Circular and Low Impact Processed Food (CLIP)

Food production is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and yet the carbon footprint of most processed food products is poorly understood. Our aim is to develop a carbon impact assessment tool for processed foods, using the Cornish Pasty as a pilot. We want to work with you to develop a freely available tool that can help the industry better understand and ultimately improve the environmental performance of your products.

Working with us can provide these benefits for your company:

• demonstrate your commitment towards sustainability and add value to your products
• benchmark your product against the industry’s average and other types of processed food
• identify opportunities for cost-effective carbon reduction
• investigate new products and inform strategic decisions
• reduce risk of exposure to climate related regulations and consumer actions

The tool adopts a life cycle assessment (LCA) based approach to examine the entire food supply chain and quantify consumption of resources such as energy and water and generation of environmental impacts such as carbon emission.

Results from a preliminary LCA on a generic pasty show that its carbon footprint can vary significantly depending on a wide range of factors such as recipes, sourcing of ingredients, manufacturing practices and storage and distribution activities.

Your inputs are crucial for us to make the tool more representative and useful for the industry. So we would love to work with you on this exciting and important project.

If you are interested, please do get in touch with us: Xiaoyu.Yan@exeter.ac.uk

(Image attribution: David Johnson [1] / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).