Testing the effectiveness of ecolabels to reduce the environmental impact of food purchases in worksite cafeterias: A randomised controlled trial
Rachel Pechey, Paul Bateman, Brian Cook, Christina Potter, Michael Clark, Cristina Stewart, Carmen Piernas, Susan A. Jebb
Abstract
1. Introduction<br/>Meeting global climate targets will require a marked reduction in environmental impacts caused by dietary patterns (Willett et al., 2019), with several UK supermarkets setting targets to halve the environmental impact of customers' food shopping by 2030 (Lee, 2021). The environmental impacts of different types of foods are highly variable, and variation in impact is also seen for a given food. For example, there is a 50-fold variability in the land-use impacts of beef products, although the difference in impacts of a given food (e.g. beef) is typically smaller than the difference in impacts between food types (e.g. beef vs beans) (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). For consumers to be able to make ecologically informed purchases, they need relevant information about the environmental impact of individual products at the point of choice.