Heineken, a public company, extensively reports sustainability performance at a global level and meets CSRD requirements, earning recognition by being voted as the best ESG Report at the IR Impact awards. However, Heineken Nederland Commerce wanted a more granular view of its own commercial footprint.

The challenge was specific: to go beyond the consolidated global figure and understand the emissions tied to commercial activities in the Netherlands: marketing spend, events, customer-facing operations, and logistics. While the brewery's production emissions sit in Heineken Nederland Commerce's Scope 3, at the same time the organisation has influence over which products are sold, which packaging formats are used, and how products are transported to customers.

To make meaningful decisions and accelerate decarbonisation, the team needed detailed, reliable data - structured in a way that could be used for internal steering.

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Heineken Nederland Commerce evaluated several providers before selecting Coolset. Three factors drove the decision:

• Methodological fit: Heineken's global reporting already used an activity-based methodology. Coolset's ability to start from a spend-based foundation and enrich it progressively with activity data matched exactly how the team wanted to build its additional footprint in a straightforward way. Efficiently, without duplicating existing processes or introducing unnecessary complexity.
• Ease of data delivery: Coolset accepts large bulk data exports in spreadsheets from Heineken's systems. There was no need for complex integration or manual reformatting, just a clean data handoff that made the process genuinely low-effort.
• Price and pragmatism: Coolset offered the right combination of depth and value. The commercial approach was clear and transparent, and the team found working with Coolset to be straightforward and collaborative from the first conversation.

The collaboration delivered the granular insight Heineken Nederland Commerce was looking for. The team now has the specific actionable insights of its carbon footprint, including for example logistics emissions.

Additionally, Coolset mapped the emissions data to Heineken Nederland Commerce's internal organisational structure, aligned to channels such as retail and out-of-home. This meant the results could be connected to internal ownership and reporting lines, rather than just the acitivity-based emission categories spanning departments.

The outcome was not just data, but a tool to drive insight for decision-making: identifying emissions hotspots, understanding which commercial choices drive the largest impact, and generating productive internal conversations about where to focus.

Heineken Netherlands describes the collaboration with Coolset as cooperative, pleasant, and efficient. The Coolset team asked the right questions, guided the process well, and kept the time investment on the client side to a minimum.

Data delivery worked well: Heineken Nederland Commerce exported data from its internal systems and shared it with Coolset. A simple, clean process that required no heavy lifting. Onboarding was handled quickly, and the working relationship felt collaborative throughout.

The quality of the conversation mattered as well. Spend-based carbon analysis has real complexity beneath the surface, and Heineken Netherlands valued that the team could discuss the nuances together rather than relying on automated outputs alone.

The work done with Coolset drove clear results: a structured understanding of the commercial footprint, an internal dashboard built on that data, and a stronger foundation for emissions reduction conversations across the organisation.

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