Back in 2021 we conducted a LifeCycle Analysis (LCA) for a 70cl glass bottle of Avallen Calvados. We measured everything from the amount of fuel used to harvest the apples in the orchards through to the emissions of the apple paper labels we use. We took into account the water, electricity, and natural gas used in fermentation, distillation, and bottling. Then we spoke with Dr Alan Lakso from Cornell University to include the sequestration of the apple trees into our calculations.

At the end of this number crunching we got a result of -2.73kg CO2e per bottle. A number that we were proud of and put on our label so everyone could see the environmental impact of a bottle of Avallen Calvados.

What we calculated is known as ‘cradle to gate’, or the impact of a bottle up to the point that it leaves the distillery door. Everything that happens after its placed onto a truck and shipped to wherever its going is ignored.

Cradle to gate is standard in the drinks industry; it’s cheaper, simpler to calculate, and requires less work in collecting and analysing data. It gives you a good picture of the impact of producing a product, what it doesn’t do is represent the total impact.

To fully calculate the total impact of a product, we need to look beyond the facility gate and add distribution, retail or citizen use, refrigeration, and end of life disposal into out calculations. It’s great to know the CO2e figure of a bottle of Avallen Calvados to the distillery door, but what about when we drive that bottle to the nearest port, put it on a container ship to Hong Kong, transfer it to a distribution centre, sell it to a liquor store where someone takes it home, enjoys some delicious appletini’s with friends, and then deposits the bottle in the recycling bin.

This is what we call a ‘cradle to grave’ approach. It aims to measure the full lifecycle of a product from raw material extraction and agricultural impact all the way through to end-of-life
The key stages beyond the ‘gate’ are distribution and logistics, retail and storage, citizen use, and packaging disposal, recycling, or reuse.

Why Cradle to Gate Is No Longer Enough

For a long time, cradle to gate was a perfectly reasonable standard. The tools to go further were expensive, slow, and required specialist consultants who charged eye-watering rates to produce a static report that was out of date the moment it landed in your inbox. Our first cradle to gate LCA for Avallen cost €5,000 back in 2021, for a single SKU. For most drinks brands, particularly smaller indie brands, the barrier was, and has always been, simply too high.

But the world has changed. Retailers are starting to ask harder questions about where their products come from and what happens to them at the end of their life. Investors are scrutinising environmental claims with far more rigour than they were even two years ago. And a new wave of environmental reporting legislation such as the EU’s catchily titled CSRD and UK SRS, is arriving that will require drinks brands to account for their full footprint, not just the easy half of it.

There is also a more uncomfortable truth: a cradle to gate number, presented without context, can be misleading, and something I was very conscious about at Avallen. A bottle with a headline carbon figure that ignores 10,000 miles of refrigerated shipping and a landfill-bound glass bottle is not telling the whole story. As sustainability reporting matures, partial data will increasingly be seen not as diligence, but as a gap, and in the worst cases, a liability.

Why Most Brands Have Not Done It Yet

If cradle to grave is the fuller picture, why hasn't the industry adopted it more widely? Honestly, because it has been genuinely difficult and expensive.

A full lifecycle assessment requires data from every stage of a product's journey including your logistics partners, your distributors, your retail accounts, your packaging suppliers, and assumptions about how citizens actually use and dispose of your product. I know first hand how hard it can be pulling all of that together, applying the right scientific methodology, and producing something that is both accurate and defensible against scrutiny has historically taken months and cost tens of thousands of pounds. Most brands simply could not justify it.

What has been missing is not the will to do it. It is the right tool.

Introducing alkatera's Cradle to Grave LCA Wizard

This is exactly the problem we set out to solve when we built alkatera's new Cradle to Grave LCA feature.

We have built a fully guided, 14-step wizard that takes you through every stage of your product's lifecycle, from the agricultural ingredients you use to make your liquid all the way through to what happens when an empty bottle/can hits a recycling bin or ends up at the landfill. It is designed to be as simple to use as possible, asking for the minimal amount of data from you and then crunching the numbers in the background, specifically for the realities of drinks supply chains, not adapted from a generic tool built for the manufacturing sector.

The whole thing is ISO 14040/44/67 (choose your number) compliant, which means the output is not just a number you can put on your website, it is a scientifically rigorous, audit-ready assessment that stands up to scrutiny from retailers, investors, and regulators. It goes beyond the singular CO2e number that we calculated for Avallen and includes full greenhouse gas breakdown, water footprint and scarcity factor, land use and biodiversity impact, and also features a waste and circularity score. What we generate is a comprehensive picture of the entire impact of your product.

Most importantly, you do not need to be a sustainability expert or climate scientist to use it. The wizard guides you through each stage with clear prompts, sensible defaults based on industry data, and the ability to add your own figures where you have them. Where you are missing data, we tell you what to do about it rather than leaving you staring at a blank field wondering what a "characterisation factor" is.

The result is a complete picture of your product's environmental impact, one that you can use in retailer conversations, investor materials, on-pack claims, and regulatory submissions with confidence.

Conclusion

When we got that -2.73kg CO2e result for Avallen Calvados back in 2021, we were proud of it. We still are. But if I am honest, we knew it was an incomplete number. We knew the story did not end at the distillery door.

The drinks industry has been measuring half the picture for long enough, not because brands do not care, but because the tools to do better have not existed. Until now.

If you want to understand the full environmental impact of your product, build something credible enough to put in front of a retailer, an investor, or a regulator, and do it without hiring a team of consultants, alkatera's Cradle to Grave LCA wizard was built for you.

Try it for yourself at alkatera.com