Why carbon accounting for food products needs an overhaul

Foodstuff

The World Wildlife Fund asserts that product-level emissions data for food products is meaningless without stronger standards and more detailed input factors.

By Theresa Lieb

March 9, 2023

Food companies have started putting emissions labels on specific products. But do those labels have any truth behind them? Image via Shutterstock/Jeppe Gustafsson.

Food companies’ product-level greenhouse gas accounting efforts are most likely irrelevant, states a recent World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysis. It found that emissions attributed to a specific product can vary tenfold to a hundredfold, meaning that "even the most conscientious companies will have difficulty in tracking their emissions reduction progress, and ill-intentioned companies will be able to find systems and data sets that allow them to report the lowest possible emissions."

Why? Because the data, methodologies and interpretations used across the industry are a mess, and the impacts of different production processes for the same ingredient vary astronomically. WWF concluded that these immense discrepancies render the results of product-level greenhouse gas accounting useless "both within a company’s own scope and when comparing across industries."

That sounds like a ticking bomb to me. After all, many companies have started adding greenhouse gas labels to their product packaging and restaurant menus. And internally, companies have been incorporating emissions information from their suppliers into sourcing decisions. Consumers, investors, activists and governments have been demanding, noting and pushing back on those claims — the first lawsuits are already in process.

There are several reasons why carbon accounting for food products has been difficult:

Despite these inconsistencies, companies and investors are using information from product-level accounting to underpin investments, sustainability strategies, global and regional benchmarks as well as product rankings. A faulty and risky choice, in my opinion.

Still, it doesn’t mean we should abandon efforts to equip food products with emission footprints. Done correctly, it can render valuable insights. So how must the system change for this tool to be used correctly?

WWF calls for three improvements that would facilitate more meaningful comparisons and targets:

These action items sum up to an extensive to-do list that might initially seem overwhelming. But projects going in this direction are already underway — for example, the Sustainable Markets Initiative, World Business Council for Sustainable Development and One Planet Business for Biodiversity run various pre-competitive workstreams aiming to streamline supplier data collection efforts. Still, building a somewhat globally aligned system will take time, and it will never be bulletproof.

In the meantime, don’t take these challenges as an excuse for inaction. "You can start making good decisions with the data that’s available now," said Ethan Soloviev, chief innovation officer at HowGood, a company assessing product footprints.

Sophisticated data platforms such as the ones used by HowGood and PlanetFWD have evolved over the past decades by leveraging machine learning to pull together thousands of data points on hundreds of ingredients from existing life cycle assessments. HowGood’s data on each ingredient includes emissions counts, among other factors such as biodiversity, water use and human rights, accounting for regional and practice-based differences with more granularity. "Today’s technology gives us the ability to triangulate and spot figures that are way off in an automated and scalable way," Soloviev said.

Technologies such as these enable even companies that are just starting on product footprinting to rapidly get a big-picture look across their portfolio, identify hotspots and hone in on specific ingredients or suppliers as their most significant areas for impact. And as more companies use such shared platforms, many of which contribute additional data from their suppliers, the insights continuously become more accurate.

Given the urgency of this work, tapping into these collaborative approaches, rather than spending years building up proprietary insight platforms, seems the smartest and most impactful way forward.

This article originally appeared as part of our Food Weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get sustainability food news in your inbox every Thursday.

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