Farm to Fridge: Carbon Accounting at Neutral
At Neutral Foods, we rigorously and conservatively measure the entire carbon footprint life cycle of each of our products and eliminate it entirely. How we do that is the thing that sets us apart in our industry…
When it comes to the calculations for our footprint, we’re incredibly fortunate to rely on our chief science advisor, Dr. Greg Thoma – one of the seminal experts on the carbon footprint of U.S. dairy. Dr. Thoma has dedicated 12 years to researching the carbon footprint of a gallon of milk in America and has studied over 500 dairy farms cradle to grave in that pursuit. Building on all thisresearch, Dr. Thoma fine tunes his models and calculations to give us incredibly robust, deeply conservative estimates for every product, based on each product’s life cycle and characteristics.
These estimates include everything that happens from farm to fridge — the emissions of the fertilizer on-farm, the cows and the methane, the trucks that transport to the co-packer, the energy used in the process, the packaging, everything at retail and the consumer’s home, and what happens when the milk carton is disposed of (e.g., recycle vs. incinerate vs. landfill).
As broad as the lifecycle analysis is, it’s also deep. For example, the retail portion of the value chain includes estimates on things like the leakage rate of the dairy aisle refrigerators as people open and close those doors all day, as well as an estimate on how far the average consumer drives round-trip to go buy milk and how much of that drive we can shoulder in our product footprint (based on the amount of the bill that milk makes up). As a scientific leader in the space, Dr. Thoma’s foundational work has been cited 395 times in peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Our carbon footprint calculations are not only performed by Dr. Thoma,, but have been certified by SCS Global Services in accordance with leading standards (i.e., The Greenhouse Gas Protocol: Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard and ISO 14067).
Understanding the footprint of our products is the first critical pillar of Neutral’s operating model, but the work we are most passionate about is the radical reduction of the footprint on farm. If our global food system accounts for 21-37% of all GHGs, it can’t be just about making that footprint neutral solely through the use of offsets, it has to be about demonstrating that a whole new way of producing food is, in fact, possible. This year, our carbon team is working to eliminate the equivalent of 60% of our gross products’ carbon footprint by directly supporting farmers and ranchers, providing them with the resources necessary to adopt low- and no-greenhouse gas emitting agricultural practices.
This is one look at how we account for carbon emissions, which we have been doing since our inception. Neutral is on a mission to radically fight climate change by focusing on innovation and progress in our agricultural food supply.
