16 October, 2026

Cost, calories, and now carbon footprint. The announcement of the Global Sustainable Transition Alliance’s (GSTA’s) international standard for footprinting in the food and beverage sector could mean that customers will soon be checking more than just the nutritional value of their next snack at the checkout.

Today, depending on who you ask, the same chocolate bar could claim to have very different emissions, due to varying methodologies across brands, retailers, software providers and consultancies.

The GSTA is proposing one standardised method for calculating product-level emissions in the food and drink sector, aligned with existing standards such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, SBTi, ISO, PACT and PEF. Led by WRAP and Wageningen University & Research, its founding members represent a range of perspectives. These include major food and beverage companies such as Mars Incorporated and Schwarz Group (Lidl), food supply chain platforms including Mondra and Inoqo, and industry initiatives such as the European Sustainable Food Coalition and Partnership for Carbon Transparency.

While we may still be some way off seeing the carbon footprint of our favourite biscuit displayed on packaging, a single standard will foster consistent and comparable data across products, suppliers, years and product iterations. This could make a real difference for companies in this space. Retailers collecting data for scope 3 calculations and procurement decisions will benefit from comparable and robust inputs, while suppliers can enjoy more streamlined, standardised requests compared with the large number of slightly different requests they receive today.

Twenty years ago, Tesco pledged to put carbon labels on the 70,000 products it sells, a commitment it quietly dropped just five years later, with data collection challenges to blame. And many of us will remember the days when Walkers Crisps briefly included a carbon measurement on pack (85g for a standard pack of cheese and onion). The GSTA’s new standard could finally begin to make big ambitions like this a reality again.

By Nia Vines