About

Nomad Foods, Europe’s leading frozen food company, is committed to achieving carbon net zero as part of its commitment to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

Nomad Foods currently has a near-term SBTi validated target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 45% per ton of product produced across scope 1, 2, and 3, amounting to a 25% reduction in absolute terms by 2025. Given the business’ recent acquisitions and the publication of the SBTi Forest, Land, and Agriculture (FLAG) requirements, Nomad Foods is currently reviewing its carbon strategy and supporting targets. As emissions from ingredients production account for over 65% of their carbon footprint, Nomad Foods will be prioritising efforts to reduce upstream emissions moving forward.

Challenge

Nomad Foods has a commitment to sustainable farming and is exploring how to evolve its activity to help both the nature and climate crisis. Nomad will be using collected primary data to inform the strategy where available and address sustainability concerns along its upstream supply chain. Part of this strategy is using primary data from suppliers to calculate scope 3 emissions, which is more accurate than using industry-average emission factors. This will allow Nomad Foods to gain insights in where to target and measure reduction efforts within their supply chain. In addition, Nomad Foods will also be able to provide upstream suppliers – such as the farmers in their supply chain – with insights in how to reduce their own impact.

However, Nomad Foods has a very complex portfolio, spanning 250 ingredient groups. Over half of the vegetables, potatoes and herbs sourced are from farmers with whom Nomad Foods has a direct relationship and long-term contract, totalling more than 800 farmers. Collecting primary data from such a diverse array of suppliers is daunting, due to the scale, diversity, and lack of streamlined procedures and expertise. Not only is the scope itself challenging – there are also no existing carbon footprinting tools that can meet Nomad’s specific needs of:

• Footprinting all product categories and geographies with a consistent methodology
• Providing insights at both the farm and producer level

To address these challenges, Nomad piloted a tailor-made tool on the SimaPro online platform – customised to Nomad’s supply chain, ensuring high robustness and meaningful insights at the farm-level, and giving farmers room to provide input that gets incorporated into the long-term solution, which ensures their needs and priorities are considered.

Solution

Gathering primary data from all product categories is a massive task. So, Nomad Foods conducted a pilot project with crop producers.

The objectives of the pilot were:

1. Collecting crop-specific carbon footprints for Nomad’s most important crop ingredients to help move away from reliance on secondary data.
2. Identifying on-farm environmental hotspots, gaining insight on where to target sustainability efforts.
3. Learning from the data collection and carbon footprinting process, to identify what works and what doesn’t, to lay the groundwork for building a scalable solution for Nomad’s wider supply chain.

Of their 800-1000 farmers, Nomad included around 40 in the initial pilot, after presenting them with the context and benefits of their involvement.

PRé built the base of the tool in the SimaPro online platform, using a highly configurable LCA model following FLAG methodology to cover 6 countries and 20+ vegetables. The parameters from the configurable model were then linked to a survey, which enables farmers to provide primary input data through a secure online form – no carbon footprinting expertise required.

With this tool, we could easily send out requests and gather data from many farmers at the same time. Once they had submitted their data, we bulk-calculated the results automatically using API. The result: footprints from different farms, with different crops, across various countries. The footprints and insights can be displayed on farm level for the individual farmers, and the meta-level for Nomad Foods.

• The farm-level reports clearly show the absolute footprint and main carbon hotspots, plus the option to dive into the key contributors within each group. For example, which fertilizers have the largest impact, or which cultivation stage is responsible for most of the fuel use.

• The meta-level reports for Nomad Foods allow easy navigation between different geographies and crops. They also link to individual farm reports. This centralized overview can facilitate ongoing collaboration and informed decision-making around driving carbon reductions at farm level.

Benefits

For the pilot project, 30 farmers from across the UK and Europe provided primary data for carbon footprint calculations. The analysis revealed various hotspots based on geography, crop type, and management practices. However, the key drivers across the board were fuel and fertiliser usage. This has been very insightful for both the farmers and Nomad.

To ensure farmer engagement, involvement of Nomad’s regional agricultural managers and clear communication of data requirements were crucial. This bottom-up approach resulted in a far smoother process than the usual top-down approach because the agricultural managers knew what was happening both in the field and in the LCA. That meant they could create buy-in among farmers and emphasize that farmer input was crucial for future improvements.

On the whole, this tailor-made solution with an online survey and a configurable LCA model offers an effective approach to engage farmers in providing primary data. These types of tailor-made solutions really shine in complex situations, with multiple product categories and geographical locations to keep in mind. Although this pilot solution is far from ready to manage the full Nomad portfolio, it has served as an important stepping stone in incorporating more primary data in their corporate footprinting and ongoing carbon strategy review. The participating farmers have also gained more insight into their on-farm impacts and agency over where to target change. Going forward, it will be exciting to define the next steps toward further roll-out to more crop producers other product categories.

The food system accounts for over a third of global GHG emissions. Consequently, as Europe’s leading frozen food company we wanted to increase our understanding of carbon at farm-level to inform our long-term activity to achieve net zero. Given’s PRé’s expertise within the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) space, we decided to partner with them. They were excellent partners, taking a flexible and pragmatic approach, with clear communication, and well-defined roles and responsibilities between all stakeholders involved. The final deliverable was an easy to navigate excel containing 30 farm level LCA’s across several countries and crops. This was exactly what we had envisioned, clearly showing carbon emission hot-spots enabling us to have focused discussions around what action can be taken to reduce them.

Alisha Anstee, Group Sustainability Manager at Nomad Foods Ltd