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New environmental food scoring standards emerge

EIT Food and Foundation Earth collaborate to launch environmental food scoring for products entering the global supply chain.

EIT Food, a product development community backed by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and the non-profit organisation Foundation Earth, have teamed up to develop new environmental credentials.

The duo is collaborating to create standards to score food based on environmental credentials and plans to make these standards applicable worldwide to promote global collaboration on environmental food scoring.

Sharing environmental aims

Non-profit Foundation Earth, which issues front-of-pack environmental scores on food products, has become part of EIT Food, the world’s largest food innovation community.

The International Alliance for Food Impact Data will combine the expertise of EIT Food and Foundation Earth to create, evaluate, and advocate for international standards and coordination on environmental scoring for food. The standard will serve as a publicly accessible tool for evaluating the environmental impact of food and beverage products.

The Foundation Earth team will lead this collaboration and will focus its efforts on independently scoring food and beverage products’ environmental impact and to gain the backing of significant food and drink companies in Europe.

Valuing data

According to the institutions, environmental impact data can revolutionise food systems and support informed decision-making, help environmental and sustainability reporting, and assist in producing front-of-pack labelling for shoppers.

“Environmental data is a key lever of change for food systems transformation,” said Richard Zaltzman, Chief Executive of EIT Food. The EU-backed community programme seeks to integrate the knowledge and capacity of Foundation Earth into EIT Food to transform the food system with credibly collected, measured, and evaluated impact data.

“This will form the basis for decision-making across the food and drink industry, policy, future-proofing innovation in our sector and enabling us to reduce the environmental impact of the entire food system,” Zaltzman added. By building its new alliance, it hopes to deliver “clear standards and address confusion that is currently hampering the environmental scoring of food and drink”, Zaltzman said.

The food industry must tackle the complex challenge of handling environmental data, scoring, and governance to fulfil its net-zero commitments. At first, the new partners will concentrate on how EU policies can support an eco-friendlier food system. Various methodologies and labels are used worldwide, but they adhere to different standards, making them irregular and disparate. Food brands looking to enter multiple regional markets therefore need to understand and pass different approval systems.

Assessing the true environmental impact of various food products is challenging for policymakers, companies, and consumers. Insufficient coordination and a lack of management by central EU-level organisation, which the EU Green Claims Directive now requires, have also hindered the system.

The road to achieving environmental scoring standards

“Over the last three years, Foundation Earth has led the European-wide drive towards the environmental scoring of food and drink products,” said Jago Pearson, outgoing chairman of Foundation Earth. “Our work now provides the building blocks for providing consumers with the information they need to make more environmentally-friendly buying choices and food producers with the credible information they need to innovate in a more sustainable way,” adds Pearson.

Teaming up and launching the International Alliance for Food Impact Data offers a chance to tackle the absence of standards and coordination in both the EU and worldwide.

Together, EIT Food and Foundation Earth hope to establish broader collaboration across fragmented initiatives that individually focus on the environmental footprint of food and drink products. “Those efforts are currently constrained by limited resources, which has slowed progress towards a single European-wide system,” said Cliona Howie, previously the Chief Executive of Foundation Earth who will now become the Director of Data Impact Systems at EIT Food, with responsibility for the International Alliance for Food Impact Data.

“Our focus will be on driving large-scale impact that works across the whole food system and transforming the environmental credentials of the continent’s food and drink industry,” added Howie.