Food companies are trying to beat the burps, while sustainability leads suffer from reporting rules headache. David Burrows reports.
We start with burps. From cows. These contain the potent but relatively short-lived greenhouse gas methane (CH4) and have therefore become a focus for food companies seeking to reduce their scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. One potential trick up their sleeve is to treat the bovines with gas-suppressing feed supplements – a concept that got off to a bad start with some over-inflated claims.
Burger King attracted attention and criticism in the summer of 2021 for its “low methane” burgers from cows fed on lemongrass. (Their adverts actually prompted us to run this monthly roundup of hot news and hot air in the net-zero space (happy third birthday to us, and thank you BK)). There was some nuance lost in the headlines – which talked of 33% reductions in emissions – including the fact that feed is only part of the diet in the last four months before the cattle are culled, and not the first 10-12 months.
BK seems to have kept a low profile on the topic since. But it hasn’t stopped others launching trials using a range of novel ingredients (Defra last year ran a consultation on some of the most promising). There has been a glut of new stories over the summer. For example, Tesco says it is adding the ingredient Bovaer – which works by suppressing the enzymes responsible for producing methane – to 400 cows at Grosvenor Farms, one its key dairy suppliers. The trial is expected to lead to an overall emissions reduction of 12%. Meanwhile, Morrisons has just announced a partnership with Sea Forest and Myton Food Group (the supermarket’s manufacturing arm) to introduce seaweed-based livestock feed to its beef supply chain. “Our trials with beef, dairy and wool producers across Australia and New Zealand have demonstrated excellent results,” said Sea Forest CEO Sam Elsom.
Marks & Spencer was however first out of the blocks this year, investing £1m in a change to dairy cows diets. The initiative is projected to remove 11,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere annually, cutting M&S’ RSPCA-assured core fresh milk carbon footprint by 8.4%.
More on CH4
We can’t see much activity in the foodservice space here. Some 35% of Costa’s scope 3 emissions in the UK are from milk, but there has been no mention of work on methane at farm level yet. Starbucks has signed up to the dairy methane action alliance, and in doing so must account for and publicly disclose methane emissions within its dairy supply chain, and create a comprehensive methane action plan. Nestlé and Danone are signatories too.
McDonald’s doesn’t mention methane on its ‘climate action’ page, nor in its 2023/24 purpose progress report. However, it is working with long-term partner FrieslandCampina to reduce emissions from dairy farms, including through the use of feed additives. FreislandCampina has been using Bovaer in trials in the Netherlands with nutrition specialist DSM; these showed that the additive “can easily be introduced at scale without affecting animal health, milk production or milk composition”.
The mitigation potential of these additives remains hotly debated. Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Dairy Science, Alexander Hristov, professor of dairy nutrition at PennState college of agricultural sciences in the US, suggested diet manipulation could cut emissions by 10% to 15% with feed additives necessary to go further than that. “The choice of additives with proven efficacy however is limited,” he notes. It is also currently “unclear” if combining several nutritional practices targeted at enteric methane mitigation can deliver synergistic effects, but: “If currently available mitigation practices prove to deliver consistent results and novel, potent, and safe strategies are discovered, nutrition alone can deliver up to 60% reduction in enteric [methane] emissions from intensive dairy production systems.”
That’s quite impressive; but it’s also quite a few ifs and buts. Worth noting too is that the focus is also on intensive dairy production. There is a lot of scrutiny of such systems in the UK currently – for cows, pigs and poultry – and the wider environmental and ethical baggage of these systems. Consider for example the fuss created over Sainsbury’s announcement this time last year about its lower carbon beef range. Better breeding as well as “strictly monitored feed and living conditions mean that healthy calves are raised in the most efficient way possible, needing less time and energy to grow, in turn emitting fewer harmful gases”. In other words, they’re killing the cows quicker: in fact 20% sooner than the industry standard.
A quick cull
Quicker culling means less carbon. Hybu Cig Cymru – Meat Promotion Wales – has just announced that it has grants available for a group of 50 beef farmers as part of a research project to decarbonise beef and improve farmer profits by ‘finishing’ cattle earlier. SRUC, Scotland’s rural college, is also going to be looking at carbon from cows – or more specifically all greenhouse gases and how mitigating one might increase the others. That’s called the UltraGreenCow project.
Greener, less windy or low carbon, the race is certainly on to prove that some forms of meat production are more sustainable than others. Lidl has actually footprinted hundreds of farms across the UK and now wants to use the data to help shrink (scope 3) emissions by 28% per tonne of finished product by 2030. Should this ‘better’ meat result in less meat too?
We are told there is frustration among some in the industry about the concept of ‘less and better’ meat: if companies move to higher welfare animals reared in ‘regenerative’ systems, then why should they also be reducing volumes of meat? Should intensively-reared meat and dairy be the target for any production reductions … but what if these systems have smaller GHG footprints?
The trade-offs between efficiency (emissions reduction) and ethics can leave sustainability leads in a spin. Consider for example the big chicken buyers like Nandos and KFC who are trying to transition to higher welfare, slower growing breeds but are worried about a potential rise in emissions.
Such conflation of the controversial topic of consumption doesn’t wash with campaign groups. Feedback does a lot of work around scope 3 emissions from food companies and the reductions in meat and dairy required to reduce them to limit global heating to within Paris Agreement boundaries. “Companies are so caught up in accurately measuring scope 3 and setting targets that they are failing (perhaps deliberately) to take the action which is clearly indicated by all the available evidence – that is, finding ways to cut meat and dairy sales,” Feedback’s Jessica Sinclair Taylor tells us.
Top (Ara)marks
Reporting is where we turn finally this month. The latest Sustainable Business Tracker Report, based on an in-depth survey of almost 180 business and sustainability leaders from all major UK sectors by edie.net, shows that 80% feel reporting and disclosure is helping their aim of driving climate action, yet 52% say their team is not adequately resourced to deliver reporting and disclosure requirements.
These are painful but pivotal times for sustainability reporting, with an awful lot going on, here (the UK), there (Europe and the US), and really everywhere. The near-term focus here is transition plan disclosures, while globally there is the International Sustainability Standards Board, which announced “further harmonisation” of reporting standards in June (once we have our head around this we’ll let you know… but we do invite answers on a postcard). The UK government continues to assess the merits of all this.
Clarity and consistency as ever are key. Larger caterers appear to be ahead of the game thanks to the carbon reduction plans they’re publishing. Last time we featured Compass and Sodexo; this month we wanted to flag Aramark’s similarly expansive effort, which again goes beyond the requirements of PPN06/21 to include all scope 3 emissions. Total emissions at the last count in 2021 were 196,537tCO2e, down almost 30% on the 2019 baseline. An updated effort with Aramark’s validated science-based targets is imminent.
Food companies have myriad requirements and standards to deal with in relation to climate (not to mention nature) reporting. A standardised approach is, slowly but surely we are promised, taking shape. As Robert Eccles, visiting professor at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, writes in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, reporting standards “lay the foundation for ESG transparency. Thirteen years after I cofounded the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) with Jean Rogers, a universal set of standards has yet to be agreed upon. But it is coming,” he explains. “Financial reporting standards require companies to report both good and bad financial performance. Sustainability reporting standards will do the same.”
Their arrival won’t signal the end of the Notebook, however.
