Foundation Earth is an independent, non-profit organisation established to issue front-of-pack environmental scores on food products, enabling consumers to make more sustainable buying choices. We have brought together expert scientists and leading figures from food production and retailing across the UK and EU who all share a vision of a future food industry that doesn’t destroy Planet Earth.

Foundation Earth has also brought together the world’s two leading systems for measuring the environmental impact of an individual food product and communicating the information clearly and simply to consumers via a front-of-pack score. Its aim is to promote more sustainable buying choices from consumers and more environmentally-friendly innovation from food producers, who will be determined to secure a better score.

The Foundation’s pilot launch in Autumn 2021 will use a traffic-light style system developed by Mondra, using data from the academic paper Poore & Nemecek (2018).

The pilot will run in parallel to an intensive nine-month development programme, supported by Nestlé, that will combine the ‘Mondra’ method with a system devised by an EU-funded EIT Food consortium of Belgium’s Leuven University and Spanish research agency AZTI.

The Mondra and EIT Food systems are unique globally, in they both allow two products of the same type to be compared on their individual merits via a complete product life cycle analysis, as opposed to simply using secondary data to estimate the environmental impact of an entire product group. This method of individual assessment using primary data is crucial to encourage sustainable innovation in the international food supply chain. The Foundation Earth R&D programme will produce an optimum and automated system for use across the UK and EU by 2022.