Assessing carbon labelling at Nestlé
Anke Stübing, head of corporate social responsibility at Nestlé Germany
Nestlé was on the spot at the UN Climate Conference (COP26) in Glasgow to discuss approaches to more climate protection and regeneration with politics, companies and other important interest groups and to exchange ideas for first experiences.
“Combating climate change can not wait. At Nestlé, we want to halve our greenhouse gas emissions until 2030 and reach net zero by 2050, and thus contribute to the ambitious goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, to limit the global increase in temperature to 1.5° C,” says Anke Stübing, head of corporate social responsibility at Nestlé Germany.
“In addition to our own efforts, we also want to support consumers in meeting climate-friendly decisions directly in the supermarket – for example, by a carbon labeling on food. It is important to us that consumers are offered a comparable label with genuine added value.”
Nestlé is therefore committed to a standard for uniform CO2 identification of food according to scientifically sound criteria. In this context, the company supports several initiatives, such as the German transparency initiative, Together for Carbon Labelling.
Nestlé is also involved in a European project with Foundation Earth, together with scientific institutions and actors from industry and trade. Here, two models are tested for measuring the ecological footprint of products. First pilot products with the so-called Eco Impact Score are already in the market in the United Kingdom.
“In the long term, we would like food, which are not only marketed according to their CO2 emissions, but holistically with regard to their environmental impact. For example, how much water or land area they consume in production. In order to achieve this, we also set ourselves for a common European methodology for the calculation of environmental impacts,” explains Stübing.
The fact that a uniform CO2 marking on food would have a real added value for consumers underline the results of the Nestlé Study 2021, “So climate-is Germany.”
The study shows that many people in Germany are uncertain of how they can feed climate-friendly. Less than half of the respondents announced that they know a lot about the subject: 4% answered “very good” and 43% answered “good.” Only a third (31%) had an assessment of how climate-friendly or harmful their own diet. Therefore, many more would like more orientation, when they buy products. Three quarters (73%) of the consumers find a CO2 marking on product packaging as important and helpful to better assess the climate compatibility of food.
