Caterers continue to canter along in their efforts to cut emissions, while grocers and the fmcgs moan rather than mitigate theirs. By David Burrows.
Where else to start, than Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President? For a second time. Enough said? The media was certainly struggling to know what to report, not to mention how to report it. The New Yorker’s daily update on January 21 began:
“When we sat down this morning to assemble the newsletter, it felt like an extraordinary feat to collect and present our coverage in a way that would be useful without being overwhelming. As the second Trump Administration begins, our task as newsletter editors – to bring you, the reader, the most cogent package of reporting, analysis, and delightful diversions possible – is about to get a little more complicated.”
This is a lot like we feel when slouching down to pore over the pile of net-zero-related news in order to bring you our ‘delightful’ take on it all.
Green grosser
Top of said pile this time around is a click-baity (you know we can’t resist) feature in The Grocer: ‘How sustainability efforts in the food industry are going up in flames.’ Several high-profile sustainability leaders across retail and fmcg had been consulted and “who see the excitement once emanating from sustainability jobs in the food industry now dissolving into a slough of despond”.
We certainly find ourselves at a bit of a pinch point. There have been others (Rishi’s rollback on net-zero, for example, or before that the COP15 held in Copenhagen in 2009). But with geopolitics, inflation, the media and the weather where it is, more glasses seem to be emptying than filling – which suits the status quo (and leaves campaigners and forward-thinking businesses screaming).
Just-Drinks reports a sobering survey showing ESG issues have “nosedived” as a priority for businesses as other global and macro matters continue to cause concern. GlobalData’s Tech Sentiment Polls Q4 2024 report found the proportion of respondents who feel that ESG is the theme that will most impact their business in the next 12 months is at one of its lowest points for at least three years.
The thing is, it is becoming increasingly tricky to untangle all these concerns (geopolitics, conflicts, AI and high inflation), and weaving through them all – especially for food companies – are the climate and nature crises.
How much?
On net-zero, in the short-term we are, to use football parlance, firmly in ‘squeaky bum time’. Those commitments of 2020 and 2021, made by some of the same CEOs that are draining the life out of their CSOs (chief sustainability officers) as reported by The Grocer(and others previously), are now looking almost impossible as we hit halfway in the road to the first checkpoint of 2030.
As Bloomberg reported: “These goals, set by governments, Wall Street, Big Tech and major polluting companies, are intended to put the global economy on a path to finally start reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Yet, far from being in retreat, carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record last year. That means the world faces a steeper, far costlier and more disruptive journey to reach net-zero by 2050.”
CEOs might want to hone in on the words “costlier” and “more disruptive”. This is happening now, not in 25 years’ time. As one expert told me recently: we have all got a little bit too comfortable with net-zero timelines. Expect the comfortable to become increasingly uncomfortable this year.
Meat the new plan
A taste of what’s to come can be found in the IGD’s new net-zero transition plan. “This plan shows the challenge that several 2030 targets are at risk of not being met, but that doesn’t mean without co-ordination we can’t still achieve net zero by 2050,” explained IGD chief executive Sarah Bradbury. “We need a different approach, one that involves the whole end-to-end supply chain, a more aligned dialogue across Industry and with government. A more widely shared view of where we are now, how extensively we can reduce emissions and what will be needed in terms of capabilities, financing and policy support to do this.”
What’s not clear is where catering, foodservice and hospitality fits in here. There is mention of the sector when it comes to energy but little else (there are 158 pages to the plan so we will keep you posted if we find anything). Most of the media picked up on the reduction in meat consumption: the plan acknowledges that supply-side interventions won’t get us to where we need to be, but underplays the demand-side shifts somewhat.
The authors, from IGD, Wrap and EY, talk of “moderate diet change away from the most carbon intense foods” (20% in red meat and dairy is the figure mooted, which is below that put forward by the likes of Henry Dimbleby, the Climate Change Committee and countless academic studies). Perhaps more interesting (and encouraging) is the link with health. This wasn’t within the scope of the report (a missed opportunity?) but the recommendation to get something done is loud and clear: “The food industry should work urgently to develop an approach to diet that balances net-zero and health objectives; the absence of a position stands in the way of progress and leaves the industry vulnerable to having policies imposed upon it.”
The UK Government is of course up to its eyeballs in food policies currently. A farming roadmap, land-use framework and new national food strategy are all being worked up. The noises coming from Defra secretary Steve Reed in relation to ‘food systems’ suggest an intention to join the dots between health, nature and the environment. “Bringing together some of the environmental work with the NHS 10-year strategy I think is going to absolutely be critical for us as an industry,” said Bradbury at a Future Food Movement meeting last month.
Fireworks over food plans
Expect some fireworks when it comes to these food policies, especially the more disruptive ones. Reed’s boss, Sir Keir Starmer the prime minister, has pledged to cut the UK’s emissions by 81% by 2035 but is confident this can be done without “telling people how to live their lives”. That is “probably not true”, according to Sam Hampton and Lorraine Whitmarsh, two scientists that have a fair bit of experience on the matter. “This kind of ‘techno-optimism’ is rife in government policy statements and strategies, but it is misplaced,” they wrote in a piece for The Conversation.
The Conservative-led government’s net-zero plan was panned for such an approach, as was its flimsy food strategy. Is Labour already falling into the same comfortable space? Hampton and Whitmarsh certainly think so: they argue that Starmer’s claim is not only unrealistic, it’s also potentially harmful to the prospects of effective climate action: “Most measures for reaching carbon targets in the UK will require changes to public behaviour. It’s the government’s job to make it easier, cheaper and advantageous for people to make those changes.” Including within our food system.
Research by Sodexo recently showed consumers are in conflict: their conscience is telling them to buy sustainable options, and they want to, but the cost of this too often gets the better of them. Price and taste are deal-breakers, but so too is health. “For too long, businesses have treated health and sustainability as separate agendas – health initiatives often ignoring environmental impacts, and sustainability strategies overlooking human wellbeing,” wrote Ali Morpeth and Mike Barry in a piece for Footprint last week. “Yet, growing evidence shows that diets beneficial for human health can also enhance planetary health, presenting a clear opportunity to align efforts.”
It mightn’t be an easy ride. Quality Meat Scotland (QMS) has published a toolkit to “highlight and empower” stakeholders to communicate the health benefits and sustainability of Scotch red meat. That’s fair enough, but what we have to be careful of is the perception of this being ‘all meat’, and ignoring the question of ‘how much’.
Expect ‘big meat’ to turn the spotlight on tech fixes (and perhaps even moreso on the back of the bother over the methane-suppressing feed Bovaer). For example, a McDonald’s funded study in the US has found that “30% of the baseline GHG emissions could be mitigated” mostly through changes to feed production and grazing. “What would have been interesting is to look at these practices in concert with reducing meat production,” says Derric Pennington, an expert in communicating the value of corporate and public sustainability ‘theories of change’ from the University of Minnesota.
Just focusing on the supply-side is folly (as IGD’s plan suggests): what some might call fiddling with the (broken) food system rather than fixing it. Whether the likes of McDonald’s are funding such work to help mitigate methane and other GHGs or hinder the harder stuff around consumption is moot. An FAI adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing project with the chain has just claimed the suckler beef enterprise is now “completely offset by carbon sequestration”. Suckler herd costs were also lower (77% of the AHDB average). On-farm emissions and sequestration were modelled using GWP100, the standard but older metric, which “over-emphasises the warming impact of cycling methane in farm systems”, FAI noted.
GWP
There will be much more noise on GWP100 and GWP* this year as the government agonises over the contribution of red meat and dairy to UK emissions, and how to curb them. Before getting sucked in it’s worth considering the argument put forward in this pieceby the academics Myles Allen and Charles Godfray on BBC Farming Today. GWP* may well have been adopted by the NFU as their preferred greenhouse gas comparison tool but this “does not mean the livestock sector is off the hook, especially since global livestock emissions are still rising”.
“It is true that we can imagine a future when net emissions of carbon dioxide have reached zero and methane emissions from a roughly stable global livestock herd cause little further global warming – our current metrics tend to over-estimate the long-term effects of this gas,” they explained. “But the critical challenge for the world is to reduce warming in the short to medium term before climate impacts get much worse and any tipping points are passed.”
In other words we need to buy time for the political and societal changes required to curb emissions. One way is to plant trees (and lots of them) and protect those that are already there (which the food sector continues to struggle with and delays to deforestation regulations don’t help). Reducing methane is the other. And policymakers who are mulling over how to mitigate methane through the trio of new food plans we mentioned above should not forget that cooling the environment is a ‘public good’.
Of course, there is considerable variation in the impact from different farms and production systems – and this is something the UK sector is laser-focused on. Consider for example the 170 farms AHDB will be using in its environmental baselining pilot. Dairy in particular has been keen to count its CO2e on an ever more granular level: one coffee chain told me recently of the considerable emissions reductions it achieved by swapping supplier for its milk (though the big prize remains in persuading those inside and outside the business to really push plant-based options).
Caterers cantering on carbon
Data, as it ever seems to be, will be crucial, allowing food companies to tie their commitment to customer health with better (in all senses of the word) food. It is also harder for the nay-sayers on net-zero to complain. This year will inevitably see this group snowball, especially on social media. Moves by the likes of Meta to end its fact-checking programme could open the floodgates on climate misinformation, for example. Mainstream media then jump on this (as we saw with the bonkers Bovaer stories in December).
A study by experts at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester has looked at coverage of climate change in opinion pieces and editorials across UK newspapers between 2013/14 and 2023/4. “The nature of climate scepticism has changed notably in the last decade,” they discovered. Initially the evidence (climate change isn’t happening) and the process (challenging the scientific models used) were the targets, but now it’s the response (the policies are too expensive). This, certainly, will be the challenge facing Labour as it mulls over how to mitigate emissions from food, the largest of emitters.
Where does this leave companies in 2025? While grocers and manufacturers (generally, it has to be said) seem content to moan, the foodservice companies we speak to want to move forward. One caterer told me that supermarkets “will catch up with us”. If nothing else, that’s incentive to put the pedal to the metal.
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