Abstract
Background
The global food system faces a dual challenge for the decades ahead: providing nutritious food to a growing population while reducing its environmental footprint. Reformulation of food has been identified as a strategy to improve the nutritional quality of products; but the environmental consequences of such reformulations have rarely been studied. The objective was to assess the evolution of five environmental impact indicators following reformulations of extruded breakfast cereals.
Methods
Recipe, nutritional composition and sourcing data for three extruded breakfast cereals were retrieved from the manufacturer, at three distinctive time points of a 15-year reformulation cycle: 2003, 2010, and 2018. Nutritional information was summarized using the Nutri-Score indicator. The environmental impact of all recipes was assessed by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) using five indicators: climate change (CC), Freshwater consumption scarcity (FWCS), Abiotic resource depletion (ARD), Land use impacts on biodiversity (LUIB), and Impacts on ecosphere/ecosystems quality (IEEQ). Life cycle inventory (LCI) was both primary data from the manufacturer and secondary data from usual third-party LCI datasets.
Results
Reformulation led to improved nutritional quality for all three products. In terms of environmental impact, improvements were observed for the CC, ARD and IEEQ indicators, with average reductions of 12%, 14% and 2% between 2003 and 208, respectively. Conversely, the FWCS and LUIB indicators were increased by 57% and 70%, respectively. For all indicators but ARD, ingredients contributed most to the environmental impact, while the absolute impacts of other stages of the supply chain (i.e. manufacturing, packaging, transport and end-of-life) reduced. A sensitivity analysis simulating no deforestation agricultural practices suggested that the CC indicator could be further reduced by 21 to 49% for the 2018 recipes.
Conclusions
This study highlighted the need to better account for the environmental consequences of changing food product recipes. While improvements can be achieved at all stages of products’ life cycles, agricultural commodities need to be the focus for further improvement, in particular in shelf-stable grain-based products such as extruded cereals. This could be achieved through selection of less demanding ingredients and improvements in agricultural practices.
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