Supermarket food could soon carry eco-labels

Supermarkets could soon carry eco-labels that will allow shoppers to check the environmental impact of their food before buying it.

Up until now this hasn’t been possible because reliable information has not been available to provide an accurate picture.

This is because manufacturers in the UK are only legally obliged to list their main ingredients, rather than all of them, and also just have to provide a percentage rather than the actual amount.

But now, thanks to new research by Oxford-led scientists, consumers who want to know how their weekly food shop affects the planet could soon be able to do so. 

The researchers made use of public databases to estimate the composition of 57,000 food and drink products and their environmental impact.  

It’s bad news for meat eaters as beef and lamb top the list of worst foods for the environment, while energy drinks are among the best.  

Nuts and dried fruit, coffee, cheese, fish and seafood, tea, pies, quiches and party food, jams, chocolate and ready meals also have among the worst environmental impacts.

Squash and cordial, roast potatoes, onion rings, rice, juices and olives have among the least impact, according to the international research team. 

Oxford-led scientists have provided a glimpse of how good or bad certain food products are for the environment. They created ‘impact scores’ for 57,000 products in the UK and Ireland

It’s bad news for meat eaters as beef and lamb top the list of worst foods for the environment, while energy drinks are among the best (stock image)

Nuts and dried fruit, coffee, cheese, fish and seafood, tea, pies, quiches and party food, jams, chocolate and ready meals also have among the worst environmental impacts (stock image)

Professor Peter Scarborough, from Oxford University, told BBC News he hopes the new information will lead to an eco-labelling system for customers.

He said the algorithm was already being used by some manufacturers and caterers to make their meals more sustainable.

‘It fills a huge gap. Manufacturers, caterers and retailers have targets for reaching net zero [emissions] and they don’t have the tools they need to get there,’ Professor Scarborough said.

‘Now they have this data, and some of them are talking to us about things they can do to help people move towards more sustainable food purchasing. 

‘The data could help manufacturers adjust their formulations.’ 

A study by the Food Standards Agency has previously shown that more than half of UK consumers want to make more sustainable decisions on the environmental impacts of foods.

At the same time, food corporations are setting ambitious net zero greenhouse gas targets.  

But there is a lack of detailed environmental impact information on food and drink products which would allow consumers and corporations to make more sustainable choices, the Oxford experts said.

Last month, British consumer goods giant Unilever unveiled plans to add ‘carbon footprint labels’ to its products by the end of this year. 

Carbon footprint labels show the carbon footprint of particular products — the total greenhouse gas emissions for which they are responsible, from ‘farm to fork’. 

Unilever’s 75,000 products include Pot Noodle, Marmite, Cornetto, Magnum and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, as well as inedible items like toothpaste and body wash.

A recent study led by researchers from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg also highlighted how restaurants can step up in the fight against climate change.

The experts found that diners choose more eco-friendly meals when the carbon footprint of each dish was printed on the menu.

‘The design of restaurant menus has a considerable effect on the carbon footprint of dining,’ the researchers wrote in their study.

The latest Oxford-led research compared meat and meat alternative products, such as plant-based sausages or burgers, and found that many meat alternatives had a fifth to less than a tenth of the environmental impact of meat-based equivalents. 

Researchers looked at greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water stress, and eutrophication potential — when bodies of water become enriched with nutrients, often causing harmful algal blooms and ultimately killing other life. The legend above shows how they compared a product’s environmental impact alongside its nutritional score

The researchers looked at the differences in environmental impact between multi-ingredient products and found that those made of fruits, vegetables, sugar, and flour, such as soups, salads, bread and many breakfast cereals, have low impact scores, and those made of meat, fish and cheese, are at the high end of the scale

The experts said their research provides a first step towards allowing consumers, retailers, and policymakers to make informed decisions on the environmental impacts of food and drink products.

‘By estimating the environmental impact of food and drink products in a standardised way, we have taken a significant first step towards providing information that could enable informed decision-making,’ said lead author Dr Michael Clark.

‘We still need to find how best to communicate this information effectively, in order to shift behaviour towards more sustainable outcomes, but assessing the impact of products is an important step forward.’

The new study, led by researchers in the Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) programme and Oxford Population Health at the University of Oxford, used publicly available information to calculate and estimate of the environmental impact of 57,000 food products, which make up the majority of foods and drinks for sale in UK supermarkets.

They looked at greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water stress, and eutrophication potential — when bodies of water become enriched with nutrients, often causing harmful algal blooms and ultimately killing other life. 

For the purposes of analysis, visualisation and communication, the team combined these four scores into a single estimated composite environmental impact score per 100g of product.

Professor Scarborough said: ‘This work is very exciting. 

‘For the first time, we have a transparent and comparable method for assessing the environmental footprint of multi-ingredient processed foods. 

‘These types of foods make up most of the supermarket shopping we do, but until now there was no way of directly comparing their impact on the environment.’

He added: ‘This work could support tools that help consumers make more environmentally sustainable food purchasing decisions. 

‘More importantly, it could prompt retailers and food manufacturers to reduce the environmental impact of the food supply thereby making it easier for all of us to have healthier, more sustainable diets.’

Squash and cordial, roast potatoes (pictured), onion rings, rice, juices and olives have among the least impact, according to the international research team

The researchers looked at the differences in environmental impact between multi-ingredient products and found that those made of fruits, vegetables, sugar, and flour, such as soups, salads, bread and many breakfast cereals, have low impact scores, and those made of meat, fish and cheese, are at the high end of the scale. 

Jerky, biltong, and other dried beef products, which typically have more than 100g of fresh meat per 100g of final product, often have the highest environmental impact.

When looking at specific types of food products, such as meat and their alternatives, lasagne, cookies and biscuits, and pesto sauces, the researchers found large variation within these types of foods. 

For these food types, lower-impact products often had one half to one tenth the environmental impact of higher-impact products. 

The researchers hope that this type of information, if communicated to consumers and retailers, may help shift behaviours towards more sustainable foods without requiring large changes in dietary behaviour, such as swapping beef for beans.

When comparing the environmental impact score to their nutritional value, as defined by the Nutri-score method, products that were more sustainable tended to be more nutritious, including meat and meat alternatives. 

There are exceptions to this trend, however, such as sugary beverages, which have a low environmental impact but also score poorly for nutritional quality.

Jennie Macdiarmid, Professor of Sustainable Nutrition and Health at the Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen, said: ‘An important aspect of the study was linking the environmental impacts of composite foods with the nutritional quality, showing some of the synergies and trade-offs between different parameters. 

‘Using this new method manufacturers can reduce the environmental impact, while ensuring a high nutritional quality of products.’

The amount of every ingredient in a multi-ingredient food or drink product is usually known only to the manufacturer.

However, in Britain manufacturers are legally obliged to provide percentage values for certain ingredients, and ingredients are listed on packaging in order of size. 

Dr Clark and colleagues used the known percentages and order of ingredients to estimate unknown values, cross-referencing products and ingredients by using a large dataset of products. 

Rice is not only nutritious, but also scores low on the environmental impact criteria 

Individual ingredients were mapped to environmental databases, and the percentages of all ingredients within each product were used to estimate the impact of each whole product.

The analysis involved using the foodDB – a Big Data research platform at the University of Oxford which collects and processes data daily on all food and drink products available in 12 online supermarkets in the UK and Ireland.

Researchers also reviewed 570 studies looking at the environmental impact of food production, which includes data from 38,000 farms in 119 countries.

Dr Richie Harrington, head of foodDB, said: ‘Our method fills an information gap on the environmental impacts of multi-ingredient foods. 

‘The algorithms we developed can estimate the percentage contribution of each individual ingredient within a product and match those ingredients to existing environmental impact databases. 

‘Applying this methodology to generate impact scores for large numbers of products, we illustrated how this can be used to derive quantifiable insight on the sustainability of those products, and their relationship to their nutritional quality.’

The research has been published in the journal PNAS.