TY - JOUR

T1 - Sustainable food profiling models to inform the development of food labels that account for nutrition and the environment: a systematic review

AU - Bunge, Anne Charlotte

AU - Wickramasinghe, Kremlin

AU - Renzella, Jessica

AU - Clark, Michael

AU - Rayner, Mike

AU - Rippin, Holly

AU - Halloran, Afton

AU - Roberts, Nia

AU - Breda, João

N1 - Copyright © 2021 This is an Open Access article published under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO license which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In any use of this article, there should be no suggestion that WHO endorses any specific organisation, products or services. The use of the WHO logo is not permitted. This notice should be preserved along with the article's original URL.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - Sustainable food profiling models (SFPMs) are the scientific basis for the labelling of food products according to their environmental and nutritional impact, allowing consumers to make informed choices. We identified ten SFPMs that score individual foods according to at least two environmental indicators, with the most common being greenhouse gas emissions (n=10) and water use (n=8). Six models additionally assessed the nutritional quality of foods and presented different methods to combine nutritional and environmental indicators. Key advantages of identified models include a wide range in system boundaries, reference units, approaches for defining cutoff values, design proposals for food labelling schemes, and the comprehensive geographical scope of the lifecycle inventory databases used in the development phase of the model. Key disadvantages of identified models include inconsistent methods for food classification and poor replicability due to unclear methods, unavailable code for environmental and nutritional impact calculation, and unclear cutoff values. We found that few SFPMs to date account for at least two environmental impact factors, and even fewer include nutritional values or other dimensions of sustainability. This systematic review highlights the need to use consistent components and to develop national and international reference values for the classification of sustainable food to enable standardised food labelling.

AB - Sustainable food profiling models (SFPMs) are the scientific basis for the labelling of food products according to their environmental and nutritional impact, allowing consumers to make informed choices. We identified ten SFPMs that score individual foods according to at least two environmental indicators, with the most common being greenhouse gas emissions (n=10) and water use (n=8). Six models additionally assessed the nutritional quality of foods and presented different methods to combine nutritional and environmental indicators. Key advantages of identified models include a wide range in system boundaries, reference units, approaches for defining cutoff values, design proposals for food labelling schemes, and the comprehensive geographical scope of the lifecycle inventory databases used in the development phase of the model. Key disadvantages of identified models include inconsistent methods for food classification and poor replicability due to unclear methods, unavailable code for environmental and nutritional impact calculation, and unclear cutoff values. We found that few SFPMs to date account for at least two environmental impact factors, and even fewer include nutritional values or other dimensions of sustainability. This systematic review highlights the need to use consistent components and to develop national and international reference values for the classification of sustainable food to enable standardised food labelling.

KW - Faculty of Science

KW - Sustainable food profiling models (SFPMs)

KW - Food labeling

KW - Sustainable food systems

U2 - 10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00231-X

DO - 10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00231-X

M3 - Review

C2 - 34774122

VL - 5

SP - e818-e826

JO - The Lancet Planetary Health

JF - The Lancet Planetary Health

SN - 2542-5196

IS - 11

ER -