Capgemini and Henkel Consumer Brands (HCB) co-developed and implemented the Henkel Environmental Assessment Reporting Tool (HCB HEART) platform, enabling automated, cradle-to-gate Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) calculations for more than 50,000 HCB products. The adapted solution gives the company broad portfolio coverage and creates a scalable foundation for internal sustainability guidance across product categories.

By reducing manual calculation effort, improving consistency, and making footprint contributions more transparent, HCB HEART enables all teams to better understand where emissions originate and how they can be reduced. This supports more informed portfolio, formulation, packaging, and R&D decisions aimed at developing and prioritizing low-PCF eco-design products in the future.

Building scalable internal sustainability transparency

Henkel Consumer Brands, a division of Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, is a global leader in consumer goods and renowned for its commitment to sustainability and innovation. Known for its laundry and home care brands such as Persil, Bref, Schwarzkopf, and Syoss, the company’s vision is to drive sustainable growth by embedding environmental responsibility and eco-design principles across its product portfolio. To enable this goal, Henkel’s sustainability strategy builds on a strong legacy that relies on a holistic approach to turn commitments and ambitions into action and impact across the value chain. Digital tools and data-driven insights support this work by helping the company measure progress, steer action, and meet evolving sustainability and regulatory requirements.

HCB manages a broad and complex product portfolio, including many multi-component products. Because of this, calculating PCFs across this portfolio requires reliable data from multiple sources and consistent logic across categories, components, production sites, and lifecycle steps.

Before HEART, PCF-related work involved a significant amount of manual effort and fragmented analysis. This made it challenging to scale portfolio-wide coverage efficiently, compare footprint results consistently, and understand which components or lifecycle stages contributed most to a product’s carbon footprint.

HCB therefore needed a solution that could automate recurring calculation steps, increase data quality, create transparency on footprint drivers, and provide the insights needed to steer future portfolio and R&D eco-design work towards low-PCF products.

Capgemini was selected as a development partner due to its successful implementation of HEART for Henkel Adhesive Technologies and its ability to adapt to the specific requirements of Henkel Consumer Brands.

Adapting HEART for Consumer Brands

In order for the HEART platform to play its intended role, it needed to be extended and adapted to HCB’s specific requirements. Capgemini and Henkel worked closely to replicate the solution’s core functionalities in HCB’s environment and tailor the system to its unique data structures.

The resulting platform automates cradle-to-gate PCF calculations, supports scalable portfolio coverage, and provides more consistent and comparable carbon footprint results for HCB products.

In particular, HCB HEART breaks down and summarizes footprint contributions across relevant product dimensions, such as raw materials, packaging, production, logistics, and product components. As a result, teams now have a better understanding of which product components, materials, packaging elements, production steps, or logistics factors contribute most to the overall footprint. This enables HCB to identify emission hotspots and prioritize sustainability improvement opportunities more systematically.

In addition, the Consumer Brands version of HEART introduced Multi-Component Product (MCP) logic. Unlike a standard product with one packaging formula and set of accessories, this approach combines multiple finished goods—each with its own product dimensions—into a single product, for example a Schwarzkopf hair coloration kit. This enables the solution to calculate all components together for one unified MCP.

By integrating this MCP logic into HEART, HCB can calculate complex product variants more reliably and apply a consistent calculation logic across product types that would otherwise require extensive manual handling.

A sustainability vision becomes reality

After more than a year of development, the HEART solution successfully went live in 2026 for its first user group. The platform now covers more than 50,000 Product Carbon Footprints for Henkel Consumer Brands products.

This go-live marks an important step from individual or manual PCF-related analyses towards scalable portfolio coverage and consistent internal sustainability insights. The credibility of the solution was further strengthened through a recent external audit of the HEART platform environment across both Henkel Consumer Brands and Henkel Adhesive Technologies.

The data platform provides HCB teams with a strong asset for comparing product footprints, understanding footprint contributions, and identifying where future efforts to reduce ecological impact can have the greatest influence.

By making PCF data available in a structured and comparable way, HEART supports portfolio and R&D decisions related to low-PCF product variants, formulation enhancements, and packaging optimization, as well as finally enabling sustainability-driven product development.

The go-live also marks the successful transition from development into stable operation and maintenance, ensuring the solution’s long-term scalability, reliability, and continuous improvement.

Going forward, the business will use consistent PCF insights to compare products, identify reduction opportunities, and guide future development towards lower-PCF alternatives. In addition, the platform creates a foundation for future integration with external frameworks such as Digital Product Passports or Eco Beauty Score. As a result, HCB HEART provides a scalable foundation for integrating sustainability considerations more deeply into product development, portfolio management, and business decision-making.

“Sustainability transformation requires more than ambition. It requires reliable data, transparency, and the ability to act at scale. HEART gives our teams a consistent view of Product Carbon Footprints across our portfolio and helps us better understand where we can make the greatest impact. By bringing sustainability, business, and technology teams together around a common data foundation, the platform supports more informed decisions and helps accelerate our sustainability journey.”

Agnes Thees
Corporate Vice President Global Sustainability, Henkel Consumer Brands