Home to many historic environmental organizations, the Hudson Valley can now call itself home to an international database on ingredient and product sustainability. In the past few years, HowGood, a technology platform now based in Stone Ridge, has become a large resource for tracking the environmental sustainability of food and personal care products.

The platform measures the environmental and social impact of a company’s ingredients, tracking the brand’s sourcing and manufacturing processes, and then grading its sustainability using a proprietary metrics system. Depending on results, the database also detects alternative, more sustainable sources that the company can use for its brands. HowGood’s clients include massive grocery corporations like Ahold Delhaize, which oversees the Hannaford and Stop & Shop chains, as well as the fast-food chain Chipotle and the food company Kraft Heinz.

“The great thing is, I think companies have realized that they have a social responsibility,” said Rachel Calomeni, senior vice president of growth and innovation at HowGood.

HowGood was founded in Brooklyn in 2006 by brothers Alexander and Arthur Gillett, who say they were raised by environmentally minded, well-traveled parents. The brothers developed the company to address a need they saw in the food industry.

“They just felt that innate responsibility to try and help the planet,” said Calomeni. “And they realized that this is an area where there's not a lot of transparency, and there's not a lot of understanding.”

HowGood’s office in Stone Ridge marks an addition to the historically environmentally keen Hudson Valley. The Gillett brothers had been living part-time in the Hudson Valley for several years before they moved most of their executive team upstate in 2014 and, of HowGood’s 30 or 40 employees, about a dozen are within the region.

“Because of the immense biodiversity in the area, it is representative of what we do,” said Calomeni of the Hudson Valley. “We like to think that being in nature, and being a part and connected to the community, and understanding the needs of farmers especially, is a really important thing for the team to understand and see how that's connected to the greater good.”

Last year, a report from the UN estimated that the food industry accounts for over one third of carbon emissions — from fertilizers used to grow the food to the greenhouse gasses emitted by powering commercial refrigerators.

“These two brothers really wanted to figure out how we could help measure the impact of the food system,” Calomeni said. “How do we help brands to actually make better decisions in their sourcing and manufacturing processes to make a difference?”

The Gillett brothers amassed a small team of scientists, engineers and technicians, and launched HowGood as a software platform that can be used by food manufacturing/sales companies on a subscription basis to determine their environmental impact. Once hired, HowGood’s “sustainability intelligence platform,” Latis, investigates the companies’ sourcing — from bananas in Madagascar to sugar in Brazil — and rates the environmental impact based on the product’s immediate area, the area at large, and the labor risks associated with the production facility.

Calomeni suggested that while HowGood can’t force its subscribers to address any problems exposed by the data, hiring the platform in the first place indicates a hope for improvement. Increased customer demand and an interest in organic ingredients and sustainable manufacturing has led a host of companies to make relevant investments, she added.

“I like, personally, to think that they want to do better for the environment, but it also helps them with their brand image,” Calomeni said. “Companies are experiencing better growth in sales when they have true environmental positions and do better for the world.”

Last month, HowGood raised $12.5 million in a funding campaign led by Titan Grove, a private holding company focused on investing in sustainable businesses. The funds will help develop more partnerships across the country and Europe and expand the Latis database, which requires immense time, energy, and funds, according to Calomeni, HowGood spent almost a decade simply collecting data sources.

“There's a huge amount of work in the background, to pull the information together, and to make sure that we have a database that can cover pretty much any scenario,” she said. “That funding is an important part of continuing to grow our database.”

HowGood has already enhanced Latis’ indirect greenhouse gas reporting capabilities and expanded supplier-specific data. The company is also hoping to triple its team by hiring more engineers and employees.