Turning Data Into Action: The Path to Sustainable Food Systems

More than a decade-and-a-half has passed since Sir Terry Leahy, then chief executive of Tesco, promised to carbon footprint every one of the supermarket chain’s thousands of skus. He couldn’t manage it: the costs were too high and the competition wasn’t keen on the concept. “[…] it was 10 years ahead of its time,” said David North, who worked with Leahy on the initiative as corporate affairs director.

Indeed, in 2025, assessing the carbon footprint of a product or a meal is increasingly common at the major food retailers. Data has improved. So too has technology. A life cycle assessment can be run quickly and efficiently. And yet carbon labels adorn few products on the supermarket shelves.

“I think public-facing labels had their place, and still have their place, but the evidence behind them being a key lever of behavioural change was always quite limited,” says Anya Doherty.

As founder of Foodsteps, a data insights firm that provides footprinting services to food and drink businesses, this could be seen as an odd thing to say. Shouldn’t there be a hard sell on carbon labels and the benefits to your customers, clients and consumers? Not really. “That isn’t how I saw the business evolving,” she explains.

Recipe for success

The mantra at Foodsteps is for “change to happen at scale”, and that doesn’t mean mandatory carbon labelling rules (though they wouldn’t hurt). The ability to pop ‘kgCO2e’ against a steak and kidney pie, a vegetable korma or a four-cheese pizza certainly raised awareness of the possibilities. However, the chances of carbon labels nudging millions of people to change their choices even a little were slim, and would take time. Doherty quickly realised this: “In catering companies you can target a small number of people and arm them with this data and they can make a big difference,” she says.

Foodsteps’ clients, including Compass, Chartwells and Zizzi, have begun chopping and changing ingredients and recipes in order to bring the carbon footprint of the final dishes down. Chefs are enjoying the challenge too, given the data is offered up in real-time to them and they can innovate (it is easier to change a spaghetti bolognese served up on Wednesdays in a corporate canteen than it is to alter the essential ingredients of a Mars Bar or can of Coca-Cola). “We have way more flexibility than the high street,” says a head of ESG at a leading catering company (and one of those interviewed for a new report on net-zero in foodservice, due to be published in March by Footprint in association with Foodsteps).

That doesn’t mean high street brands are not dabbling in this kind of data too. The Azzurri Group, which owns Zizzi, Ask Italian and Coco Di Mama, has completed a full carbon analysis of its core businesses’ menus and established regular monthly performance reviews to track progress. As such, it’s been able to determine the carbon impact of specific ingredients and benchmark dishes against industry averages. At Coco Di Mama, dairy yoghurt has been replaced with coconut yoghurt in its tiramisu overnight oats, for example, reducing the dish’s carbon footprint by 26%. A new dough recipe created by Wildfarmed and made with regenerative flour has cut the footprint of the dough in half (an initiative that led to it being awarded ‘Best Supplier’ initiative at the 2024 Footprint awards).

Simply using more accurate data has also resulted in a reduction of food-related emissions by 6.85%, according to Azzurri’s 2025 ESG report published earlier this month. Food represents 62% of the company’s total emissions. “We are there to lead on the data side of things,” says Doherty, “and then it’s up to those in the company to use what we provide to leverage change within the business.”

Influential

This isn’t just about recipe reformulation. The data provided to foodservice businesses by Doherty and her team at Foodsteps – as well as its growing number of competitors in this space – is also arming chief sustainability officers and their teams with the evidence to influence the rest of the company. “We can see and influence so much,” says the CSO at a catering company.

Recent reports have suggested that sustainability leaders and their teams are still siloed within large organisations; that they lack the agency to deliver meaningful change. Data can provide them with the ammunition to drive action. They have confidence that changes will reduce carbon (and in some cases cut costs) and this brings others on board. Commercial opportunities can arise too: caterers say clients are asking for more data like this; investors are beginning to pore over it too.

Foodsteps is also helping those at the coalface of new reporting requirements. In July it was acquired by Registrar, a US firm owned by Paine Schwartz Partners, the private equity group dedicated to sustainable food chain investing. Registrar provides regulatory and compliance software, and will give the Foodsteps platform access to a global market of over 32,000 companies in 190 countries, including 28,000 food businesses.

“Foodsteps’ data platform is like no other,” said Registrar vice president of corporate development Brian Thies at the time. “With industry leading data that is recognised through partnerships with the University of Oxford, WWF and Wrap, the company has a track-record of helping procurement, sustainability, and marketing teams meet reporting standards and net-zero goals.”

Counting on carbon reports

There are voluntary commitments made to reach net-zero. Targets must be validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) which has added forest, land and agriculture (FLAG) emissions to its standards. As one expert consulted for the new net-zero report suggests: we are into the weeds of supply chain emissions, and this excites some, but frightens the life out of others.

There is also the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act in the US, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). In the UK, the government is set to approve UK versions of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards in the first quarter of this year (which have been developed by the ISSB). Then there is nature to consider too, with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) aiming to standardise reporting by companies on their impacts on the natural world and other nature-related risks. Work is also ongoing to develop a standardised product level accounting method for the agri-food sector through the Defra-funded ‘Long-term improvements to environmental impact data for Food’ (LED4Food) project.

It is enough to make a CSO’s head spin. Doherty is there to make sure it doesn’t and that CSOs can stay focused on change that will deliver carbon reductions. All these regulations will ensure sustainability is part of general business operations, or ‘embedded in the company’s DNA’, in ESG speak. “Rules like the CSRD can ride out the waves of intent [on sustainability] that tend to come and go with consumers,” Doherty says. Deep emissions cuts by 2030 are needed, but “I think we have become a bit too comfortable with the timelines around net-zero”, she adds.

Her advice is not to get too “bogged down” in the data: “It can be a distraction,” she says. Another surprising statement from someone leading a company driven by data. Her point is that “the data only needs to be good enough to serve the purpose you need it for – so decarbonisation of the food system over the next five years. And there are some pretty well evidenced and simple things we can do to achieve that.”