DFI Retail Group is a leading pan-Asian retailer operating thousands of outlets, including supermarkets, hypermarkets, and convenience stores. Managing a complex supply chain across multiple Asian markets, the group serves millions of consumers daily. Historically, tracking the environmental footprint of their extensive product range relied on global industry-wide emission averages.

Early foundational efforts to measure Scope 3 emissions yielded data that lacked comparability over time and decision-usefulness. The heavy reliance on generic emission factors meant the metrics did not reflect DFI’s specific operating context in Asia.

At the same time, the varying sustainability readiness and limited understanding across their diverse supplier base made securing reliable, primary data consistent with international frameworks incredibly difficult.

To overcome supplier reporting fatigue, DFI Retail Group used the Common Data Framework to identify clear decision use-cases and apply proportionate data collection efforts. They used foundational questions to get started:

• What do I want to achieve? Calculate a contextualised GHG inventory and compare emissions of similar products.
• What is my organisation ready for? Dedicated supplier engagement and collaboration via an external data platform.

DFI then prioritised four key categories: rice, coffee, dairy, and beef. They engaged priority suppliers through structured onboarding and guidance to accommodate different levels of readiness. Finally, they used a data platform provider to estimate product carbon footprints and refine based on actual supplier data availability.

By following the CDF’s transitional roadmap to work towards granular, product-level emissions insights, DFI Retail Group successfully transformed its data collection strategy.

• Supplier Engagement: Successfully onboarded [X] suppliers across the four priority commodity categories.
• Data Accuracy: Replaced generic assumptions with verified primary data, improving data consistency by [X%].
• Strategic Capability: Strengthened the group’s ability to measure impacts from decarbonisation efforts.

Key Learning: Focusing data collection on high-impact categories ensures the most important decarbonisation efforts are captured in DFI’s emissions accounting, and  generating actionable, decision-useful insights and