Hey food industry, show us your numbers.

The food industry generates about one third of the world’s total human-created climate impact.* But how can you start making more sustainable choices when it’s almost impossible to find out the impact different food have on the planet? Well, you can’t, which obviously is something that must have to change. But if you plan to request that the whole food industry starts showing their products’ climate impact, you should probably start by doing it yourself, right?

And that we did. Click here for the long climate impact calculation 
story (and get more technical and numerical stuff than you probably 
 ever wished for). The short story is that, in Europe you now can find our CO2e numbers on the back of our packaging or on all our product sites on our website, and easily compare them with those of other products before deciding what to buy.

Wait, did we say “easily”? Well, the one problem with all these numbers is they don’t really say much as long as there’s nothing to compare them with. Which is exactly where the campaign came into the picture, with one clear message across Europe: “Hey food industry! Show us your numbers.”

In Germany, we decided to take it all a step further and petition 
 the Bundestag to make a law requiring that climate footprint 
 information must be printed on food packaging. After all, there are laws mandating nutritional labels for our health—why should it be any different for numbers related to the health of our planet?

The petition terms set by the Bundestag were characteristically stern. We had only 28 days to get 50,000 signatures. So, since we needed a hand (or 50,000 to be exact) to get it done, we launched a multimedia campaign, all wrapped up in ultra-digestible 8-bit retro graphics.  How it all ended? Watch the film to find out, but we can reveal that we finally got to use the words “Hollywood ending”. (Yeah, seems like you might wanna go and get some oat ice-cream before hitting ‘play’ below.)

 - UPDATE! -

Thanks to the 57,067 petition signers and our awesome team of alliance members, *we had a hearing with the Bundestag on September 14, in which our co-general manager, Tobias, presented the case for making CO2e food labels a law. We think Tobias did great, and now we’re waiting for the Bundestag to let us know what they think(about the law proposal, not about Tobias, that is). But, well, making any decision seems to take like forever in the world of politics. *No, we are not alone in this! Before the hearing, we teamed up with a bunch of great companies supporting our idea of CO2e labels on food. And no matter what the politicians are up to, together, we’ll continue to work towards the goal of having climate impact numbers visible on all food packaging.

*Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Guizzardi, D., Monforti-Ferrario, F., Tubiello, F. N., & Leip, A. J. N. F. (2021). Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Nature Food, 2(3), 198-209. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00225-9