In an era where the environmental cost of our food choices is under growing scrutiny, Anya Doherty is leading the charge for transparency and sustainability in the food system.
As CEO and founder of Foodsteps — a pioneering platform that helps food businesses measure, reduce, and communicate their environmental impact — Doherty is carving out a new standard for climate-conscious dining.
With a background in environmental science and a mission to make sustainability accessible across the food sector, she’s helping everyone from farm to fork take meaningful action.
In this conversation, we explore her journey from academic research to tech entrepreneur, and how Foodsteps is driving systemic change in what — and how — we eat.
Anya, your journey began with a groundbreaking study at Cambridge on carbon labelling. Can you walk us through the unexpected findings of that research, and how it led to the founding of Foodsteps?
The study analysed hundreds of cafeteria meals to identify how to make their menus lower carbon and shift consumer behaviour towards those options. We evaluated the effectiveness of carbon labelling and institutional menu swaps from meat-based meals to lower-emitting alternatives.
One of the main findings was success or failure was not only connected to behaviour change. Calculating emissions of the recipes was painfully complex. With hundreds of unique ingredients requiring thousands of individual assessments, the process was too resource-intensive for most food businesses. So we developed a simplified method using food group categories that maintained extremely high accuracy.
That’s when it clicked for me: the barrier wasn’t just consumer awareness – it was also giving food businesses practical tools to measure and reduce their impact. Foodsteps was born from that realisation, and to make environmental assessment more accessible for the food industry.
From academia to entrepreneurship — what was the most surprising shift for you as you moved from a lab environment to building a tech company in the sustainability space?
The biggest surprise was discovering that passion for sustainability isn’t universal. Early on, I had a meeting with one of the large banks, and their opening question was simply why they should care about sustainability at all.
I’d been so immersed in the academic world, surrounded by peers who lived and breathed environmental science, that I genuinely hadn’t considered that sustainability might not be everyone’s priority. That experience taught me that you simply can’t assume others prioritise sustainability the way you do. It completely transformed how I communicate and build partnerships. Real results come from speaking the language that resonates with different stakeholders.
What are the key challenges for food companies to measure emissions today?
Companies are drowning in data but starving for insights. Businesses can get overwhelmed by reporting requirements, and so they tend to focus on compliance rather than using data to drive actual change.
Then there’s the fundamental problem of supply chain opacity. Most food companies simply don’t know where their ingredients come from, or how to act on the parts of the businesses that have the most impact.
The technical challenges compound this. Companies dealing with thousands or even millions of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) face the challenge of efficiently and effectively analysing the impacts of their products. Many use methodologies where the choice of method has more impact on the result than actual production differences.
Scale makes everything harder. When you’re processing millions of data points from hundreds of suppliers, manual approaches fail.
On top of this, most sustainability platforms lack food-specific expertise – they treat food like any other commodity, missing its intrinsic complexity.
Foodsteps isn’t just another sustainability dashboard — it’s tailored specifically to food businesses. What makes your platform technically and operationally different from generic carbon accounting tools?
As you said, the fundamental difference is our exclusive focus on the lifecycle of food systems. We’ve built a database of over 45,000 location-specific emissions factors covering ingredients from 147+ countries. Unlike generic tools that often rely on spend-based calculations, we take a volume-based approach. Spend-based data frequently depends on industry averages and overlooks factors like inflation or price fluctuations – it’s rudimentary and unreliable. Volume-based assessments give stable, accurate measurements of actual environmental impact.
Our technology is built to handle the complexity of food procurement at scale. We process millions of procurement records in a single assessment – we’ve analysed 2.1 million data lines for the world’s largest corporate catering company, Compass UK&I, alone. Using machine learning models, we ensure accurate matching of ingredients to our food classes, which is crucial when dealing with the messy reality of supplier data.
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But measurement is just the start. Our reports provide lifecycle breakdowns, scenario analyses, and recipe-by-recipe reformulation guidance with projected emissions reductions. We translate complex environmental data into clear business decisions that drive real impact.
For instance, when we helped Accor Hotels at COP16, our analysis enabled them to achieve a 93% reduction in emissions for some dishes through plant-based reformulations. For Azzurri Group, we verified a 50% reduction in emissions from their dough by replacing their traditional flour recipe with one featuring regenerative flour.
You work with millions of procurement records across diverse menus and supply chains. How do you ensure accuracy and usability at that scale, especially when translating complex lifecycle data into business decisions?
The scale challenge is real – we’re constantly working to improve how we handle massive datasets. On the technical side, we’re increasingly using machine learning models to ensure accurate matching of ingredients to our food classes. When you’re dealing with millions of data points from suppliers, you need technology that can handle the messiness of real procurement data – where ingredient names aren’t standardised and formats vary wildly.
The key is making this complexity invisible to our clients. We’ve designed our systems to ingest and analyse data in the formats businesses already use. No complex transformations needed on their end.
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But accuracy is only valuable if it drives action. That’s why we focus heavily on translation – taking lifecycle data and turning it into specific, practical recommendations. We provide lifecycle breakdowns, scenario analyses, and recipe-by-recipe guidance. We’ll show exactly where emissions occur in a supply chain and model potential interventions before they are implemented.
We’re making progress, but there’s still a gap between the current reality of fragmented data systems and the seamless transparency everyone assumes already exists.
With Foodsteps now part of Registrar Corp, what does this new chapter allow you to do that wasn’t possible before? How do you see the platform evolving in the next few years?
The acquisition fundamentally changes our scale and reach. Registrar Corp has over 32,000 customers across 190 countries – that’s the kind of global footprint we could never have achieved as a standalone startup. We work beyond the UK and EU, which means we can help transform food systems globally rather than regionally.
This partnership allows us to mature from a promising startup into a global force for change, while maintaining the scientific rigour and innovation that got us here.
You’ve helped shape national standards with Defra, WRAP, and WWF. What kind of policy or regulation would you most like to see to accelerate credible carbon reduction in the food sector?
Two things would make a massive difference: methodology standardisation and data accessibility.
Right now, companies waste valuable time trying to work out which methodology to use rather than taking action. We need standardised approaches that make it easier for businesses to act without second-guessing whether they’re doing it ‘right’. The complexity shouldn’t be in choosing how to measure – it should be in using those measurements to drive change.
Data availability is equally critical. Too many businesses are overwhelmed by reporting requirements and end up focusing on compliance rather than insights. We need frameworks that prioritise data quality and accessibility, enabling companies to move beyond box-ticking to genuine operational improvements.
What’s one myth about food sustainability that you wish more people in the industry would let go of?
The biggest misconception is that food supply chains are transparent. People genuinely believe it’s possible to trace the food they eat back to its origin, or that companies selling food products have that information at their fingertips. The reality is that supply chains often feel impenetrable. For most of the food we eat, the companies producing or serving it don’t know exactly where it came from.
We want to improve this situation with Foodsteps, through direct supplier engagement and developing actionable data collection methods. By creating practical surveys and gathering primary data, we hope to really increase transparency within the supply chain. And the good news is that every supplier who provides more detailed information helps us get a clearer picture, empowering companies to make more sustainable decisions.
But this is a complex, incremental process that demands collaboration across the entire food system.
