Today, leading baby and kid’s food brand Ella’s Kitchen has announced its partnership with data and environmental impact platform Foodsteps, as part of its ambition to halve the carbon intensity of its products by 2030.
The partnership will kick-off with an independent assessment of life cycle emissions across the brand’s product portfolio and supply chain, covering 210 products.
The Foodsteps database will enable Ella’s Kitchen to accurately measure, understand, and reduce its environmental impact, from farm to highchair. Using data, developed in partnership with Cambridge University, WWF and WRAP, Ella’s Kitchen aims to embed environmental impact across its decision-making processes, from ingredient selection and recipe development to product design and packaging manufacturing.
Ella’s Kitchen was the first kids’ food brand to set science-based targets. It has committed to reducing its Scope 1 + 2 Greenhouse Gas emissions by 100% and reduce Scope 3 emissions by 28% by 2030 (against 2018/2019 baseline). This partnership represents a significant advance towards this goal.
Foodsteps is working with operational teams across Ella’s to measure and reduce the CO2e intensity of products by 50%, in support of their Science Based Target.
Currently, approximately 75% of the brand’s carbon emissions come from ingredients and packaging.[1]The partnership will focus on equipping the B-Corp with data so it can make better decisions across its product portfolio, including on ingredient sourcing, product development and packaging, and follows the brand’s commitment to make 73% of its pouches fully recyclable at kerbside by the end of 2024.
This is all part of Ella’s Kitchen’s mission to ensure every little one grows up happy, healthy + never hungry, by making sure that little ones have access to sustainable, nutritious food.
Global food production is responsible for approximately a 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions.[2] As the UK’s largest baby food brand to commit to a partnership of this kind, the two organisations hope to inspire other large food brands to reduce their carbon impact, using data-backed decision making to create a healthy, sustainable food system.
Chris Jenkins, head of impact at Ella’s Kitchen, said: “What is the carbon impact of a strawberry, versus a banana, versus a carrot? And how do those emissions grow right from the moment they are planted, until they are transported to factories, packaged into our products, and then put on the shelves? That’s the level of detail food businesses like ours need if we are really going to cut our carbon emissions and safeguard our planet for future generations.
“That’s why we’re really excited to launch this partnership with Foodsteps. The platform will give us full visibility of the carbon impact of every decision we make. From recipe development to ingredient selection, to the choices we make on packaging and processing, we will now be able to make data driven decisions and look at how we can reduce, mitigate and minimise the impact of our products right from the very beginning.
“Our Mission is for every little one to grow up happy, healthy and never hungry – through this partnership I believe we can continue to develop and deliver great tasting, nutritious products packed full of fruit and veggies, whilst also working even harder to minimise our impact to leave the smallest footprint we can.”
Anya Doherty, CEO at Foodsteps, said: “Our partnership with Ella’s Kitchen demonstrates an important step towards decarbonising our food system: embedding environmental impact data and decision-making into the food product development process. Ella’s are ideal partners for us given their commitment to be an ambitious and forward-thinking force for sustainability in the food system, and we’re thrilled that they will find great use for our software platform and data to achieve their food carbon reduction targets. We look forward to helping Ella’s create nutritious, planet-conscious food for little ones.”
