Frozen food giant Nomad Foods has called on the food industry and regulators to adopt end-to-end carbon impact production assessments to tackle the climate crisis.
The company, which owns Birds Eye, Findus and Iglo, said it wanted food companies to consider Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies including food loss and waste impacts to improve transparency for consumers and to drive action to reduce carbon emissions.
It comes after Nomad started working with impact assessment experts PRé Sustainability, which conducted an LCA for 22 of the brand’s most popular products.
The study included all stages of the product lifecycle and incorporated new data on retailer and consumer food waste and primary data for processing steps with the results review by leading experts. It found that food waste had an important role to play in a product’s overall environmental impact.
When analysing the 22 frozen Nomad products, most had an equal or lower carbon footprint as similar products using other preservation methods, with only three having a higher impact.
For example, fresh spinach releases over 2.5kg CO2eq/kg compared to less than 2kgCO2eq/kg of its frozen counterpart with packaging and retail storage both being a key point of saving.
“Consumer demand for nutritious, high-quality, sustainable food is growing and we believe it’s vital that we find ways to provide consumers with information that helps them make informed choices and provides confidence that sustainability claims are robust and evidence-based,” said Nomad CEO Stéfan Descheemaeker.
“To support this, we encourage the food industry, retailers and regulators to adopt a wider scope for LCAs as standard, taking the whole product lifecycle into account. Based on the ground-breaking work that our teams have undertaken with life cycle experts PRé Sustainability, we can see there are significant benefits to frozen food in terms of longer-term food preservation and reduced food waste.”
The “elaborate” study was one of a kind, according to PRé Sustainability, as it covered a wide range of frozen food products and their alternatives, approached them all in a consistent methodological manner and included primary production data.
Ellen Meijer, consultant at PRé Sustainability, said: “Based on this study, we are now in the unique position to draw conclusions about the carbon footprint of frozen food products compared to their non-frozen alternatives and generalise these conclusions across the frozen food category.”
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