Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem do you solve?
Jan Bussiek, Managing Director of Sustaynr GmbH: Office chairs, computers, adhesive tapes, garbage bags, highlighters, and so on are purchased millions of times every year. Buyers often have a choice between hundreds or even thousands of similar-looking items. Despite the honest intention to procure sustainably, and despite the billions spent worldwide on standard products, sustainability plays hardly any role in the selection process. Not because more sustainable products cost more—they usually don't. But because creating transparency on this aspect entails a very high level of bureaucracy: Benchmarking requires not only developing evaluation criteria appropriate to the product category, but also collecting corresponding sustainability data for each individual product. This is prohibitively time-consuming if everyone has to do it individually.
Sustaynr is a rating agency that – true to the motto "one for all" – provides product-related sustainability data to help shoppers make better-informed decisions about what they buy. Our core product is the ESG Score – a standardized measure that makes the sustainability of products objectively comparable. In digital catalogs, this allows users to sort by sustainability just as they would by price. On our website Customers can also research category-specific best-of lists to identify market-leading sustainable products in the first place.
Why the ESG Score is unique
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Jan Bussiek: No, there is actually no standardized metric by which the sustainability of products can be compared, such as their price in euros. The closest thing to an ESG score are quality labels that, for example, identify products as environmentally friendly. However, these come up against glass ceilings: First, they are binary – there is only "yes, environmentally friendly" or "no, not certified." This means they cannot map the very metric criteria (CO₂, recycled content) that are crucial for sustainability. Second, they do not work across categories, which is why there are countless labels, making it difficult, if not impossible, for shoppers to work simply and efficiently.
The solution was at the Edeka around the corner
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Jan Bussiek: Before founding ESG-Score.org in September 2022, I was responsible for product range management at Unite Mercateo, a leading B2B marketplace. This included ensuring that shoppers found exactly the information they needed about each product to make an informed choice. Well, it was no different for us than for any other online shop: I can sort products by seemingly any color, but when I want to know how differently sustainable they are, there's a yawning void. That triggered me because it simply can't be that simple and certainly shouldn't stay that way. I came up with the solution at the Edeka supermarket around the corner from home: The muesli and all sorts of other food categories were labeled with the Nutriscore, and I could have sorted them on the shelf according to the Nutriscore. Our ESG Score is essentially the Nutriscore for labeling the sustainability of products – only our scale runs from 0 to 100, not from A to E.
Challenges and growth strategy
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Jan Bussiek: The first major challenge was to develop a scoring framework that would scientifically calculate a score that expresses the complex topic of a product's sustainability in a simple numerical value. We tested various approaches and, with support from, for example, the Wuppertal Institute and the Öko-Institut, we achieved our goal. The second challenge was to set up a technical platform that would process vast amounts of sustainability data and calculate ESG scores for millions of products. This would also make the scoring criteria and sustainability data completely transparent on individual landing pages.
Now we're in the next phase: We need to simultaneously scale our product coverage and acquire more paying customers to refinance our ongoing costs and become independent of investors. Our strategy, by the way, is that many customers – be they corporate purchasing departments, public procurement agencies, or online shops – pay a relatively small annual subscription fee so they can make better-informed decisions using ESG score data.
Growth, customers and Munich location
Munich Startup: How are things going?
Jan Bussiek: Over the past three years, we've grown from 50,000 to 300,000, and most recently to 1.2 million scored products – with three major corporations, over 400 public administrations, and seven online shops or procurement solutions using our services. We aim to cover five million products in one year and 50 million in five. To put this into perspective: one of our major corporate clients alone has 20 million products listed in its internal purchasing catalogs, for which the varying levels of sustainability are currently completely unclear.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Jan Bussiek: First and foremost, Munich is a place with a very high quality of life. And if you work as many hours as we do, that's certainly a good thing. Many of our first great customers also come from Munich, who support our cause tremendously. A leading global conglomerate, a huge insurance company, the city of Munich itself – all of them are among our customers.
Standardization as the key to credibility
Munich Startup: Outsource or do it yourself?
Jan Bussiek: Doing it yourself isn't an option in this case. It would be like having supermarket customers calculate their own Nutriscore for each food before they buy it – that's unaffordable. Or it would be like having supermarkets label each food's healthiness with their own self-developed score – that's also not cost-effective enough and, above all, lacking in credibility. The magic lies in the universally used standard in the best German engineering tradition of DIN & Co.
