The hidden cost of ultra-processed foods on the environment: ‘The entire industry must pay’ | Ultra-processed foods

IIf you look at a box of M&Ms, one of the most popular candies in the United States, you’ll see some familiar ingredients: sugar, skim milk powder, and cocoa butter. But you’ll see a lot of other unrecognizable stuff: gum arabic, dextrin, carnauba wax, soy lecithin, and E100.

there 34 ingredients In M&Ms, according to Mars, the company that produces the candy, at least 30 countries – including Ivory Coast to New Zealand – Participates in supplying it. Each has its own supply chain that turns raw materials into ingredients – cocoa into cocoa liquor, sugarcane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.

These ingredients then travel across the world to a central processing facility where they are combined and transformed into mini blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.

It is becoming better understood that food systems are a major driver of the climate crisis. Scientists can study deforestation for agriculture, or methane emissions from livestock. But the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods — like M&Ms — is less clear and only now starting to come into focus. One reason they’re difficult to evaluate is the nature of UPFs themselves: These processed foods contain a large number of ingredients and processes to put them together, making them nearly impossible to track.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Since UPFs dominate grocery and diet store shelves in the United States, they now include 70% of food sold in grocery stores – more than half of the calories consumed – experts say understanding the environmental toll these diseases take is critical to building a more climate-friendly food system.

What are we? He knows

While scientists are just beginning to study the environmental impact of UPFs, what is already known about them is alarming.

“The more processed foods there are, the more harmful they are to human health and the environment,” said Anthony Vardet, a senior researcher at the French National Institute of Agriculture, Food and Environment. The main reason, he explains, is that the components are energy-intensive. When combined, balloons tally.

Take M&M’s. The first step in making the candy is to grow the cocoa, sugar, dairy products, and palm trees.

It has been well documented that farming for ingredients like cocoa pays Continuously increasing Deforestation rates around the world. Since 1850, agricultural expansion has led almost 90% Global deforestation, which was responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Mars has been called out in the past for its cocoa farming practices in its supply chain, and has since established Sustainability plansbut these fail to address large-scale agricultural practices such as cocoa farming, in essence, Unsustainable.

Then there are sugar, milk solids, and palm fat, which are also major sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

On top of that, there are artificially manufactured ingredients like food dyes — perhaps a sign of ultra-processing — of which M&Ms contain 13 different types. Blue M&Ms are colored with dyes E132 and E133; These dyes are mostly manufactured in the hotspots of food dye manufacturing in India and China. Through a chemical reaction From aromatic hydrocarbons (which are petroleum products) with diazonium salt, catalyzed with copper and chromium.

Create soy lecithin, an additive made from Soybean oil Which is used to change the texture of chocolate, requires steps such as degumming in a hot reactor, chemically isolating the phospholipids, decolorizing with hydrogen peroxide and drying under vacuum pressure. and Dextrosea sweetener, starts with corn that is soaked in acid before being ground, separated and dried. From there, it is broken down into smaller molecules using enzymes and acids, and then recrystallized.

Mars declined to comment on this story.

While ultra-processed chocolate products are some of the worst harmful products, other types of UPFs negatively impact the environment as well. Take Doritos, for example 39 ingredients. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every acre planted, 1000 kg of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere. Like Mars, PepsiCo, which makes Doritos, has developed its own products Sustainability promisesBut many of these promises are backed by practices that amount to greenwashing, such as “Regenerative agriculture“In fact, these sustainability promises undermine the critical need to better understand how UPFs impact our global climate.

As a result, some experts have begun to calculate the environmental damage caused by UPFs.

CarbonCloud, a Sweden-based software company that calculates emissions of food products, analyzed carbon detection from Mars and estimated that mergers and acquisitions generate at least 13.2 kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram of M&A produced. Mars produces more than 664 m kg of M&M candy in the United States each year, which means that if CarbonCloud’s calculations are accurate, the candy emits at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide — which makes up 0.1% of annual emissions in the United States. (Mars doesn’t report emissions by product, but according to its 2024 emissions report, it did 29 million tons CO2 throughout the company.)

But this is just an estimate based on publicly available data; Experts say the real cost may be much higher. There is a “black box” when it comes to carbon accounting in the processed food industry, says Patrick Callery, a professor at the University of Vermont who researches how companies are dealing with the climate crisis. “There is a lot of uncertainty with the complexity of supply chains.”

What we don’t know

It is almost impossible to obtain an accurate measurement of environmental damage caused by UPFs, since UPFs, by definition, consist of many components and a large amount of opaque processes. The ingredients are not mixed together as one does to make soup at home. Instead, these ingredients are chemically modified, parts are removed, and flavours, dyes or textures are added – and it is unclear how much these processes cost since so many suppliers and ingredients are involved.

Another reason is that all UPFs (again, by definition) are creations of food companies that have little incentive to disclose their environmental footprint and may not fully understand it to begin with.

For example, Mars itself does not grow cocoa, but instead relies on hundreds of farms that don’t always have accurate carbon accounting procedures. This means that emissions from large food companies may be underreported. Companies “don’t have actual data, so they use emissions factors, which are just guesses,” said David Bryngelsson, co-founder of CarbonCloud.

Companies report on simple things like transportation, which are easy to calculate, and often omit or circumvent the agricultural emissions of their products, Callery says. After all, reporting high emissions is against the interests of big food companies, so the complex calculations needed to determine the carbon footprint of large-scale agriculture and the multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make UPF ingredients remain understudied.

“The main point of ultra-processed foods is money,” Vardet said, noting that they are designed to be attractive, easy and fun to eat.

“Most people in [food industry’s] “The value chain doesn’t care about climate change from an ideological point of view, but it cares about money,” Bryngelson said. To shift those incentives, he explains, the value of foods and ingredients must include their impact on our shared climate. But this requires government regulations and financial penalties based on the true environmental cost of UPFs, Bryngelson says.

Why does it matter?

At just under $2, the price of M&Ms at the grocery store doesn’t reflect their true cost to the environment. But to address these problems with ultra-processed foods, more than just a few tweaks to the ingredient list are needed.

“Reducing salt or sugar in just one product is just greenwashing,” Vardet said. “We need to change the whole picture.” To do this, he suggested consuming more locally sourced whole foods, which often take much less energy and transit to produce, and therefore have a much lower carbon footprint.

Specialty goods that cannot be sourced locally, such as chocolate, should form a small part of our diet and come from traceable, ethical supply chains.

This is not easy for all Americans, given the rising costs of food and the prevalence of food deserts and substandard food retailers across the United States.

For this reason, individuals can’t just make environmentally (and health-conscious) choices, experts say. Instead, big food companies must take responsibility for the burden they impose on society – especially when it comes to climate change. Sustainability practices, such asCocoa for generations“The plan set by Mars or PepsiCo”Beep+“The initiatives are bandages on broken bones. Big food companies need to be phased out to create global food systems continuous.

But perhaps even more important is changing our understanding of the hidden costs of ultra-processed foods, Vardet says, whether that’s at home, in schools, or by banning the marketing of UPFs to children. Our food systems are “not natural at all. The entire industry must pay the hidden costs,” Vardet said.