UK Food Ecolabel Methodological Review

Key Takeaways For Agricultural Transitions,

Environmental Targets, and Food Sovereignty

28th March 2025

Written by Catherine Chong

Report Overview

Environmental labels (ecolabels) are largely unregulated, and without common standards and minimum operating criteria, there is ample room for disinformation. There is widespread concern about the potential for food ecolabels to exaggerate or falsely claim the environmental benefits and conversely, to underplay or conceal the environmental harms relating to the production of food products.

With food production being a major driver of the transgression of all six of the nine Planetary Boundaries, ecolabels should serve as vital tools for consumer empowerment and agricultural transition to higher standards, to limit the adverse impacts, and avoid the transgression of more Planetary Boundaries. 

Report highlights

The ecolabelling industry needs more robust and transparent methodological approaches to ensure credibility and alignment with the food and environmental agenda.

Methodologies should be designed with explicit sustainability strategies that will not undermine individual and institutional efforts to drive more sustainable consumption patterns and transition to higher standards of production.

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Key Findings

  • Extensive potential to mislead consumers, current ecolabels may not consistently provide consumers with accurate and reliable information about the environmental impact of food products across their supply chains

  • Significant variation and lack of comparability across schemes in the absence of a standardised approach.

  • A high risk of externalising critical environmental destruction.

  • A transparency gap in the absence of regulation and standard.

‘Eco-rating’ schemes:

  • A lack of significant environmental impacts such as biodiversity, air, soil, and water equality, 

  • Based on effect and outcome-based metrics.

  • Lack of significant environmental impacts such as biodiversity, soil, and water quality and accounting for site-specificity.

  • Over-reliance on modelled data instead of actual data.

  • Challenges in communicating multiple impacts- contextualising impacts and aggregating the outputs into a single rating.

‘Farm-assurance’ schemes: 

  • Assurance of standards of production, based on primary data collected on farms supplemented by independent inspection and verification procedures.

  • Greater coverage of environmental impacts related to circularity, ecotoxicity, soil health, water quality and availability. 

  • Certifications are based on practices adopted rather than verification of environmental outcomes achieved.

Call to Action

Policymakers, industry leaders, and ecolabelling bodies in the UK to:

  • Strengthen the validity and integrity of ecolabelling so that the information presented to stakeholders reflects the environmental performance of the corresponding methods of production.

  • Develop regulatory frameworks that prevent misleading claims and ensure methodological transparency including the disclosure of inherent limitations in communicating the actual environmental impact or outcome to stakeholders.

  • Engage with agroecological stakeholders for institutional learning and collaboration to ensure that ecolabels, like other food system accountability and transparency tools, are designed to support the agricultural transition to higher farming standards, meet national environmental targets and achieve food sovereignty.

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