Food giants sign up to new Foundation Earth eco-labelling scheme

A group of food manufacturers and retailers have signed up for a new project, Foundation Earth, which will see front-of-pack labels put on products to give an indication of environmental impact.

The initiative was the brainchild of the late UK food entrepreneur Denis Lynn, who set up UK meat group Finnebrogue Artisan. He died in a quadbike accident last month.

Through a pilot launch this autumn, non-profit organisation Foundation Earth will issue front-of-pack eco-scores on food and drink products. The labels will rate a product’s environmental credentials using a traffic-light scoring system devised by the consultancy Mondra.

The system behind the labels looks at farming, processing, packaging and transport. It assesses the environmental impact of a product based upon carbon (49% weighted), water usage (17%), water pollution (17%) and biodiversity loss (17%).

In parallel to the pilot will be a nine-month research and development programme, funded by Nestlé, that will combine the Mondra method with a system devised by an EU-funded consortium of Belgium’s Leuven University and Spanish research agency AZTI.

The consortium is brought together under the auspices of the European Commission’s food innovation initiative EIT Food. The aim of the programme is to prepare Foundation Earth for a Europe-wide roll-out in 2022.

“The Mondra and EIT 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,” Jago Pearson, chief strategy officer at Finnebrogue, told Just Food.

Under the system, generic chicken nuggets would get a B label and blueberries a C, but the scores for individual products will vary depending on production methods.