GLOBAL food brands and leading supermarkets are to trial a new front-of-pack environmental scoring traffic light system.
The initiative, launched by Foundation Earth, will measure the environmental impact of an individual food product and its packaging then communicate the information via the on-pack score.
The aim is to promote more sustainable buying choices from consumers and prompt more environmentally-friendly innovation from food producers, which Foundation Earth said will be determined to secure a better score.
The likes of Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op are already on board, alongside Nestlé, Costa, The Meatless Farm Co, Naked and Mighty Pea – each signing up to ‘explore the potential for environmental labelling on food products and to support Foundation Earth’s ambition to help build a more sustainable food industry’.
The scoring system has been developed by the University of Oxford with the support of WWF. The pilot will run in parallel to an ‘intensive’ nine-month development programme, backed by Nestlé, which will combine the Oxford method with a system devised by an EU-funded consortium of Belgium’s Leuven University and Spanish research agency, AZTI.
The Oxford and EIT Food systems are unique globally, in that they both allow two products of the same type to be compared on their individual merits via a complete product life cycle analysis, as opposed to simply using secondary data to estimate the environmental impact of an entire product group.
Experts say this method of individual assessment using primary data is ‘crucial’ to encourage sustainable innovation in the international food supply chain. Foundation Earth said that the research and development programme will produce an optimum and fully automated system for use across the UK and EU by Autumn 2022.
UK secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, George Eustice MP, welcomed the launch of Foundation Earth. He commented, “Foundation Earth’s ambitions to develop eco-labelling on food has the potential to help address the urgent challenges of sustainability and climate change.
“The government continues to support the industry to become more sustainable, for instance through our funding for the Waste and Resources Action Programme and support for the Courtauld 2025 initiative, which aims to cut carbon, water and food waste in the food and drink sector.”
