Higg Launches Traceability Partner Program for Supply Chain Sustainability

Higg, a technology platform that enables consumer goods companies to measure, manage, and share the social and environmental impacts of their full value chain, today announced a new program enabling comprehensive traceability across the global supply chain. The Higg traceability program, a global collaboration beginning with technology partners atma.io by Avery Dennison, FibreTrace, and TrusTrace, aims to fast-track global brands' efforts to track the hidden impacts within their manufacturing processes, ensure fiber integrity, and to understand, communicate, and accelerate product sustainability.

The Higg traceability program is designed to enable consumer brands to identify and share the supply chain provenance of billions of items with their upstream value chain partners and highlight and disclose sustainability information – on their own and other ecommerce platforms – to the public and other stakeholders. 

"Consumer goods businesses face a tremendous urgency to accelerate sustainability improvements and need comprehensive tools and contextualized data that can illuminate untracked areas of the supply chain," said Higg CEO Jason Kibbey. "Together with some of the world's most advanced traceability innovators, we're bringing robust new capabilities onto the Higg platform to enable brand and retailer customers to understand and trace product certifications and provenance." 

The program launches with a cohort of innovation partners including atma.io by Avery Dennison, FibreTrace, and TrusTrace: leading solution providers in the end-to-end tracking of materials and product origins, and unified in identifying and illuminating essential sustainability management data. These providers will be integrating their unique services onto the Higg platform in order to connect a network of 45,000 users, 500 brands and retailers, and tens of thousands of manufacturers' factories, bringing product chain-of-custody tracking to the robust platform. 

"We're thrilled to partner with these organizations, all of whom are committed to advancing transparency and sustainability, and each of whom brings unique capabilities needed by the industry," Kibbey said. "Higg is laser-focused on aggregating quality environmental, social, and governance data to provide a single source of truth for consumer goods industries. Partnering with best-in-class traceability innovators is a critical step in helping our customers make better informed sustainability decisions."

"atma.io connected product cloud is built on Avery Dennison's leadership in digital ID technologies that combine physical and digital worlds. In collaboration with the Higg platform, we are helping reimagine supply chains for the greater good by combining item-level traceability data from atma.io together with environmental and social impact data from Higg," said Max Winograd, vice president, atma.io & connected products, Avery Dennison Smartrac. "This gives brands and retailers a complete view of their supply chain and an opportunity to provide accurate sustainability insights to consumers and other key stakeholders."

FibreTrace brings a unique advantage to the program because the technology is implemented at raw fiber source, tracing and verifying that fiber throughout the global supply chain in retail in addition to collecting primary farm data that is third party verified, adding a new layer of data and depth.

"Without transparency we can't improve the impact of the global textile industry for future generations," said Shannon Mercer, CEO of FibreTrace. "FibreTrace combines physical and digital traceability for verification of a fiber's sustainability credentials – combine this with Higg's ability to incorporate data across every facility in a supply chain…it empowers brands to make best practice sustainable decisions right from the start."

Higg's traceability partners will enable blockchain technologies to support tracking and tracing of a product's chain of custody, streamline certification claims, and address material movement, supplier data, consumer engagement, and brand protection. The collaborative approach across the global industry seeks to provide both immediate, verified insights to Higg users, and allows brands to better fulfill the expectations of the public, the satisfaction of corporate sustainability goals, and the oversight of regulatory agencies.

Representing the world's largest dataset for the footwear, apparel, and textile industry, and providing services to the largest global consumer goods retail platforms, Higg will enable its traceability partners to broadly engage with global corporations while providing Higg platform customers access to leading traceability solutions. As part of this program, key social and sustainability data from Higg will also be made available for direct integration into partner platforms, creating more robust solutions for both partners and their customers.

Today's announcement follow's Higg's recent launch of Sustainability Profiles, a first step in a joint initiative with the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to enable fashion brands and retailers to connect sustainability-related product claims at point of purchase to verified data.

"Sustainability cannot exist without traceability, which is why TrusTrace is on a mission to bring true transparency to brands who really want to know what they sell," said Shameek Ghosh, CEO and Co-Founder of TrusTrace. "In collaborating with Higg, our technology can be leveraged to drive more sustainably-conscious and socially-responsible decisions across the global supply chain – while simultaneously equipping the TrusTrace platform with key data from Higg that will help our customers make better, more informed sourcing decisions. It's a win-win for all involved!"