Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem do you solve?
Jan Bussiek, CEO Sustaynr GmbH: Office chairs, computers, adhesive tapes, garbage bags, highlighters, etc. are purchased millions of times every year. Often, buyers 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 of standard products. Not because more sustainable products would cost more – they regularly don’t. Rather because creating transparency on this aspect causes very high bureaucratic effort: for a benchmark, not only must evaluation criteria appropriate to the product category be developed, but sustainability data must also be collected for each product. This is prohibitively time-consuming if everyone has to do it themselves.
Sustaynr is a rating agency that – true to the motto “one for all” – provides product-related sustainability data that helps buyers make better informed decisions about what they purchase. Our core product is the ESG score – a standardized measure that makes product sustainability objectively comparable. In digital catalogs, it allows sorting by sustainability just like by price. On our website, customers can also research category-specific best lists to identify market-leading sustainable products in the first place.
Why the ESG score is unique
Munich Startup: But hasn’t that existed for ages?
Jan Bussiek: No, there is actually no standardized metric yet by which product sustainability can be compared the way price is compared in euros. What comes closest to the ESG score are quality seals that mark products, for example, as environmentally compatible. However, they reach their limits: First, they are binary – there is only “yes, environmentally friendly” or “no, not certified”. This means they cannot capture the exact metric criteria (CO₂, recycled content share) that are crucial for sustainability. Second, they don’t work across categories, which is why there are countless labels and it becomes difficult or impossible for buyers to work simply and efficiently.
The solution was at the Edeka around the corner
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Jan Bussiek: Before I founded ESG-Score.org in September 2022, I was responsible for assortment management at Unite Mercateo, a leading B2B marketplace. This also included the task of ensuring that buyers find exactly the information they need for each product to make a well-informed selection. Well, it was no different for us than in all the other online shops: I can sort products by virtually every color shade, but when I want to know how differently sustainable they are, there is deafening silence. That triggered me because it simply can’t and shouldn’t remain that way. I came up with the solution at my local Edeka around the corner: there were the mueslis and all kinds of food products from other categories marked with the Nutri-Score, and I could have sorted them by Nutri-Score on the shelf. Our ESG score is essentially the Nutri-Score for labeling product sustainability – except our scale goes from 0 to 100 instead of A to E.
Challenges and growth strategy
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Jan Bussiek: The first major challenge was developing a scoring framework that scientifically calculates a score that expresses the multifaceted topic of product sustainability in a simple numerical value. We tested various approaches and, with support from organizations like the Wuppertal Institute and Öko-Institut, reached our goal. The second challenge was setting up a technical platform that processes huge amounts of sustainability data and calculates ESG scores for millions of products, making scoring criteria and sustainability data completely transparent on individual landing pages.
Now we’re in the next phase: we need to simultaneously scale 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 – whether they are purchasing departments of companies, procurement offices of public administrations, or online shops – pay a comparatively small annual subscription fee so they can make better informed decisions with the help of ESG score data.
Growth, customers, and the Munich location
Munich Startup: How is business going?
Jan Bussiek: Over the last three years, we’ve grown from 50,000 to 300,000 and most recently 1.2 million scored products – with now three major corporations, over 400 public administrations, and seven online shops or procurement solutions using our services. We want to cover five million products in one year and 50 million in five years. To put that in perspective: just one of our major corporate customers has 20 million products listed in its internal procurement catalogs, for which there is currently complete lack of transparency about how differently sustainable they are.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced the Munich startup ecosystem so far?
Jan Bussiek: Munich is first and foremost a place with a lot of quality of life. And when you work as many hours as we do, that really does a lot of good. But many of our first great customers also come from Munich, who support our cause wonderfully. A globally leading conglomerate, a huge insurance company, the city of Munich itself – all are among our customers.
Standardization as the key to credibility
Munich Startup: Outsource or do it yourself?
Jan Bussiek: Doing it yourself is not an option in this case. It would be like customers calculating their own Nutri-Score for individual food products at the supermarket before buying – that’s not feasible. Or like supermarkets each labeling the healthiness of food with their own custom-developed score – also not cost-efficient enough and, above all, not very credible. The magic lies in the standard used across the board, in the best German engineering tradition of DIN & Co.
