How food brands affect climate

How food brands affect climate

By Kristina Sobol

Budrigannews.com – The health benefits of a food already appear on the label. But is it beneficial to the environment? That is frequently a lot less clear. A growing number of brands are now labeling their goods to show how they affect the environment.

Felix, a Swedish food manufacturer, is one of them. Felix opened a pop-up store in Stockholm in October for two days, pricing each item according to its carbon footprint. The cost rises proportionally to their emissions.

The idea was to show how easy it is for customers to choose environmentally friendly products when they are clearly labeled. Each customer was given a “carbon dioxide equivalent” budget to spend on groceries for a week.

Felix already lists on its website the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all of its foods, from the cultivation of the ingredients to the finished product, despite the fact that the pop-up was a brief effort to raise awareness.

If a product’s emissions are no higher than half of the average for food in Sweden, it receives the label “low climate footprint.” According to Thomas Sjöberg, marketing manager for Felix, clear labeling is essential.

Sjöberg asserts, “We know that the numbers alone do not make sense to consumers.” We have created a climate scale that clearly shows the current average and which climate footprints are low to give the numbers meaning.

Two-thirds of consumers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States support carbon labeling on products, according to a poll that was commissioned by the Carbon Trust. The Carbon Trust certifies the carbon footprints of various products. According to the Carbon Trust, no government has yet made labeling a legal requirement.

Climate labels, however, are beginning to gain popularity. Quorn, a meat substitute, introduced climate labels earlier this year for 60% of its product volume, and Unilever (UL) recently established a strategy to communicate the carbon footprint of each product it sells.

It is difficult to determine a food’s true carbon footprint, so brands are collaborating with specialized platforms that analyze data with sophisticated calculation tools to calculate emissions across the entire production chain.

CarbonCloud, a Swedish startup that was founded as a result of research conducted at Chalmers University of Technology, assists Oatly in calculating the environmental impact of its oat-based beverages—from the farming processes to the grocery store.

CarbonCloud CEO David Bryngelsson explains, “We have developed a web platform that allows the food producers to perform detailed climate assessments without them needing to understand any of the science or the mathematics behind it.”

CarbonCloud’s web tool takes care of the rest after businesses like Oatly enter information about their ingredients, energy use, waste production, and shipping methods.

Businesses can see how their impact on the environment would change if they switched suppliers or switched to renewable energy, for example, using the information to label their products.

CarbonCloud has evaluated hundreds of brands and products, including Estrella, Nude, and Naturli’, and reports that interest is rapidly growing.

According to Bryngelsson, “the industry is screaming for this — to get reliable, high-detail information with as little work as possible.”

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Sjöberg says that the most important thing is to provide consumers with the information that is currently available, even though the food industry does not yet have a standardized method for calculating carbon figures.

He adds, “Hopefully, in the future, we will see a common ground for how we calculate and label products.” However, the climate can’t wait for now.