A few themes we explore in this session:
- How can we educate the average consumer to help them grasp difficult terms like “kg of CO2e” when labeling menu items or products?
- How have you tied business results to carbon labeling initiatives?
- How might carbon labeling and transparency affect the research and innovation process of new products?
It’s almost like you can’t be real. You can’t be doing good unless you check these 37 boxes and by the time you get to those 37 boxes, 10 years have passed and you haven’t actually made a positive impact. At the end of the day, greenhouse gases have the tightest link to climate change. That being said, we know that by carbon farming, we’re actually checking a lot of those other boxes. We’re increasing soil health, we’re increasing biodiversity within the farm, we’re helping with water conservation. All those things are coming along, we’re just not trying to overwhelm the consumer with every single check box.
We started carbon labeling in a spirit of learning. We were looking for a new way to talk about food and climate change – we know that 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system. As a brand Just Salad that has championed re-use for 16 years through this reusable bowl program, we felt that we wanted to talk about food in a way that was as innovative and fresh, and new as our reusable bowl program. We said, well, carbon labels sound pretty different, and maybe that would get our customers excited and interested in the link between food and planetary health. So for us, it was just a way to open up a new dialogue.