Sustainable food profiling models to inform the development of food labels that account for nutrition and the environment: a systematic review

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Documents

  • Anne Charlotte Bunge
  • Kremlin Wickramasinghe
  • Jessica Renzella
  • Michael Clark
  • Mike Rayner
  • Holly Rippin
  • Afton Halloran
  • Nia Roberts
  • João Breda

Sustainable food profiling models (SFPMs) are the scientific basis for the labelling of food products according to their environmental and nutritional impact, allowing consumers to make informed choices. We identified ten SFPMs that score individual foods according to at least two environmental indicators, with the most common being greenhouse gas emissions (n=10) and water use (n=8). Six models additionally assessed the nutritional quality of foods and presented different methods to combine nutritional and environmental indicators. Key advantages of identified models include a wide range in system boundaries, reference units, approaches for defining cutoff values, design proposals for food labelling schemes, and the comprehensive geographical scope of the lifecycle inventory databases used in the development phase of the model. Key disadvantages of identified models include inconsistent methods for food classification and poor replicability due to unclear methods, unavailable code for environmental and nutritional impact calculation, and unclear cutoff values. We found that few SFPMs to date account for at least two environmental impact factors, and even fewer include nutritional values or other dimensions of sustainability. This systematic review highlights the need to use consistent components and to develop national and international reference values for the classification of sustainable food to enable standardised food labelling.

Original languageEnglish
JournalThe Lancet Planetary Health
Volume5
Issue number11
Pages (from-to)e818-e826
Number of pages9
ISSN2542-5196
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2021 This is an Open Access article published under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO license which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In any use of this article, there should be no suggestion that WHO endorses any specific organisation, products or services. The use of the WHO logo is not permitted. This notice should be preserved along with the article's original URL.

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Science - Sustainable food profiling models (SFPMs), Food labeling, Sustainable food systems

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