon footprint (kg CO2e per unit, lifecycle basis)
- Water use (litres per unit)
- Packaging weight, composition, and recyclability
- Waste to landfill per unit
- Land use and biodiversity impact (where applicable)

Verification

- Methodology used (e.g. ecoinvent 3.12)
- Date of assessment
- Third-party verification status

Supply chain

- Primary ingredient origin
- Key supplier sustainability data
- Scope 3 categories covered

Certifications

- Active certifications with expiry dates
- Relevant claims and their substantiation

How alkatera builds our Product Passports

alkatera was built specifically to solve this problem for drinks brands. Every product added to the platform generates a Product Passport automatically, drawing on:

Scope 1, 2 and 3 data input via the platform's guided data collection
Life cycle assessments built using primary data and databases from ecoInvent and Agribalyse
Packaging data integrated at product level
Supplier data pulled directly from verified supplier profiles

The result is a Product Passport that can be exported, shared with buyers, embedded in trade presentations, put on your product or website, or used as the basis for verified environmental claims all with our Glass Box transparency, meaning every number is traceable to its source.

The practical question

If a buyer emailed you today and asked for the carbon footprint of your flagship product, not your company's total emissions, but that specific SKU, what would you say?

If the honest answer is "I'd need a few weeks and I need to conduct an expensive LCA” that is the gap a Product Passport closes.

The drinks brands building these credentials now are not doing it because regulation has forced them to. They are doing it because their buyers are asking, because their competitors aren’t doing it so they have a competitive advantage, and because the window for treating sustainability data as a nice-to-have is closing faster than most brands realise.

alkatera is a sustainability operating system built for the drinks industry. If you want to see what your Product Passport could look like, book a demo or get in touch.