The Chilled Food Association (CFA) has described the carbon labelling of chilled food as “misguided” and “potentially misleading”.
In a statement the CFA, which represents many of the UK’s largest chilled food manufacturers, said: “Carbon footprint labelling is a recent development whereby a product label will show how many grammes of greenhouse gases were emitted during production, from sourcing raw materials, to manufacturing, transporting to the stores and to the end of life.”
The statement continued: “For the chilled food sector we believe that carbon footprint labelling of individual foods is misguided and potentially misleading to consumers”
“We favour the carbon footprinting of the business making foods which we believe to be far more relevant to identifying and addressing areas for carbon reduction than carbon footprint labelling”.
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The CFA went on to outline several reasons why carbon labelling of the products would be complicated – including that the commercial life spans of chilled food recipes are short and often under a year, that some components, and that the same product can often be prepared using different methods (for example conventional oven, or microwave).
It comes as broadly, UK and European consumers have been increasingly keen for more carbon labelling – a recent survey highlighting that 76% of customers across Europe and 72% of UK customers were keen for carbon labelling to be implemented on their food items.
However, there have been concerns around how easy they are to understand with another study highlighting that over 61% of UK consumers do not trust carbon labels from major retailers and brands.
Writing on LinkedIn the CFA’s director general Karin Goodburn said: “Net zero/carbon labelling of foods is inaccurate and misleading for those foods that are not ready to eat and shelf stable as it does not take account home storage or preparation (e.g. microwave/conventional/other oven” which can account for a large proportion of a food’s carbon footprint”.
She added that “business level net zero is a better indicator of net zero efforts”.
