Food industry ‘must move beyond simply reporting carbon emissions’

Despite a decade of improved carbon reporting across the food industry, emissions are not falling fast enough.

Food and agricultural supply chains account for around 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet improved disclosure has not translated into the operational change needed to drive meaningful reductions.

In a new report published today by sustainability consultancy Aethr Associates, we argue the reason is structural: carbon has become something businesses measure and disclose, but not something they systematically manage.

We call this the ‘decarbonisation delivery gap’: the disconnect between measuring emissions and systematically removing the inefficiencies that drive them. A core part of the problem is that traditional carbon metrics measure scale rather than efficiency; they tell an organisation how much carbon it produces, but not how well it is converting that carbon into economic value, or where to act.

A growing business can appear to worsen even as it becomes more efficient, and vice versa. With regulatory scrutiny of carbon performance tightening, the pressure to close that gap is growing.

To address this, the report introduces the Aethr Carbon Value Metric (ACVM), linking greenhouse gas emissions directly to Gross Value Added (GVA). By measuring carbon emissions against the economic value created, it compares which companies are generating more value for every tonne of carbon emitted.

When emissions fall and value creation rises, the ACVM improves, giving organisations a clear signal of real progress across sites, business units, and over time.

Examining the trends

To illustrate the metric, Aethr applied the ACVM to publicly available data from nine UK food retailers – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, M&S, Aldi, the Co-op, John Lewis Partnership and Lidl, across 2022, 2023, and 2024.

The year-on-year trends reveal variation that absolute reporting does not: most retailers show improvement, but the pace differs considerably, and some show stagnation in particular years.

The analysis is not intended as a comparative ranking; structural differences between businesses affect results, and the metric is most meaningfully used to track each organisation’s progress over time.

Reporting boundaries also vary. M&S, for example, includes its own distribution fleet in its emissions figures, which is not the case for all retailers, while the John Lewis Partnership figures cover the whole business rather than Waitrose alone.

Retail provides a useful illustration because it is one of the few parts of the food system with sufficiently consistent public data to apply the metric meaningfully, but Aethr is clear that the delivery gap is not a retail problem. It is a food sector problem.

Most food businesses we work with know their carbon footprint. Far fewer have a clear picture of whether their carbon efficiency is actually improving year on year, or where the biggest opportunities are. The ACVM is designed to give operations and sustainability teams the same kind of decision-grade visibility over carbon that finance teams have over cost. Without that, decarbonisation will keep getting measured and reported but not delivered.

The report argues that carbon emissions accumulate where processes consume more energy, materials, or movement than needed, making them a practical signal of operational inefficiency.

Across the retail sector, changes such as LED lighting, heat recovery systems, and logistics optimisation have delivered measurable cost savings alongside emissions reductions, suggesting the opportunity to act is already there for many businesses.

 Benefits of carbon efficiency

Where emissions are high, value is often being lost. When carbon efficiency improves, businesses see gains in cost control, resilience, and margin. It’s not about the boldest targets, it’s having the best operational discipline.

Decarbonisation fails when the focus is on reporting rather than management. Aethr’s response is LeanGreen, an approach that treats carbon waste the same way businesses have treated operational waste for decades – as something to be mapped, owned, measured, and systematically removed.

By embedding carbon reduction into day-to-day management across the business, rather than treating it as a standalone programme, this approach turns decarbonisation from an annual reporting exercise into a continuous performance discipline.

The urgency of this shift is increasing. Regulatory scrutiny of corporate carbon performance is tightening, and Scope 3 emissions (those generated across the supply chain rather than within a company’s own operations) are expected to face greater disclosure requirements in the near term.

For food businesses, where Scope 3 typically represents the largest share of the total footprint, the ability to demonstrate credible, value-linked progress is becoming a strategic differentiator.

The organisations that will be best positioned as requirements tighten are those that start treating carbon like cost: something to be managed, governed, and improved, not just reported. Decarbonisation is not a trade-off between sustainability and profitability. When it is managed properly, it drives both.