First Major Food Brand Adds Carbon Footprint Labels to Products

"This is about giving people the information needed to make informed decisions..."

They Do Labels

If you're looking at a food's label, it's probably because you want to know something about its ingredients or nutritional content.

But Quorn Foods thinks consumers will be interested in knowing what sort of impact its popular fake meat products have on the environment, too — so it's adding carbon labels to all its food products, according to a new Guardian story.

Double Checked

As part of this newly announced plan, Quorn's in-house team will calculate the carbon footprint of each of the company's food products, taking into account everything from the energy used by its factories to emissions produced during the manufacturing of a product's packaging materials.

Quorn will then task the Carbon Trust, an independent organization focused on accelerating sustainability, with analyzing and certifying each product's calculated carbon footprint before adding the information to the food's packaging.

Knowledge Is Power

Quorn has already calculated the carbon footprints of about half of its products and will begin rolling out the labels in June, according to the Guardian's story. By next year, every Quorn product will feature one of the labels.

"This is about giving people the information needed to make informed decisions about the food they eat and the effect it has on our planet’s climate — in the same way that nutrition information is clearly labelled to help inform decisions on health," Peter Harrison, Quorn's chief commercial officer, told The Guardian.

READ MORE: Quorn to be first major brand to introduce carbon labelling [The Guardian]

More on food sustainability: Lab-Grown Meat Could Be Worse for the Environment