Leading UK food retailers including Tesco, Asda, M&S and Ocado have partnered to establish a unified standard for product carbon footprinting in the grocery industry.
In consultation with WRAP, IGD AND WWF, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) Mondra Coalition will leverage break-through technology to scale this standard and provide the means to monitor, improve and communicate the environmental performance of products.
This looks to enable effective measurement and management of scope three emissions, in line with the BRC’s 2040 net zero ambition.
It comes as total emissions from food are estimated to make up around 30% of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with the biggest challenge to tackle this being measuring and managing scope three emissions due to a lack of robust environmental data.
Currently, Tesco, M&S, Asda and Ocado have chosen to implement Mondra’s automated life cycle assessment (LCA) system, while Sainsbury’s, Lidl and Co-op are also piloting the scheme.
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Tesco group quality, technical and sustainability director Claire Lorains said: “We’re delighted to be a part of the BRC Mondra Coalition that brings together the food industry to tackle the challenge of consistent carbon reporting across the value chain.
“By working together in a pre-competitive way to develop product level sustainability data, we can accelerate decarbonisation, and help meet our goal of reaching net zero across our whole footprint by 2050.”
Mondra’s AI-driven technology will enable food brand owners and suppliers to run LCAs on thousands of products in a matter of hours.
Once invited to the platform, suppliers can refine the data that the brand owner relies on, while protecting intellectual property and unlocking product development tools to model composition and sourcing scenarios that drive environmental performance improvement.
Other major brands including Starbucks and Nando’s, as well as suppliers such as Avara, Samworth Brothers, Greencore, Bakkavor, Pilgrims, Dunbia and Crankswick have joined the coalition.
One discrete workstream in the Coalition programme, ‘Farm Data Done Better’, is looking into the best routes to incorporate farm-stage carbon data for product footprints.
Led by sustainability advisors 3Keel with practical support from Avara, it looks to engage the wider UK agricultural sector and develop recommendations for consistent treatment of farm data across supply chains.
