When you inspect a package of M&Ms, among the best-selling candies in the US, you'll see recognizable components like sweetener, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. However, many more elements are less known: acacia gum, dextrin, carnauba wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.
You'll find 34 ingredients in M&Ms, with at least thirty nations involved in providing them. Every one has its own supply chain that transforms raw materials into ingredients – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, oil into artificial coloring.
These ingredients then journey across the world to a central processing facility where they are mixed and transformed into small blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.
It's becoming better understood that agricultural networks are a significant contributor of the climate crisis. Scientists can study deforestation for agriculture or greenhouse gases from animals. Yet the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods – like M&Ms – is more ambiguous and is only now to be understood. A key factor they have been so difficult to evaluate is the inherent complexity of ultra-processed foods: these industrially made items include a huge number of components and procedures to put them together, making it nearly impossible to track.
But it doesn't mean it's not important. Since UPFs dominate US grocery store shelves and eating habits – they now account for seventy percent of food sold in supermarkets, and more than half of dietary energy intake – experts say that assessing their environmental toll is essential to create a greener food system.
The Information We Already Understand
While scientists are just beginning to examine the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, what's already known about them is concerning.
"The greater the processing foods are, the more deleterious they are to human health and the planet," said a senior researcher. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the components are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact balloons.
Take the popular candy. The initial phase in creating the candies is farming for cocoa, sugar, dairy and palm oil.
There is extensive evidence that farming for components like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of deforestation across the globe. Since 1850, farmland growth has driven almost 90% of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for 30% of worldwide carbon output. Large corporations have been criticized in the past for farming practices in their supply chain, and have since created environmental initiatives, but these fail to address that industrial farming are, at their core, unsustainable.
Additionally, sweetener, milk solids and palm oil – likewise significant greenhouse gas emitters.
Furthermore are the factory-produced ingredients like artificial colors – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. Blue M&Ms are colored with E132 and E133; these dyes are mostly made in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, through synthetic processes of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, accelerated by the elements copper or chromium.
Creating soya lecithin, an ingredient made from soybean oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires steps like degumming in a heated vessel, chemically isolating phospholipids, bleaching using chemical agents and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. And, a sweetener, begins as corn that gets soaked in chemicals before being ground, divided and dried. From there, it's broken down into simpler compounds using biological catalysts and chemicals, and then recrystallized.
While highly manufactured candies are some of the worst offenders, different types of UPFs are burdensome on the environment 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 emitted to the atmosphere. Similar to other corporations, producers have developed their own environmental pledges, but several such promises are supported by methods that are considered greenwashing.
As a result, some experts have started to calculate the ecological cost of UPFs.
One analysis calculated that popular candies generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of carbon equivalents per kilo produced. With annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the US, this would mean that the candies emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – making up 0.1% of annual emissions in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on accessible information; the actual impact is probably significantly greater, experts say.
There's a "unknown element" when it comes to emissions tracking in the processed food industry, says a professor who researches how corporations engage with the climate crisis. "There is so much ambiguity as supply chains get complex."
The Gaps We Don't Know
Calculating precisely of the environmental toll of UPFs is nearly impossible, given that, definitionally, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a significant number of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Instead, these ingredients are chemically modified, certain portions stripped away, and tastes, colors or consistencies added in – and it's unknown what the cost of these methods are because so many suppliers and components are included.
Another reason is that every ultra-processed food are the creations of manufacturing corporations that have minimal motivation to disclose their environmental footprint and might not fully understand it to begin with.
As an example, large corporations do not farm primary components themselves, but instead depend on numerous growers that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that emissions from big food corporations may be underestimated. Experts noted that corporations "lack actual data, so they use estimated values, which are approximations."
Researchers say that corporations submit data on straightforward aspects like shipping, which are simpler to measure, and frequently exclude or complicate the farming-related carbon of their items. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output goes against the interests of major manufacturers, so the intricate assessments needed to establish the environmental impact of large-scale agriculture and complex manufacturing methods used to make UPF ingredients remain understudied.
"The primary goal of manufactured products is profit," said the researcher, pointing out that they're designed to be attractive, easy and pleasurable to eat.
"Most of the people in the manufacturing sector's value chain don't care about global warming from an ethical perspective, but they do care about profit," said another expert. He explains that to shift those incentives, the cost of foods and ingredients would need to incorporate their effect on our shared climate. But that would require government regulations and financial penalties based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.
The Reasons It Is Important
At just under $2, the cost of M&Ms at the supermarket barely represents their true cost on the planet. But to tackle these problems with manufactured products, more than just a few tweaks to the ingredient list are needed.
"Lowering the sodium, or sugar of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," stated the expert. "We need to transform the whole picture." To do that, he suggested consuming more regionally produced, unprocessed items, which frequently take much less resources and transportation to produce, and therefore have a significantly reduced environmental impact.
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