Hustle Awards 2025 Special: CarbonTrac, Winner of Eco Warrior

0:00Welcome back to the Serial Entrepreneur. I'm your host Anna Wood. On today's episode, I'm joined by Yasmin Abdu, the founder of CarbonTrack. We discuss how sustainability can make money and isn't the cost sink that corporates think it is. Making sure to enjoy the founder journey and winning the Eco Warrior Award at the Hustle Awards 2025. Let's dig in. Hi, Yasmin. Welcome to the podcast today. How are you? I'm great, Anna. How are you? Thank you for having me. yeah i'm really good thank you thank you for coming on the podcast so we begin each episode with our signature icebreaker question which is what's your favorite breakfast cereal and why i would say granola because you can add like different ingredients every now and then and it would change like the whole taste it just makes my day because i like making it myself in the oven so that's yeah i think granola might be the most popular option on the podcast besides people saying they don't have breakfast.

1:01So would you be able to introduce yourself and tell me about your background? Yeah so I'm Yasmin, I am the founder of CarbonTrack. I founded CarbonTrack after graduating last year in May with a degree in chemical engineering from UCL and I've been working with sustainable tech startups since I was around 17. So I've dabbled into AI, blockchain, um web3 and a bunch of different other technologies since then great so what is carbon track and what are you trying to achieve so carbon track is an ai platform that simplifies gamifies and rewards sustainable grocery shopping by integrating directly into supermarket loyalty cards which means absolutely no extra steps are required for shoppers no scans no downloads no qr code simply shop scan your loyalty card and we're on a mission to cut uk emissions by five percent by 2030 through the power of small sustainable actions.

1:53Great so what are the kind of rewards that come with that? Oh so rewards is there's two different aspects to that really so there's the financial incentives we can give customers up to 10 pounds in cash back for a month if they meet a certain threshold with regards to how sustainable their shopping choices have been and the second one is emotional impact translations so obviously to incentivize people to make better choices. Financial aspects is one part, but another one shown by the Harvard Business Review is that 44 % more likely to make better decisions based on how they make you feel. So instead of telling people you saved 200 kilograms of CO2 this year, which absolutely nobody I've met understands, we translate that impact into something they can feel.

2:35So every time you make a swap with one tap, it will tell you something like if you make this swap six more times, you'd save a total's worth of ocean plastic or Arctic ice for penguins because people don't connect with raw numbers, but they do connect with things they can see, picture and, you know, care about. Yeah, great. So what was the inspiration behind founding CarbonTrack? When I discovered that 34 % of world emissions come from food, I wanted to make better choices. I quickly realised how difficult it was to navigate sustainability. Like there's just way too many factors. There's packaging, there's transport, farming methods.

3:09Where does one even start, even if you wanted to make better choices? So I interviewed 1 ,176 shoppers and found out that the biggest barrier wasn't the lack of willingness. It was actually the lack of clarity and convenience. And it was also proven by research studies, I think it was the World Economic Forum, that 80 % of Gen Z millennials want to make more sustainable choices, but only 12 % actually do. So there's a 68 % gap in between where people have the motivation but lack the action. And it turns out people just don't have the data to make those better choices, and it's just not seamless enough for them.

3:42Nobody wants to take the extra steps of the scanning, of the downloads, etc., etc. And it turns out one of the other more deeper reasons why people don't take action is that we're often told our choices don't matter because we're just one person. But we're not one person. We're 8 billion people. And the choices we make together have the power to disrupt and reshape entire supply chains. So how do you see the growth of the platform? So what we're trying to do in the meantime is trying to assemble as many partners globally as we possibly can. So we've got the United Nations ITU, the UNESCO, Nestle, Sage, Samsung, Huawei, a couple of other big organizations.

4:20So we've created this ecosystem of support and growth that we're able to expand exponentially once we launch. Obviously, a lot of them have provided us with advisors, with funding to help us refine the product before we get it to a place where we want to get into market. it so that's one of the key things we've been working on to drive carbon track in the right direction with regards to like launch we aim to sign our first contracts by the end of the year it's looking promising with one major uk retailer and we're also in discussions with the european union to try to get one of those um chains there on board yeah that's great so you founded carbon track straight out of coming straight off the university why like why was this why didn't you look into kind of going somewhere else why did you decide like the path of the founders for me so I've been doing hackathons every weekend since my second year of university I doubled into anything you could possibly imagine I've been to surgical hackathons to AI hackathons to agriculture hackathons bear in mind I can't code if my life depends on it yeah I mean it was good to to learn and explore all the different industries but one of the things I realized it was like innovation doesn't come from being a specialist in a particular area so i could have gone into chemical engineering but it it depends more on that your ability to be able to draw the different knowledge from different industries and plug them into a proper solution and for me carbon track was was born out of the only hackathon i lost i did 11 hackathons and i went back home that day i was being a bit demoralized so i pulled it apart i was like i should have done this instead this instead this instead and then i realized you know hold on a second there's nothing like this in market i I might have something here.

6:02So I put it through competitions, came second in Samsung software tomorrow. And then obviously Samsung's a big brand. Part of me was like, you know, I could leave it because I came second. It was only a thousand pounds. Like what does one do with a thousand pounds? But then I realized that, you know, why would I drop such support from a big brand? And even if I fail, I mean, it's an experience that really matters. And I guess with entrepreneurship specifically, what I have noticed is the destination is important, but it is genuinely the journey because 90 % of startups fail. You may as well enjoy failing in the process.

6:35Yeah, and essentially starting out with that failing from a hackathon, you kind of started how most founders end. Yeah, absolutely. So would you say you have any competitors in the market? And if so, what do you think makes CarbonTrack stand out from them? There's different parts to the solution, right? There's a carbon footprinting aspect. Obviously, we have a lot of competition there. Our difference there is that we can actually footprint products in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the cost between a 5 % to 7 % accuracy with the traditional SEAs. So that's where we stand out with the carbon footprinting things.

7:11We've developed a machine learning algorithm that is able to pull up all the after-processed food ingredients and look at all the other details with very seemingly simple questions. But they're quite easy to fill out for even the average supplier that doesn't have specific data. and then we've got competition in the the helping people make better choices but those require extra steps right nobody wants to download apps scans downloads yes there are some people that you know are willing to go the extra mile but let's face it if we can't make it easier for a lot of people to be able to make those actions we are never going to be able to drive systemic change and that's what makes us unique the easy integration it's seamless for the supermarket seamless on the customer and we make money for everybody so it's yeah we're the only solution i think on market that is able to generate profits for supermarkets uh we make profits as well we increase customer rewards and we can also fund supplier transition toward greener practices all of that while cutting emissions cutting food waste and optimizing supply chains wow that that is truly amazing so it's kind of no wonder that you won the eco warrior award at the hustle awards this year so congratulations on that thank you so how did winning the award make you feel and what do you think that means for carbon track so winning the eco warrior award at the hustle awards was quite the humbling experience personally it was quite the reminder that the long hours and tough decisions and the belief in our mission are actually resonating beyond our own team and people are actually starting to connect and you know understand what we're trying to do on a larger scale for carbon track it's the validation that we're building something that isn't just technically innovative it's genuinely impactful and has the power to not only cause a dent in national uk emissions but also lead the way in the transition the food sector making systems a bit cleaner it also signals to our partners the supermarkets and future customers that sustainability can be profitable and it can be more than a buzzword.

9:18And it can be embedded into everyday decisions in a way that drives measurable change. And awards like this increase and amplify our visibility, help open new doors and fuel the momentum we need to reach our goal of cutting UK emissions by 5 % by 2030. So it's basically a boost, not just for our credibility, but for determination to keep proving that small choices multiplied by millions of times can reshape entire supply chains. Perfect. So on the journey so far, what do you think have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced? I think there are a lot of programmes for entrepreneurial support and how to start a business, but I feel like none of them actually are quite hands-on.

10:00So I don't know how many programmes I've done so far, but they're definitely over 10. And with some really large organisations, how do you manage a team? How do you raise funding? How do you run a business? You know, you get an introduction to these different aspects of how does one run a business through these programs, but there just isn't enough support. So the way I started to, I guess, run my team and run the business, that has taken an absolutely transformative turn since last month. I mean, so it took me a year to actually properly understand how does one run a functional business? How do you create a sales pipeline?

10:37How do you, some of these do come through experience, I guess, but it's also the messaging. Messaging was a key part because we started the business with, we want to have people make sustainable grocery shopping, but nobody cared. But the second we translated that into, we were on a mission to cut UK emissions by 5 % by 2030, through the power of small actions, people started listening. Organizations started counting us, VCs started reaching out. So it's quite the difference. Knowledge is one of the things. Plus entrepreneurship, especially sustainability, is probably a difficult industry to play around with because a lot of the time it's seen as a cost sink, but really it can be a profit driver.

11:23And those solutions, unfortunately, are quite scarce these days. Yeah, I feel there was a very evident trend towards sustainability a couple of years ago. But as soon as kind of the AI hype bubble really started showing up, I feel like the talks of sustainability and even support towards sustainable startups has really started taking a backseat. I think that's more to do with the Trump administration, to be honest. We've had discussions with some US retailers. I think some programs there were banned from using specific certain words relating to sustainability, which I think is ridiculous. so yeah they don't really care too much about the carbon stuff and obviously the u.s has such large market influence to a point where it kind of ripples across and since ai is quite the big bubble but ai can also be used to improve sustainability which is what we're trying to do with our machine learning levels due political concerns due political reasons policies bad policies and um we just don't have enough policies in place to be able to do more in the space right on.

12:26Yeah, wow. Well, kind of on the flip side of that question, what do you think have been some of the biggest highlights since founding the company? Oh, I mean, in the same month we found, we properly started working on this, which is like May last year since graduation. We won a UN fellowship with the UNITU. And the same month we won the London Mayor's Award for Entrepreneurship. Three months later, I was meeting a president in Czech Republic. A couple of months after that, I was in China meeting another set of presidents. So it's really been the exponential belief the second we change the sort of messaging and trying to work things out.

13:04It's been a remarkable journey. I think the growth of this is something I'm very proud of. And regardless where it ends up, I'm pretty happy with where it's gone so far. And I'm pretty confident, fingers crossed, we are able to cut not only UK emissions by 5 % by 2030, but let's say European emissions by like 3 % by 2030. Yeah, you've been on quite the journey meeting so many high profile people and it really does go to show the kind of growth that you've already had within a year, let alone what you're going to see in the next two, three plus years. But I think one of the major barriers at the moment is that I'm not, I do two full time jobs, so I do a day job as well.

13:44I am planning to take Carbon Track full time very, very soon. So we are planning to open and raise our fundraise soon because I have a team of eight employees at CarbonTrack at the moment. And it would be a shame to drop all that for some safety. Yeah, definitely. Have you received funding yet? So far, we've been fully grant funded, but we are planning to start giving away equity. Obviously not too much, which is why we've delayed it so far, because what I've realised is when you raise at a lower valuation, they take a bigger chunk and then sometimes it impacts your mission and your impact but we're an impact driven business so even if it means I take a bit more yeah be more rough days then it's for the sake of the business and I'm confident we'll get it to that stage I'm more than happy to do that so yeah so it's definitely like an active choice not to fundraise earlier oh absolutely we've had inbound interest from VCs but I've put them on hold because I've said it wasn't wasn't the raising from angels, that said VCs haven't blocked the door for them yet because there are some impact VCs which I am exploring as well.

14:52That's very interesting. One of our other winners has also done a very similar thing. So I think it's a trend that's coming up with people really waiting for the right opportunity to start raising funding rather than a preconceived notion of you've got to raise funding straight away. Yeah, absolutely. So what do you think have been some of the lessons that you've learned on the journey so far? It takes a village to build a business. If you're trying to drive something that will change entire systems or the way people shop, not just shop, I think to do just about everything, then you will need as much support as possible.

15:30So I guess some people do focus on funding. But I think one of the more important factors is creating an ecosystem of support around you, where you're able to pull support and advice from organizations that not only provide you with visibility, but also funding, advisors, people you can reach out to usually for free. And you'd be surprised how many of these corporations actually want to help. So that's one thing that would have been useful if I knew about, well, a lot more people know about. And then another thing would be that it's okay to feel like things are not going wrong because every couple of weeks I do call my mom and I tell her I'm going to shut the business down.

16:09But, you know, it's not going to happen. I keep going because every two weeks something more exciting happens. It's just you just have to give it time. You just really have to give it time. I saw this thing the other day. It said, like, give it three years before you quit a project you started if you think at some point it was going somewhere. So that's exactly what we're trying to do. And obviously we've had quite significant traction and the right number of conversations. but yeah don't give up it is difficult there's a lot of blood sweat and tears involved but you will get there eventually and if not just enjoy the journey you do enjoy the journey I do think it's quite normal to have those moments as no I'm gonna give up I'm gonna give up but sometimes I think everyone has those in their day-to-day life when you're like no I'm not doing it anymore I'm not doing it and then the next day you're like why did I act like that why did I think that everything's fine so is there one lesson or even a piece of advice that you wish you would have known before starting carbon track so if you could go all the way back to before you found it and tell yasmin from then something see i have conflicting thoughts every time i i talk about this because you know i kept telling myself like i shouldn't have registered the business in 2023 because before carbon track was even like you know just like a little light bulb moment but i actually never started working on it until May 2024, since last year.

17:35So obviously there are some advantages and disadvantages of that. And I can't tell you if I took another path or registered it after, would I have committed? Because I'm also that type of person that has like so many different ideas that I find it very difficult to stick to something unless it's registered with the government so um yeah i i've gone through this conversation a lot and a lot of public speaking events and to young people just trust the process you know i i don't know if there's one piece of advice i'd give to my younger self apart from the fact that just keep doing everything you're doing it will work out eventually don't overstress too much and if it doesn't work out there's always another idea you can start exactly especially as you said you're always having ideas you know this one doesn't work move on to the next yeah so what do you think the future holds for carbon track and yourself do you have any big plans that you can talk about yeah um so we envisioned that carbon track would be more than just a sort of like a carbon like eco sort of side we obviously sustainability is more than just the environment it's also people aspects and that's what we're trying to explore as well so instead of just looking at sustainable in terms of eco swaps we're looking at embedding nutrition so since we collect the data based on all your shopping things we've taken the skeleton from our carbon models putting it feeding it new information and new data for nutrition models that hopefully we'll be able to detect like deficiencies in micronutrients So every two weeks, it would tell you something like, based on your shopping choices in the last two weeks, it seems like your diet might be deficient in selenium.

19:20Would you like to add Brazil nuts, tuna, macaro, etc., etc.? If you type 1 diabetic, it's easier for you to make choices. You're low cholesterol, high cholesterol. You love the gym. You want a bulk or you want to cut, etc., etc. So I think the options there are limitless. And in terms of impact, I would say that people don't really know that bad diets kill more people than smoking does. But you don't hear about that statistic as much as you probably should be. So that's what we're trying to do. Two billion people in the world have nutrient deficiencies that obviously lead on to other bigger problems you have.

19:57So tackle them earlier. So not only do we want to see a better planet with carbon drop, we want to see better and healthier people as well. It's creating data layer for food systems with a seamless experience. yeah that's that's really interesting i think there's been a huge drive recently and a real big trend about people really taking more care about nutrition and there's like a big trend towards health and lifestyle recently and like improving that so that's such a interesting kind of way to take that you're like we don't just want to improve kind of the earth but also the people there yeah and um one of the one of the other reasons we also explored this a bit more is because you know we don't want to cut off the whole u.s market and we do have lots of connections to u.s retailers which is another thing and in the u.s there are specific areas where people are willing to pay a lot more the whole food is a lot of a bigger thing in the u.s people are a bit more health conscious to some extent not all of them and so we kind of block out an entire market if we just do carbon but at the same time everybody wins in that sort of way too um it's two different business models, but largely the same sort of integration stuff.

21:08Yeah, that's really interesting. So to kind of round off the podcast episode, is there anything else that you wanted to add or plug? Yeah, I used to think that climate change was the responsibility for the big companies. But those companies, they don't operate on principle, they operate on profit. And profit is driven by demand, our demand. So if we change the demand, we shift the system. And that's what we're trying to do. Your choices do matter. And something as small as swapping dairy milk for oat milk just in coffee, if everybody in the UK who drinks coffee makes a swap, we can cut UK emissions by up to 1.1%, which I know sounds like a very small figure, but in the grand scheme of things, that's just your coffee.

21:49Imagine what we can do with smaller other little choices, like swapping red meat for white meat in terms of 70 gram portions. We can cut UK emissions by another 2.7%. So we've already have 3.7 % roughly of emissions cut through two little tiny actions. And that's what we're trying to do. You can go vegan if you want to, you can go vegetarian if you want to, but if we can drive small micro behaviors and embed them in the current system we have, then that in itself is strong enough to drive that sort of systemic change we need. Because we've changed the demand, you change the way suppliers, how they source their from farmers and how farmers operate in their practices so it ripples kind of nicely right back to the farm triggers a sort of change and then we end up with a greener climate well that's amazing and i'm really excited to see kind of what's next for carbon track and to see how you continue to grow so thank you so much for coming on the podcast today it's been amazing speaking with you thank you for having me on this anna yeah and once again congratulations on winning Eco Warrior Award at the Hustle Awards this year.

22:56Thank you so much. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and check out Startup Magazine's socials to stay up to date on the latest startups news.