Initiated by Chanel, the TRaceability Alliance for Sustainable CosmEtics (TRASCE) brings together 15 key players of the beauty industry to enhance traceability in ingredient and packaging supply chains.
With the support of FEBEA, the French federation of beauty companies, the members of the new consortium [1] have committed to map their supply chains across the entire value chain on a common digital platform, Transparency-One.
The latter was selected for its ability to guarantee each supplier the ownership, security and confidentiality of the data they share. Transparency-One has already been used in other sectors of activity, such as the food and automotive industries, for the deployment of large-scale traceability approaches.
TRASCE will help respond to three main challenges for the industry by strengthening the understanding of the supply chains, assessing the related social and environmental risks and determining the necessary actions for common progress plans.
“The essential and demanding work of mapping our supply chains carried out in recent years has allowed us to understand the main limits of the exercise. It is sometimes quite difficult for a single client to convince distant tier suppliers to commit to this process, when we do not exchange directly with them or when they do not meet the same regulatory requirements. Based on this observation, we proposed that the actors of the sector join forces to trace our supply chains as far and as quickly as possible,” explains Julien Garry, International Director of Purchasing and Packaging Innovation Development at Chanel Parfums Beauté.
According to Meghan Ryan, Executive Director of Responsible Sourcing at The Estée Lauder Companies: “Through shared digital tools and close collaboration, we have an opportunity to move the needle in transparency and elevate how we source responsibility, with attention to potential impacts on people and the environment.“
“We are convinced of the need to align the industry on a single traceability tool, and to implement a common methodology,” shares Karl Hensen, Quality Director Surface Solutions at Merck.
According to Gilles Swyngedauw, Vice President CSR and product sustainability at Albéa Cosmetics Fragrance: “Cosmetics packaging will have to revolutionize in the years to come. We’ve been working on these issues for years. As a global player in the sector, it soon became clear to us that we needed to create a common methodology to harmonize needs across the industry and achieve our goals by involving as many stakeholders as possible.”
This collaborative approach is not a first within the cosmetics industry. In 2022, several international players have joined forces within the EcoBeautyScore consortium, in order to create an industry-wide environmental assessment and scoring system for cosmetic products.
