If you examine a package of M&Ms, among the best-selling sweets in the US, you'll notice recognizable ingredients like sweetener, dried milk, and cocoa butter. But, many more elements are less known: acacia gum, starch gum, palm wax, soy lecithin, and E100.
There are 34 ingredients in the candy, and no fewer than thirty countries participating in providing them. Every one has its own supply chain that converts base substances into ingredients – beans into chocolate paste, plants into sweetener, petroleum into blue food dye.
These ingredients then journey across the world to a central processing facility where they are combined and transformed into tiny blue, red, yellow and green candy-coated chocolates.
It's becoming better understood that agricultural networks are a significant contributor of the climate crisis. Scientists can examine deforestation for agriculture or methane emissions from livestock. But the ecological footprint of ultra-processed foods – like M&Ms – is less clear and is just beginning to come into focus. A key factor they have been so difficult to assess is the very nature of ultra-processed foods: these factory-produced foods include a huge number of components and processes to assemble them, making it nearly impossible to track.
However, this doesn't imply it's unimportant. As ultra-processed foods take over American supermarkets and eating habits – they now account for seventy percent of products purchased in supermarkets, and more than half of calories consumed – experts say that understanding their ecological cost is critical to create a more climate-friendly agricultural system.
What We Already Understand
While scientists are only starting to investigate the environmental impact of UPFs, what's already known about them is worrisome.
"The more processed products become, the more harmful they are to human health and the environment," said a senior researcher. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. Once assembled, the toll balloons.
Take the popular candy. The first step in producing the sweets is cultivating for cocoa, sugar, milk products and palm.
It has been well-documented that farming for components like chocolate drives consistently rising rates of forest clearance across the globe. For over a century, farmland growth has driven nearly ninety percent of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for thirty percent of worldwide carbon output. Major companies have been called out in the past for agricultural methods in their production network, and have since developed sustainability plans, but these fail to address that large-scale agricultural practices are, fundamentally, unsustainable.
Then there's, sugar, milk solids and palm oil – also significant greenhouse gas emitters.
Furthermore are the industrially made components like artificial colors – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which these candies contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are dyed with artificial blue dyes; these dyes are mostly made in industrial color production centers Asia, through synthetic processes of aromatic hydrocarbons with diazonium salt, accelerated by the elements copper and chromium.
Producing soya lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires steps like oil refining in a hot reactor, chemically isolating phospholipids, bleaching using hydrogen peroxide and drying under reduced air pressure. Similarly, dextrose, starts off as maize that gets soaked in chemicals before being milled, divided and dried. Afterward, it's broken down into simpler compounds using biological catalysts and acids, and then reformed into crystals.
While ultra-processed chocolate products are among the most damaging, different types of UPFs are burdensome on the planet as well. Consider a well-known chip, which has 39 components. Corn is the primary component, and for every hectare grown, 1,000kg of CO2 is released to the air. Like other corporations, producers have developed their own sustainability promises, but many of these commitments are supported by methods that are considered greenwashing.
Consequently, some experts have started to calculate the ecological cost of UPFs.
A study estimated that popular candies generate at least 13.2kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. Considering yearly output of more than six hundred million kilograms in the US, this would mean that the candies emit at least three point eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide – accounting for zero point one percent of annual emissions in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the true cost is likely much higher, according to specialists.
There's a "black box" when it comes to emissions tracking in the manufactured food sector, says Patrick Callery who researches how companies engage with the climate crisis. "There exists so much uncertainty as production networks get complicated."
The Gaps We Don't Know
Calculating precisely of the environmental toll of UPFs is extremely challenging, since, definitionally, these products consist of many ingredients and a high volume of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these elements are altered synthetically, some parts stripped away, and flavors, colors or textures added in – and it's unclear what the cost of these processes are because so many suppliers and components are included.
Another reason is that every ultra-processed food are the products of food companies that have minimal motivation to disclose their ecological impact and might not comprehend it to start with.
For instance, major brands do not farm key ingredients themselves, but instead depend on numerous growers that don't always have precise emissions tracking in place. This means that carbon output from large manufacturers may be underreported. Analysts noted that corporations "lack actual data, so they use estimated values, which are guesses."
Specialists say that corporations provide reports on simple things like shipping, which are simpler to measure, and often omit or complicate the farming-related carbon of their product. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output goes against the objectives of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to determine the environmental impact of large-scale agriculture and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make processed food components remain understudied.
"The main point of ultra-processed foods is profit," stated Fardet, pointing out that they're created to be appealing, convenient and pleasurable to eat.
"The majority of individuals in the manufacturing sector's value chain don't care about global warming from an ethical perspective, but they are interested in profit," said another expert. He clarifies that to shift those incentives, the value of products and components would need to include their effect on our global environment. But that would require official policies and economic consequences based on the actual ecological impact of UPFs.
The Reasons It Is Important
At just under $2, the cost of popular candies at the supermarket hardly reflects their true cost on the environment. But to address these problems with ultra-processed foods, not only a few tweaks to the ingredient list are required.
"Lowering the sodium, or sweetener of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," stated Fardet. "It is necessary to change the whole picture." To do that, he recommended eating more locally sourced, unprocessed items, which frequently take much less energy and transit to create, and therefore have a significantly reduced carbon footprint.
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