Decarbonising second green food – the revolution

Read how the S3 Project, serves as a practical demonstration of Science Based Targets, utilising digitalisation, automation, and workforce engagement to encourage adoption, across the food and beverage industry, for a sustainable and decarbonised future

The research presented here embodies the aspiration for a second Green Revolution, it has initiated a program aimed at decarbonising both food production and manufacturing processes.¹. This is now part of our route to the goal of net zero which is a fitting story for this 60 Year Jubilee edition of the Food Science and Technology Journal. The ’revolution’ in the title considers the food one led by Professor Norman Borlaug in the early 1960s which was also at the time IFST was evolving at the National College of Food Technology at Weybridge in Surrey². Food production, sustainability and security were key focus points of the food industry at that time and without doubt, we face similar challenges today. The first Green Revolution lifted billions of global citizens from the scourge of hunger, and it is still relevant to generations following the goals of agriculturalists such as Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan and Norman Borlaug³. We believe there is a requirement for a second Green Revolution and this is the time for it to happen; moreover, it should provide food security to nine billion global citizens utilising the technologies Borlaug and Swaminathan did not have when they started out, so that it is achieved in an environmentally benign way. This cannot be achieved without creating a decarbonised manufacturing industry and, in this article, we show how we are doing this by engaging food and beverage companies.

Our first practical engagement has been launched and it is a simple but incisive one in that it reports carbon footprints on food product packaging. This is not new, it will be familiar to many but what is novel is that we are presenting the product carbon footprint as a proportion of a Carbon Daily Allowance (CDA) (Figure 1).

Figure 1, is the first public communication of the CDA, the decarbonisation in production operations is part of the S3 Project which is generating real-time carbon foot printing for Raynor foods Ltd. S3 ‘Smart people – Smart process – Smart factory’; is a Manufacturing Made Smarter: Sustainable Smart Factory project funded by Innovate UK and the industry partners. The authors of this article are all engaged with and committed to delivering this important initiative. S3 is demonstrating the future of Science Based Targets (SBT's) by reporting Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions for food and beverage companies, and whereas most will be familiar with labels and claims, the CDA is different because it engages customers and consumers practically by choice and change⁴. The genesis of the CDA solution drew inspiration from the well-established and proven nutritional labelling regulations, aligning with the Food Information Regulations of 2014. (UK Statutory Instruments 2014 No. 1855). These regulations mandate the incorporation of an energy (kcal) benchmark featuring distinct thresholds. This results in the recognisable traffic light system on food and beverage packaging, calibrated to delineate permissible and restricted nutritional claims. The route S3 and the CDA has taken here has utilised the UK Government Climate Change Committee 6^th Carbon Budget (a 7^th is due this year) and the datasets for agri-food and food and beverage manufacturing to develop a food and drink CDA baseline for a UK citizen of 2470 grams CO₂e per day.

We are currently benchmarking this CDA against export-import analyses that undertake a Life Cycle Assessment approach to determine the footprint of manufactured foods in the UK. These efforts are significantly influenced by the actions taken by the Competition and Markets Authority, specifically the introduction of the Green Claims Code in 2021. This code is crafted to ensure that assertions of environmental friendliness align with UK consumer law, and its effectiveness has been evaluated in the context of consumer goods⁵. The current mix of carbon labelling schemes have a number of ways in which they communicate the embedded carbon of food products and we have reported these with respect to our CDA development method. The Science Based Targets Institute (SBTi) guidance has played a pivotal role in providing direction for our efforts. Our carbon foot printing method, using the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methods, has been instrumental. To conduct our carbon footprint calculations, we employed multiple libraries such as Agri-footprint, Ecoinvent, the World LCA Database, Agribylase, and Exiobase, encompassing an extensive range of products. These calculations specifically pertain to the carbon footprint of both UK energy production and ingredients. The SBTi guidance is beginning to be tested and this will be important for the food industry to consider when developing targets that meet decarbonising goals with the CDA reported here⁶.

The S3 Project serves as a practical demonstration, unravelling the practical implications of frequently mentioned terms such as net zero carbon, resilience, and regenerative in the realms of production, processing, and retailing operations.At Raynor Foods Ltd, we are establishing a Living Lab to actualise these goals, with the optimistic aspiration that other factories will join the decarbonising movement, influencing the 11,000 food and beverage manufacturers across the UK.

Our goal is to encourage thousands of companies to join with us on this journey.

Such an approach is likely to appeal even to those who have not previously worked with sustainability programmes, and the carbon foot printing may offer some technical challenges however food and drink is an industry that maintains accounts and balances to ensure traceability and safety, so the thinking of footprints is very-much second-nature.

Figure 2, shows some of the carbon footprints for the types of sandwiches that are tested in the S3 Project, their CDA percentages and the current RAG calibration that is being tested as part of a trial that will use the pack designs shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2, shows carbon footprints are effectively static pieces of information that do not change quickly and these are claimed on pack using the design shown in Figure 1.

They have been calculated using the IPCC GWP100 2021 methodology. It is crucial to understand that, at this point, the IPCC method is precisely that—a method developed over numerous years and standardised for universal use. S3 intends to make optimal use of this standard environment by embedding it into product development and reporting so that footprints become real-time and this will be carried out in the Raynor Foods enterprise. That is, each day the carbon footprint of products will be reported and the ingredient and dispatch inventory of carbon footprint for products and ingredients will account for the sourcing, production, waste, loss and dispatch decarbonising activities. This is what we call the living carbon footprint of the S3 consortium methodology. Paired with the CDA on each product, this provides a practical application for customers and consumers to report supply chain GHG emissions. This facilitates the implementation of decarbonisation through strategic changes in the entire system.

Change to decarbonise will be incentivised by gamifying actions and practices in the manufacturing operations for all food and beverage products and S3 is currently testing both the gamification processes and the impact CDA values. This can eventually be applied to all food industry products and S3 has begun benchmarking to what we call a food basket of products. Some of these products are shown in Table 1, and our future work will be testing how the CDA approach can be integrated with choice and diet for the whole food industry.

The mapping of these processes in S3 and development in real time is a crucial component of our Living Lab demonstrator because it provides immediate data for time and place of people, assets and materials which is essential to understanding the carbon footprints within the enterprise. This is the Internet of Things platform and it begins the process of developing a digital twin of the enterprise, that is a real time simulation of what is actually happening. S3 has transformed this practice by creating this real time monitoring and an example of our current tests is shown in Figure 3. As S3 develops this year, we will be able to demonstrate this dynamic monitoring on-line.

The initiative reported impacts on lifestyles and cultural movement, and such matters will ultimately decide how our industry will either increase or decrease contributions of total greenhouse gas emissions to the national carbon budget. We, as part of the food industry, have a critical role to play in driving down our emissions and facilitating a decarbonising revolution for a sustainable future food system. The food industry serves the consumer, their choices are a critical factor in delivering this sustainable food system that must be both commercially and socially sound in delivering environmental sustainability. Therefore, decarbonisation is critical and there should arguably be a mandatory mechanism in communicating how food products impact upon the environment because it connects energy utilisation with materials and people. We believe the CDA begins this movement.