Why Climate-Friendly Beef Labels Fall Short

(Bloomberg) -- Shoppers in the US and Europe are finding a growing number of products labeled or marketed as net carbon zero or carbon neutral. They’re part of an emerging group of certifications purporting to slash beef’s outsize climate footprint.

But an analysis of five such programs found they fail to publicly disclose enough emissions data to substantiate those claims, according to a report from the nonprofit World Resources Institute.

“We don’t have enough information to verify that they’re reducing emissions or that they’re even using practices to reduce emissions,” said Raychel Santo, a senior food and climate research associate at WRI and the report’s lead author.

The most effective way to curb emissions from beef, the report said, is simply to consume less of it.

Some green labels for beef have drawn scrutiny in recent years, with environmental and consumer groups saying the labels are often misleading or opaque. In November, Tyson Foods Inc. agreed to stop marketing its beef as “climate smart” or “climate friendly” as part of a settlement with the Environmental Working Group.

Livestock account for roughly 40% of food-system emissions, according to a 2023 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Of that, more than 60% comes from cattle used for meat and milk, compared with 14% from pigs and 9% from chickens. 

WRI examined green beef labels at the request of food-service companies like Aramark and IKEA, which are among more than 80 organizations that have pledged to cut food-related emissions under the institute’s Coolfood initiative. Beef was a focus of the research because it accounted for about half of pledge members’ total carbon footprint in 2024.

Beef-label claims

WRI reviewed five beef brands claiming to be lower carbon, net zero or carbon neutral, including TruBeef Organic Carbon Neutral, Silver Fern Farms’ Net Carbon Zero by Nature, Forward Farms’ Carbon Neutral Raised Beef and Royal Ranch Carbon Neutral Beef. The group assessed whether the companies publicly disclosed six key metrics needed to evaluate the credibility of their emissions assertions.

That included whether the labels tracked emissions across the full life cycle of their products and provided documentation showing how much their carbon-reduction practices actually cut emissions.

In almost all cases, the information wasn’t disclosed, the report found. One exception was Silver Fern Farms’ Net Carbon Zero by Nature, which published its production-related emissions.  

Most of the labels evaluated by WRI appeared to rely on indirect methods to balance out their emissions, such as growing carbon-capturing vegetation, rather than directly cutting methane emissions from cattle digestion and manure. 

Producers say they use a range of approaches to back up carbon zero and carbon neutral claims. Silver Fern Farms said it tracks the vegetation it uses to counteract emissions with satellite data and is certified by a sustainability group. 

TruBeef Organic relies on carbon offsets as “a way of taking responsibility for our footprint,” said co-founder Ken Power. 

Forward Farms said its carbon-neutral label is overseen by the US Department of Agriculture and compares emissions reduced by plants grown on farms and ranches with those produced by animals and equipment. Co-owner Derek Kampfe said publishing the data would be easy, but consumer appetite for such detail is limited. 

Royal Ranch has described its beef as carbon neutral in press releases, but owner Austin Allred said the company doesn’t make that claim on its labels. “As far as I am aware, carbon-neutral labeling hasn’t yet become a legitimized certification,” he said. 

The WRI analysis also looked at Tyson Foods’ Brazen Beef line, which was introduced in 2023 with claims of producing beef with 10% less greenhouse gas emissions. The company said in a statement that it stopped selling the brand over a year ago. 

Tyson Foods has long valued its stewardship of resources such as land and animals, a company spokesperson said. 

Net zero beef?

WRI also looked into whether it’s possible to produce net zero or carbon neutral beef. The researchers noted that there are ways of reducing beef’s footprint, including by using feed additive Bovaer, which cuts the methane in cow burps. But there are limits to how much emissions can be cut.

Previous research has suggested US cattle emissions could be slashed by almost half over the next decade using new strategies. But those studies didn’t account for land use, the WRI team said. Once that factor is included, total emissions from US beef could be reduced by only about 18%, the researchers found. 

“It’s highly unlikely that they would ever be truly net zero,” Santo said.

Even in a best-case scenario, US beef would generate about 11 times more carbon emissions than chicken and more than 18 times as much as beans or lentils, she said.

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