Marketing organization American Egg Board (AEB) has launched a project to support egg producers in answering customer sustainability surveys.
Customer sustainability surveys that egg producers are required to do can be time consuming and contain challenging requests for sustainability and impact data. Additionally, comparable questions are asked across various third-party sustainability survey platforms that egg buyers utilize.
To address this and support the egg industry’s growth in sustainability, AEB is working to understand egg customers' sustainability commitments by identifying commonalities across multiple buyer’s surveys and data requests, explained Dr. Mickey Rubin, AEB Executive Director of the Egg Nutrition Center (ENC), at the 2024 United Egg Producers (UEP) committee briefings.
“The idea is to provide support with customer demands and make that process more seamless,” said Rubin. “We plan to have an aggregated survey that combines themes and questions that we see across these customer surveys and provide direction in answering questions and calculating metrics.”
Since October 2023, AEB has been collecting customer sustainability surveys from egg producers and conducting surveys across the food chain. Rubin said AEB has collected almost 1,200 questions, metrics and frameworks over the last few months.
With that information, AEB plans to create a master sustainability survey that includes a how-to guide and data tool to provide support and help egg producers respond to complex questions about their process.
By the end of 2024, Rubin said AEB plans to create an online tool application that will allow for the streamlined completion of the master survey.
AEB's work coincide's with the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Poultry and Egg's (US-RSPE) sustainability reporting framework that was launched in 2023. The framework helps producers gain insight into their individual sustainability efforts and helps the industry measure and communicate with stakeholders about the sustainability of the U.S. poultry and egg supply chains.
What information is required in customer sustainability surveys?
According to Rubin, most customers are currently using third party sustainability company surveys such as CDP Climate or THESIS.
These companies look at sustainability in scopes 1-3. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), scope 1 emissions are direct greenhouse (GHG) emissions that are controlled or owned by an organization, scope 2 emissions are indirect GHG emissions associated with the upstream purchase of electricity, steam, heat or cooling and scope 3 are indirect GHG emissions that result from downstream activities.
Rubin added that in the data AEB has collected, customers are currently not requiring egg producers to report scope 3 emissions.
