FAQ
The questions an auditor asks first. Answered cleanly.
Kavel is a contribution claim, not an offset. ESRS E5-aligned, FRAME-grounded, NL-specific. Below: positioning, methodology rigor, marketplace mechanics, partnerships, business model, and risk — every answer first-sentence-is-the-answer.
Positioning
The first question every auditor and every skeptic asks. Answered cleanly so the rest of the page can move faster.
Is Kavel a carbon credit?
No. Not Verra-certified, not Gold Standard, not a voluntary offset retirement. Kavel does not issue, retire, or trade credits.
It is an attributed climate-contribution disclosure — aligned with the EU Code of Conduct on Climate Contribution Claims (May 2025), defensible to a Big-4 auditor under ESRS E5. Cleaner positioning, faster to market, no double-counting risk.
Isn't this double-counting? The foodbank reports the same avoided emissions in their own report.
No. Foodbanks publish operational data — kilograms, households, demographics. None of the operators in our network currently quantify avoided emissions in their own reports.
Sponsors receive the only formal climate-contribution disclosure derived from those operations. The foodbank does not issue a competing claim. We log the attribution per package; the same tonne is never disclosed twice.
How is this different from offsetting?
Offsetting compensates a corporate's own residual emissions with an equal-and-opposite reduction elsewhere. Contribution funds an external project without counting it against the corporate's own footprint.
Kavel sits in the contribution lane. The corporate still has to reduce its own scope 1/2/3 emissions. ESRS E5 disclosures describe resource flows — not net-zero math.
Methodology
Why FRAME, why now, and how defensible the math is.
Why FRAME-aligned and not FRAME-certified?
Certification is a multi-month audit. Alignment ships now and is fully defensible — every factor cited, every assumption surfaced, deterministic math, no model in the loop on the numerical path.
Certification is our 2027 milestone, after the first audit cycle with corporate sponsors confirms the methodology survives Big-4 review. See Methodology for the full ledger.
What if FRAME revises its emission factors next year?
We re-version. Disclosures carry a methodology version stamp; old disclosures retain the factors that were valid at the time of issue. New subscriptions adopt the revised factors automatically.
The provenance ledger means re-computation is mechanical — every field traces to a source and a formula.
Why is the Dutch counterfactual 0.93 and not 1.0?
The Netherlands incinerates most municipal waste with energy recovery — not landfill. Methane avoidance is therefore lower than in landfill-dominant countries. We discount by 7% per RIVM Afvalmonitor 2024 + CBS waste statistics.
This makes Kavel more conservative than naïve FRAME applications and more defensible to auditors familiar with NL waste infrastructure.
Fund mechanics
How packages are priced, capped, and routed.
How is €41.67 per tCO₂e set?
Calibrated against the EU ETS 2024 average (~€73/t) and voluntary contribution prices (~€20–60/t). €41.67 sits where corporate willingness-to-pay meets foodbank operational cost recovery.
The price is locked per package at purchase time. We don't run a spot market — predictability matters more than discovery for compliance buyers.
What stops you over-selling a foodbank's annual capacity?
Hard cap per bank. The marketplace shows real-time remaining capacity. When a bank's annual baseline is sold through, packages route to other food banks or to a regional cluster.
The locked unit price prevents a race to the bottom; the cap prevents over-attribution. Two corporates cannot disclose the same tonne.
What happens if a foodbank's actuals fall short of the FRAME estimate?
Disclosures are generated against actuals, not estimates. The annual report is the source of truth — if Q4 numbers shrink, the full-year disclosure shrinks with them and a true-up is issued.
Sponsors see this exposure upfront. The contract framing is contribution to actual operations, not a guaranteed tonne.
Partnerships & ethics
Foodbank dignity, regulatory posture, data handling.
Is Voedselbanken Nederland on board?
In conversation. The partnership is critical and we treat it as a launch gate. The platform respects every kernwaarde — no operations change, all-volunteer model preserved, transparent reporting, no exploitative branding.
Doesn't this commodify foodbanks or compromise their dignity?
Foodbanks already publish their operations. We don't change what they do; we attribute a climate disclosure to work they already perform. They keep 100% of the package amount.
The corporate does not place a logo on a soup kitchen. The disclosure is a back-office document — ESRS E5 in a CSRD statement, not a marketing asset.
How is recipient (household) data handled?
We never receive personally identifiable data. Foodbanks share aggregated counts and demographic bands at municipality level. Disclosures cite cohorts, not individuals.
GDPR posture: Kavel is the data controller for corporate sponsor data only. Foodbank operational data flows through a data-processing agreement with Voedselbanken Nederland.
Business
Take rate, market size, and competitive moat.
How do you make money?
5% platform fee on the corporate side, on top of the package price. Foodbanks receive 100% of the sponsor amount.
NL TAM: ~7,000 corporates with CSRD obligations from 2026. If 1% buy a single package, that is €1.75M ARR at 5% take. Up-market packages and multi-year contracts compound from there.
Why won't Heineken just do this directly with one foodbank?
Same reason they don't run their own payments rail. Methodology, audit trail, multi-bank aggregation, and capacity routing are platform work.
A direct corporate↔foodbank contract concentrates exposure on one bank's annual baseline and exposes the corporate to methodological risk. We aggregate the supply side and give the auditor one clean disclosure asset.
Why Netherlands first, not all of Europe?
CSRD applies EU-wide, but ESRS E5 disclosure quality and FRAME applicability vary by country waste infrastructure. NL is a tractable wedge: ~181 foodbanks, one umbrella organisation (Voedselbanken Nederland), homogeneous waste system, English- and Dutch-fluent corporates.
Belgium and Germany follow once the NL playbook is audited.
Risk & founders
What could break this and who is committed.
What if the EU revises the Code of Conduct on Climate Contribution Claims?
Disclosures are versioned against the Code edition active at issue. A revision triggers a re-disclosure cycle for active subscriptions, not retroactive invalidation of prior years.
We track the EU Joint Research Centre guidance quarterly and maintain a methodology changelog public to corporates.
Founder commitment — full-time?
Yes. Confirmed before walking on stage.
Is anyone else doing this?
Voluntary carbon platforms (Klima, Patch) do not touch food rescue. Food-rescue operators (Too Good To Go, OLIO) do not generate auditor-defensible ESRS disclosures. The intersection — FRAME-aligned contribution disclosures sold as a CSRD-grade artifact — is open.
The moat is methodology rigor + foodbank network density, not software.
Still have a question?