Global food giants join top scientists in landmark Foundation Earth project to launch environmental scores on food products

Global food giants and a group of the UK’s leading supermarkets have teamed up with the world’s top food and environmental scientists to form a new non-profit organisation that will issue front-of-pack environmental scores on food products from this September.

Foundation Earth is the brainchild of Denis Lynn, the Northern Irish food entrepreneur who tragically died in May following a freak quadbike accident.

M&S, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op join the world’s biggest food company Nestlé, protein giant Tyson Foods and Spanish supermarket Eroski on the Foundation’s industry advisory group, 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”.

A pilot launch will see a group of the UK’s leading food brands launch front-of-pack environmental scores on a range of products this September – while the world’s largest food business, Nestlé, is funding an intensive nine-month research and development programme to prepare the Foundation for full Europe-wide roll out in 2022.

Lynn’s firm Finnebrogue Artisan, which owns Britain’s biggest bacon brand Naked, is one of the first-mover food producers adding eco-scores to their products this Autumn, in advance of COP26.

The UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change has warned the food industry already contributes up to 37 per cent of global greenhouse gases and that, without intervention, these are likely to increase by another 30 per cent by 2050, due to increasing demand from population growth.

Foundation Earth has brought together the world’s two leading systems for measuring the environmental impact of an individual food product and communicating the information clearly and simply to consumers via a front-of-pack score. Its aim is to promote more sustainable buying choices from consumers and more environmentally-friendly innovation from food producers, who will be determined to secure a better score.

The Foundation’s pilot launch this Autumn will use a traffic-light style system developed by Oxford University, with the support of WWF.

The pilot will run in parallel to an intensive nine-month research and development programme, funded by Nestlé, that 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.

The Foundation Earth R&D programme will produce an optimum and fully automated system for use across the UK and EU by Autumn 2022.

Oxford University’s Joseph Poore has teamed up with Leuven University’s Christophe Matthys and AZTI’s Saioa Ramos to form the Foundation’s scientific committee, which will be chaired by Professor Chris Elliott OBE, the scientist who led the British Government’s investigation into the horsemeat scandal.

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.”