According to The Independent, it aims to put carbon footprint labels on all of its products in the next two to five years. The multinational consumer goods company owns some of the world’s biggest brands in food, home and personal care, including Ben and Jerry’s and Streets ice-cream products.
The news came as no surprise to Fonterra’s senior manager of sustainability solutions Lara Phillips.
Phillips says Unilever is responding to customers’ desire for more information about where their food comes from.
“A number of our customers have been increasing their ambition around climate change and their targets in that area and we have been hearing directly from our customers that they are wanting more information on this,” Phillips said.
The move was also seen from other American companies, particularly in the food service industry, including Panera Bread, Yum and Chipotle – both of which have introduced carbon labelling on their products – as well as customers Fonterra sells its ingredients to.
Fonterra had been preparing for this change for a while, she says, so it can provide that information should it be requested from customers.
“We’re really well placed to support our customers on this. We first started measuring our carbon footprint on-farm with AgResearch 15 years ago, so we have been doing emission reporting for much longer than Unilever,” she said.
“Because of our low carbon footprint in New Zealand, it means that we can provide really robust data to our customers so they have credible climate communications and so we can help them meet their emission reduction plans because we have a lower footprint than many other producers around the world. That puts us in a really good position with our customers. It’s a good opportunity for us to meet our market needs.”
Customers were requesting data across the entire supply chain, from inside the farm gate right through to shipping.
“For our customers, what we find is that the vast majority of their footprint is in the ingredients they supply and that area is a key one for many of our customers and then when we look at Fonterra’s footprint, 90% of our footprint is on-farm,” she said.
Phillips says Fonterra’s customers are asking the company what it is doing on the farm to lower its footprint because of this, which is why it developed the co-operative difference programme and other work farmers are doing to reduce their footprint.
Carbon footprint labelling is an area that has grown in interest in the past few years, particularly on the back of the Paris Agreement and with interest from investors. This has evolved to interest from consumers.
Unilever was also suggesting supermarkets create low-carbon or carbon neutral aisles, which Phillips saw as a possibility in the future.
“Supermarkets will look to make information more available and consumers are wanting more transparency and information, so we need to make sure we make that accessible and use that information to our advantage,” she said.
Phillips believed it would put Fonterra in a good position the more of this information was shared because it showed how sustainable NZ farms are.
“Consumers are wanting sustainable nutrition so we will need to keep demonstrating that. It will be driven around the world, not just from large multinational customers,” she said.
