Eco-labels are bringing transparency to the climate and nature impact of our meal choices but more data is needed to understand the effect they have on behaviours. By David Burrows.
“I think a lot of people are hoping that at some point the European Commission will evolve towards one methodology, one label,” but “all of this takes time and consumers cannot wait anymore”, said Veerle Poppe, sustainability strategist at Belgium-based retailer Colruyt. “They’re asking for this today.”
Poppe was speaking in 2022. Fast-forward three years and interest in ecolabels has intensified. Hardly a month goes by without new research or a survey showing the potential and popularity of such information – so long as it is simple and trustworthy.
“It’s clear from our research that consumers want to be better informed about the environmental footprint of their food and that there is widespread support for a universal, independent and factually substantiated label for sustainable food products,” says Klaus Grunert, Professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University, and director of the EIT Food Consumer Observatory.
EIT research across 10,000 people from 18 European countries shows 67% would use a universal ecolabel, and they want it to cover a broad range of issues – from animal welfare and packaging recyclability to climate and biodiversity impacts. Such a label should render other labels “redundant”, EIT suggests, though we remain far from realising such a panacea.
That doesn’t mean work should stop, nor should we give up. Indeed, as this series of articles has highlighted, there is much to be gained from improved measurement and monitoring of the impacts of food ingredients, meals, packaging, production systems and services.
Businesses and consumers have started thinking more holistically about the multiple impacts the food system has, for example. And better visibility of the data can also unlock opportunities to drive behaviour change. These labels can make a difference, notes Georgina Camfield, head of ESG at catering firm Aramark UK & global offshore, “although I would say the impact is gradual”. That is only natural when looking at behaviour change: it’s not a “flick of a switch scenario”, she adds.
Aramark’s initiatives are part of a larger effort to educate customers (“behaviour change often follows awareness”, Camfield says) with the focus on helping customers understand their motivations to change. “Everyone is at a different stage of their desire to make a sustainable decision,” Camfield explains, and there is an ever-increasing array of tools, science and technologies on hand to help normalise the sustainable option and make it a natural and desirable part of the dining experience. This includes carbon labels, but extends far beyond that to menu designs and the evolution of what caterers will offer.
Land-use labels
Consider the work done by Accor, with help from Foodsteps, across 10 hotels during the COP16 biodiversity talks in Columbia in October. Measurements were made of the land-use footprint of each dish, with labels presented on menus, posters and table-top displays, as well as a ‘food story’ app. Perhaps as, if not more, important was how chefs used the real-time information on ingredient impacts in their kitchens to minimise the footprint of the meals they were creating. Each hotel could then measure progress over time.
“With full transparency into the impact of their menu items and individual ingredients, the Accor culinary teams were able to create more sustainable, low-emission dishes,” notes Anya Doherty founder and director at Foodsteps. For example, they replaced traditional beef with beetroot in their carpaccio. Compared to the beef version, the new plant-based recipe reduced greenhouse gases by 93% and land use impact by 99%, Doherty explains. “They also replaced chicken with lentils in a soup recipe, cutting greenhouse gases by 38% and land use by 29%,” she added.
The value of environmental data to chef teams is increasingly being realised by foodservice businesses – from high street restaurants to contract caterers. For instance, when Compass started working with researchers in the Livestock, Environment and People labelling (LEAP) group at the University of Oxford on its Eurest eco-label pilot, they wanted to get an overall picture of the environmental impact of recipes and then to understand how customers would respond in terms of their purchasing, explained Rees Bramwell, sustainability director of Compass One and previously sustainability lead for Eurest, in an earlier article. The labels themselves actually only had a marginal effect on consumer behaviour, though: more significant was how the data shed light on which recipes had the greatest environmental impact and should therefore be targeted for action.
Universities have been fertile ground for trials around carbon and wider eco-labelling. The canteens in many have become living laboratories, explains Sophie Attwood, a behavioural science consultant and former senior behavioural scientists at the World Resources Institute, which has conducted extensive research over a number of years into shifting consumers to more sustainable diets in foodservice settings.
One of the largest field experiments took place at the University of Cambridge. This involved five university cafeterias with over 80,000 individual meal choices. The results suggested that carbon footprint labels present “a viable and low-cost policy tool to address information failure and harness ‘climatarian’ preferences to encourage more sustainable food choices”. Foodsteps founder Anya Doherty, who was involved in the study, said at the time of the research being published that she saw “no reason why” assessing and communicating environmental information in the food industry won’t become “as widespread as nutritional information”.
That isn’t yet the case (not least because nutritional information is required by law). However, activity in this space has since snowballed – especially in the foodservice, catering and hospitality space and that aimed at students. The University of Nottingham, for example, became the first university in the midlands to introduce carbon labels. “Young people nowadays are becoming more aware of the consequences of their choices,” explained Sarah Cawthorne, environment officer from the university sustainability team. “As a student living in catered accommodation, there’s a limit to what you can do yourself; although food is such an individual choice, this shows that you can make a difference with it. I’m hoping it will empower them to feel like they can make a small change,” she added.
Every little helps
This notion of small changes across large demographics is worth unpicking, as researchers from Yale University in the US recently did. The academics looked at whether, in order to tackle climate change, it is more effective to persuade more people to change (breadth) or persuade people to change more (depth). So, for example, if message 1 persuades 10% of people that are exposed to it and message 2 persuades 15%, then message 2 has greater breadth. When these messages do move people in the direction of the treatment (for example lower carbon meal choices) and message 1 moves those people an average of 5 percentage points and message 2 moves them an average of 2 percentage points on the same scale, then message 1 has greater depth.
“[…] our findings provide compelling evidence that messaging effects are driven by both breadth and depth, but more strongly by breadth,” the authors write in their preprint paper (which is yet to be peer reviewed). This means it is important to “understand whether communication efforts are designed for breadth, depth, or some combination of both, and which tradeoffs need to be made given the strategic context. Our findings show that larger total persuasive impact is more often achieved by persuading more people, even if the amount of change per person is relatively small,” they added.
Among the latest universities to join the ‘carbon club’ are Bournemouth and Sussex – both with the help of Foodsteps. Menus at campus cafeterias have ratings from ‘A’ to ‘E’ with traffic lighting for easy identification of the ‘greener’ options (with As having the lowest footprints, measured from farm to fork). This isn’t the full picture of an option’s impact (article 1 in this series considered the importance of ‘seeing beyond carbon tunnel vision’) but it offers a standardised way to compare products based on their carbon emissions per kilogram of food produced. The A-E ratings assigned to each food item are also aligned with the global carbon budget set by the EAT-Lancet Commission, aiming to keep our planet within a safe operating space outlined in the Paris Agreement.
Writing about the labelling scheme, Sussex University food sustainability manager Sandra Juan-Delgado explained that the food we eat is “linked to one-third of all carbon emissions in the world” and “our intention with this initiative is not to induce feelings of shame or guilt [but] foster open and informed discussions about food choices and the sustainability of the broader food system. We recognise that each person’s dietary preferences and circumstances vary, and our goal is to provide transparent information to guide conscious decision-making,” she added.
Craving carbon content
People certainly say they want this information available to them (France has made carbon labelling a requirement already). However, convincing that it is trustworthy can be a challenge: consumers are hyper-alert to greenwashing and there is certainly going to be scepticism among some students about the information being provided.
Indeed, the EIT research found that almost two-thirds of Europeans (63%) believe food brands pretend their products are more sustainable than they really are, while only a third of Europeans, (33%) believe their government is transparent about regulating sustainability labels on food. Adherence to the UK Green Claims Code is therefore key.
Trustworthy information is crucial but it doesn’t guarantee engagement, let alone a shift in decision-making (towards more sustainable options). Gen Z may well be (reportedly) more eco-conscious for example but they are also living in an era in which their environment is saturated by marketing on all sides and from all streams. “There are so many examples of research trials [into ecolabels] being run in university settings, so what we might be finding is good results there because you can actually test people,” Attwood explains. But whether or not Gen Z or younger audiences as a whole are more receptive to these nudges is not yet borne out in the data, she adds.
Projects are therefore already looking beyond labelling towards a package of nudges. Clara Ma, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance in the Department of Land Economy, has just started a field experiment in collaboration with 13 college cafeterias to test the effectiveness of carbon footprint labelling and sustainable food subsidies, as well as the combination of both approaches on food choices. The food subsidies will be applied to all vegan meals sold in the respective intervention cafeterias, as this food group has the lowest emissions intensity. There will also be an information campaign to raise awareness about the interventions among students.
While the power of consumer-facing carbon and environmental labels isn’t quite yet clear, there is certainly energy in the sector to educate and inform. Carolyn Lum is sustainability lead at Wahaca, a high street chain that has been carbon labelling its menus for some time now. In recent research conducted with City, University of London, there was a higher uptake of lower carbon dishes when they were flagged on table-takers, yet the overall emissions per diner didn’t seem to fall. This is frustrating but certainly not a failure. “We are looking to continuously improve how we communicate the climate impact of food choices to our customers and our teams,” Lum explains. “Our hope is that the carbon labels pique their curiosity and influence their food decisions the majority of the time they are making food choices whether it is in or outside the restaurant environment.”
Indeed, when Imperial College looked at Wahaca’s labelling scheme there was a “reassuring” discovery, Lum adds: they found that there was ‘spillover’ from seeing the climate impact of food choices in the restaurant setting, to thinking about the climate impact of food choices outside of the restaurant environment.
Using environmental data, foodservice companies are slowly shifting behaviours one label at a time. Behind the scenes, however, the shifts are speedy, subtle and sustainable.
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