Procurement - True Price

Turning purchasing power into measurable societal value

Public and commercial procurement are among the most powerful instruments for driving sustainable transformation. Each year, governments and large organisations purchase vast amounts of goods and services -representing significant economic leverage. In countries like the Netherlands, public procurement alone accounts for a substantial share of total economic activity.

Yet aligning procurement decisions with sustainability ambitions remains challenging. Environmental and social impacts are often hidden in supply chains, difficult to compare to each other and benchmarks, and hard to integrate into procurement criteria in a consistent way.

True pricing helps procurement professionals to integrate sustainability into their decision-making.

By making hidden environmental and social costs visible and quantifiable, true pricing enables better-informed judgement – before, during, and after procurement processes.

How true pricing supports procurement professionals

True Price Pilots: build experience with true pricing

Sustainability ambitions are only effective if they translate into practice. True pricing allows organisations to start small and learn fast. You can begin by running true pricing pilots. For example:

A pilot in your internal canteen or catering services

A focused pilot for a specific product category (e.g. food, textiles, ICT)

A pilot within a single tender or framework agreement

These pilots create awareness, expertise, and internal buy-in, while generating concrete insights that can be scaled up across the organisation.

Better insights at the product and category level

True pricing provides quantified insights into the environmental and social impacts embedded in your products and services. At the product and category level, this helps procurement teams to:

Identify risk hotspots in supply chains

Compare alternatives on both financial price and societal impact

Prioritise categories where procurement decisions have the greatest leverage to create societal value

This makes sustainability a data-driven input into decision-making.

Strengthening procurement criteria and tender evaluations

True pricing can be integrated into procurement criteria in a structured and transparent way. This allows procurement teams to:

Include societal costs as part of the weighting of tenders

Reward suppliers who actively reduce negative impacts

Move beyond compliance-based criteria towards impact-based evaluation

True pricing complements existing legal and policy frameworks by offering a consistent, comparable metric that procurement professionals can work with.

For public buyers: paying the true price gap

For public buyers, procurement does not stop at supplier selection. By choosing to pay (part of) the true price gap, public entities can directly contribute to:

Preventing environmental and social damage

Financing concrete improvements in supply chains

Reducing future societal costs that would otherwise require public repair through taxation

This approach is increasingly recognised as a more efficient and preventative use of public funds than ex-post remediation.

Monitoring impact and creating societal value

Procurement professionals are increasingly asked: what value do our decisions create for society? True pricing helps you to:

Track how procurement decisions reduce environmental and social costs

Monitor progress over time

Quantify the societal value created through better purchasing decisions

This supports internal learning, external accountability, and evidence-based reportingOur products and services for procurement teams

True Price Database

Our database provides access to scientifically grounded data on environmental and social costs at product and sector level. It enables procurement teams to quickly assess impacts and compare alternatives.

Explore the Database

Value chain analysis

We analyse value chains in depth to identify where negative impacts occur and where interventions are most effective. This supports both procurement strategy and supplier engagement.

In-depth value chain analysis
Identify the most important positive and negative impacts
Supports your procurement strategy
Engages your suppliers

Go to value chain analyses

Ready to explore true pricing in your procurement process?

Whether you want to start with a pilot, integrate true pricing into tender criteria, or measure the societal value of your procurement decisions, we’re happy to explore the options with you.

Get in touch