Sustainability in Food and Drink: The Importance of Product Carbon Footprints
As the global food and drink sector grapples with an array of challenges: feeding a growing population, volatile supply chains and extreme weather events, the overarching pressure to reduce environmental and specifically carbon impact is intensifying, becoming more of a requirement than ‘nice to have’.
Product carbon footprints (PCF) and Life cycle assessments (LCA) can be a vital tool to reducing environmental impact, understanding where emissions occur within supply chains and gathering the data stakeholders are asking for. PCFs and LCAs can help businesses in the food industry to make informed decisions that balance profitability, responsibility, and resilience.
Transparency Across the Supply Chain
Food products often have complex supply chains spanning raw material production, processing, packaging, transportation, and retail. A PCF helps to quantifies these emissions across the entire life cycle, offering a clear picture of where carbon “hotspots” exist. This transparency allows businesses to identify priority areas for reduction, whether through sourcing lower-impact ingredients, optimising logistics, or innovating packaging solutions.
Driving Decarbonisation and Policy Alignment
PCFs and LCAs can also support businesses to proactively prepare for emerging regulations and industry frameworks such as the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), the UK’s sustainability disclosure standards, and Science Based Targets initiatives (SBTi). By embedding life cycle data into decision-making, food businesses can set realistic, science-aligned reduction targets and demonstrate progress towards net-zero commitments, whilst supporting customers to also meet their broader Scope 3 targets.
Empowering Informed Choices
Communicating carbon and environmental impacts at the product level empowers consumers to make more sustainable purchasing decisions. Transparent labelling, backed by credible assessments, fosters accountability throughout the food system and encourages continuous improvement.
Technology increasing accessibility
Advancements in data availability and methodologies can facilitate data gathering, enabling access to carbon footprint results. Streamlined PCFs allow businesses with limited primary data to estimate the carbon impact of products by leveraging secondary data and industry averages. This can be a great first step on the journey to measuring a products environmental impact.
LCAs and PCFs equip the food and drink sector to navigate a low-carbon future, drive innovation, and lead the transition toward a more sustainable and resilient food system. Beyondly can help - offering a range of PCF and LCA services that support your businesses to take action now.
Beyondly's data driven LCA and PCF services support businesses to quantify their impact and gain confidence towards environmental declarations and product development.
Beyondly partner with the Food & Drink Federation to ensure support for the sector, to ensure businesses feel confident in navigating the quickly changing landscape that drive environmental expectations.
You can get in touch with the team and request a proposal for a PCF or LCA here.
