Food producers and supermarkets including M&S, Sainsbury’s, the Co-op and Nestlé, have formed a new non-profit organisation with scientists that will issue front-of-pack environmental scores on food products from this September.

The brainchild of Denis Lynn, the food entrepreneur who died in May 2021 following a freak quadbike accident, the Foundation Earth initiative will include M&S, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op with Nestlé, protein maker Tyson Foods and Spanish supermarket Eroski on the Foundation’s industry advisory group, each signing up to “explore the potential for environmental labelling on food products and to support Foundation Earth’s ambition to help build a more sustainable food industry”.

A pilot launch will see a group of Europe’s leading food brands launch front-of-pack environmental scores on a range of products this September – while the world’s largest food business, Nestlé, is supporting an intensive nine-month development programme to prepare the Foundation for full Europe-wide roll out in 2022.

Foundation Earth has brought together the world’s two leading systems for measuring the environmental impact of an individual food product and communicating the information clearly and simply to consumers via a front-of-pack score. Its aim is to promote more sustainable buying choices from consumers and more environmentally-friendly innovation from food producers, who will be determined to secure a better score.

The Foundation’s pilot launch this Autumn will use a traffic-light style system inspired by work from Oxford University researchers and developed by life cycle assessors at Mondra.

The pilot will run in parallel to an intensive nine-month development programme, supported by Nestlé, that will combine the Mondra method with a system devised by an EU-funded consortium of Belgium’s Leuven University and Spanish research agency AZTI.

The Mondra and EIT Food systems are unique globally, in that they both allow two products of the same type to be compared on their individual merits via a complete product life cycle analysis, as opposed to simply using secondary data to estimate the environmental impact of an entire product group.

In a mark of the multi-national support for the Foundation, Foundation Earth is also being backed by EIT Food, the European Commission’s multi-million Euro food innovation initiative.

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