Show HN: GreenSwapp – API to track CO2 of food products at scale
Hi guys! We’re Ajay & Jainit, and we’re super excited to launch GreenSwapp to the HN community!

GreenSwapp is an API that tracks product and recipe-wise carbon footprints at scale, for food products.

Tracking carbon footprints of individual food products is hard because you’d have to trace it all the way back to the farm and account for all the energy inputs till the point of sale. Each such analysis takes about 6 months to do, and in many cases, it is hard to even map this journey. For food products that typically have multiple ingredients (i.e. they are recipes), you have to do this for each ingredient. Supermarkets have about 30k unique products per store. If you do the math, you’ll see that this quickly becomes impossible to do manually, in a reasonable amount of time.

After my Masters’ in Sustainability & Engineering, I (Ajay) worked as a climate & impact consultant for more than a decade. I first discovered this problem 5 years ago (as I ran my own sustainability consultancy), when I saw some of my large food brand & retail clients struggling to identify their highest impact products & suppliers. More recently, we found that food platforms (such as Uber Eats & Yelp) want to track the climate impact of their recipes and restaurants too.

We do the hard work of estimating carbon emissions using a combination of product meta-data / supply chain attributes (such as origin location, farming type, packaging type etc.) and aggregated product carbon footprints from peer-reviewed journals. Our core dataset is a comprehensive list of food types found in supermarkets. We use an ML model (semantic search using sentence transformers) to match queried product names to our standard list of product types and retrieve their median supply chain carbon footprints. This enables us to track impact at scale (thousands of products in minutes), making it easy and cheap for you to track product-level emissions. This would allow you to easily a) report emissions, b) identify high impact products, brands, and suppliers in your inventory, and c) communicate impact with consumers.

What if my product is more sustainable? We identify every supply chain attribute that might reduce a product’s impact (such as organic farming, better packaging material, locally grown) and apply a correction factor (also obtained from peer-reviewed life cycle analyses papers). You can read more on our algorithm here - https://greenswapp.com/api/

You can try our API for free on any milk product (e.g. - Oatly oat drink barista edition) or any type of pizza (e.g. - Pepperoni pizza). Here are the API docs - https://docs.greenswapp.com/. You can get your trial API key here - https://greenswapp.com/api/.

Our full API works with any food product you can find in the supermarket and any recipe. We charge a data license fee of $0.99 per product per year for supermarket products and $0.99 per ingredient per recipe per year for dishes. Here is a cost estimator tool - greenswapp.com/pricing. If you want to look up more than 100 products and 10 recipes, you also pay an annual platform fee (still figuring out the right price point).

We’d love to get your feedback on our API. We are also trying to identify the biggest use case for this product. So please let us know what you’re using it for by commenting on this post - is it to use in a new app you’re building, get your company to use it at their cafeteria, reduce your company’s emissions, offset it, etc.? Any other ideas on how we can make this better would be wonderful too.

Thanks a ton!