The True Impact of Meal Kits
The real environmental impact of meal kits. Ordering goods and food at a click is easy, fast, and convenient–but it creates mountains of packaging waste and millions of transport miles. Shopping from any device, anywhere and having goods delivered to your door, sometimes within hours, has tremendous appeal. Younger age groups are less likely to shop locally than people over 55.
Most consumers consider their environmental impact only when they are drowning in excess packaging (nearly ⅓ of solid waste in the US comes from e-commerce packaging), but they ignore the rest. Such as the fact that Amazon emits nearly as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as a small country (in figures released last year).
Environmental Impact
It’s easy to go online and buy things cheaply. Even though they might have been shipped from far off countries, manufactured from raw materials, and arrived at our homes at little or no (financial) cost.
We live in a world in which profit and consumerism are rampant. We don’t behave–and online retailers don’t encourage us to behave–in a sensible way. Ever shortening delivery times, even same-day delivery, means goods get moved in smaller and smaller quantities. There are vehicles traveling all over making single deliveries.
The Appeal
The concept of “free” delivery, which is a selling point for retailers, is not really free in the sense of what it costs in environmental terms. People also buy things, particularly clothes, with the intention of returning most of the items in the order, resulting in more mileage. There’s no financial penalty for doing so.
Hot Food Delivery Services
The growth in hot food delivery services, such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats, has been enormous. It’s sheer inefficiency to move a single meal in a car or motorbike. Bicycles would help in terms of pollution, but the trend has been for businesses to expand their networks, making delivery by bicycle not viable.
Consumers waste somewhere between 30% to 40% of the food produced, which is just a mind-boggling number. Food waste affects the environment in multiple ways.
Food Production and GHGs
All food production adds greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere, and producing excess food uses unnecessary crop land, water and fertilizer. Furthermore, as food rots in landfills, it produces more of the greenhouse gas methane.
One selling point of meal-delivery services like Blue Apron is that they minimize food waste by sending exact portions. But does this offset the environmental costs of the packaging and shipping of the ingredient boxes? Meal-delivery services do encourage people to conserve food, which is commendable: Consumers waste about 21 percent of the food they purchase, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
But…What of the Packaging?
But those services’ packaging materials create a new set of problems. Most meal-delivery kits come with plastic-covered freezer packs to keep the food fresh. According to Mother Jones, Blue Apron piles up more than 190,000 tons in freezer-pack waste annually.
The freezer packs are recyclable, but cleaning and recycling them is not always easy, and many recycling services do not want plastic bags. The amount of carbon (CO2) emissions generated by driving the meals to individual residences is also a problem. Blue Apron is trying to address that by placing its meal kits in grocery stores; other companies have begun to do the same.
Blue Apron also says that it obtains food from family farms that use regenerative agricultural practices, does not sell meat raised with hormones or antibiotics, and serves only fish that meet the standards of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.
Meal Kits and Sustainability
Some predict that meal kits will gross $10 billion in annual sales by 2020. That would challenge pizza delivery, which accounts for $10 billion out of pizza’s $44 billion a year in U.S. sales. While it may seem that heaps of plastic from meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron make them less environmentally friendly than traditional grocery shopping, a new study says the kits actually produce less food waste.
Meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron or HelloFresh promise gourmet meals without the hassle of shopping for ingredients. But environmentally conscious consumers may wonder about all the plastic and cardboard it takes to bring that meal to their doorstep.
A Consumer Poll
In a new study by National Public Radio (NPR), “How I Learned To Face Food Waste And Plan Smarter,” researchers argued that, pound for pound, meal kit delivery services have a smaller carbon footprint than equivalent meals bought from a grocery store and prepared at home.
The study, published in the scientific journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, examines the whole life cycle — from farm to rubbish bin — of meal kits and their grocery store equivalents. On average, store meals produce 33% more greenhouse gas emissions than their equivalents from Blue Apron. Much of the reduced emissions stems from less food waste and a more streamlined supply chain, according to the study.
While focusing on the plastic and packaging in meal kits is important, it’s not the whole story. Food production has a huge carbon footprint. One study estimates it is responsible for 19% to 29% of annual greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Part of this food carbon footprint is producing the plastic that keeps food fresh.
A Broader Approach
But to get the whole picture, we need to consider emissions from fertilizer production, farm equipment, and processing operations. As well as how that food gets distributed.
A substantial chunk of food’s carbon footprint is waste, much of which happens during distribution and consumption. According to a United Nations‘ (UN) report food waste (its production, processing, and distribution) is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, just behind that of the U.S. and China.
In a study from 2010, the USDA estimated that about 31% of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted, with 10% occurring at the retail level and 21% at the consumer level. The study measured data output in the creation of two different meals: one meal kit, and one homemade with store-bought ingredients. For each meal type, the researchers fed the data into a life-cycle analysis.
A Life Cycle Analysis
A life cycle analysis incorporates existing data on emissions throughout the supply chain. In order to estimate the total emissions for each stage of the process. From agricultural production, packaging production, distribution, supply chain losses (unsold grocery store food), consumption, and food waste.
It turned out that meal kits had more plastic waste than grocery store meals, but less food waste. Greenhouse gas emissions tied to distribution were also lower for kits, owing to their streamlined supply chain. Grocery stores can’t always predict demand and so generally buy more food than they can sell. Meal kit services skip this stage altogether by shipping directly to the consumer, thereby cutting down on food waste and distribution emissions.
Of course, shipping meal kits to millions of households creates emissions. But these kits are delivered alongside other mail on routine routes. This last stage of distribution accounted for 11% of grocery store meal emissions, but only 4% for meal kits.
“When you zoom out and look at the whole life cycle, packaging is a relatively small contributor to the overall environmental impacts of a meal. What really ends up mattering is the quantity of food wasted throughout the supply chain.”
– Brent Heard, Ph.D.
The Issue of Food Waste
The kinds of foods purchased also affect the emissions profile. For emissions-intensive foods, like cheeseburgers, the researchers found that they had 15% more emissions than the grocery store equivalent. Most likely, because cheeseburgers tend to create less food waste than other kinds of foods.
The largest share of emissions from U.S. household food purchases comes fairly early in the food supply chain at the production stage. This underlines the benefits of meal kits’ direct-to-consumer supply chain in reducing food waste at grocery stores.
Subscription meal kits like Blue Apron and HelloFresh, which deliver portioned ingredients and recipes for making meals, were once hailed as the future of food. But so far, they haven’t lived up to that hype: In recent years, many top brands have had financial problems as well as disappointing sign-up numbers.
Additionally, meal kit delivery services still have their environmental drawbacks. While much of the packaging material is recyclable, components like freezer packs can be a problem for consumers who don’t know what to do with or how to dispose of.
Consumer’s Share of Responsibility
So far, the findings in these studies were based on limited data and future research should aim to incorporate more information on consumer behaviors. For example, if a consumer stops by the grocery store on the way home from work, will make it difficult to assign emissions to grocery store food they eat at home.
Another factor to consider is that Americans are increasingly eating at restaurants, which could change the overall impact of meal kits compared with other types of meals.
A Better Alternative
Consumers of all kinds (meal-kit subscribers, supermarket shoppers, or both), need to do a better job of using up all of the food that they buy. Consumers should also educate themselves about what food labels mean and when products actually go bad, since research suggests that many people throw food away unnecessarily while it is still OK to eat.
To that end, some recommendations are: resisting impulse buys and over-purchasing, strategically planning meals so that ingredients are used for multiple purposes, and being realistic about the types and quantities of food they’re likely to consume.
More recommendations are: shop locally, especially if you can use sustainable transport, consolidate orders into one delivery at a time, and rather than having goods delivered to your home, choose to pick them up at a nearby collection point. But instead of making a special trip by car to collect it, try to work it into your daily commute.
Note: Blue Apron has been a sponsor of NPR programming.
Sources:
Delivery disaster: the hidden environmental cost of your online shopping
https://www.theguardian.com/news/shortcuts/2020/feb/17/hidden-costs-of-online-delivery-environment
Emine Saner
Published on Mon 17 Feb 2020
SIERRA – The national magazine of the Sierra Club
What Is the Environmental Impact of Meal-Delivery Services?
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2018-4-september-october/ask-mr-green/what-environmental-impact-meal-delivery-services
By Bob Schildgen Sep 5 2018
Meal Kits Have A Smaller Carbon Footprint Than Grocery Shopping, Study Says
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/04/22/716010599/meal-kits-have-smaller-carbon-footprint-than-grocery-shopping-study-says
April 22, 2019
Jonathan Lambert
Why Meal Kits Aren’t as Bad for the Environment as You Think
https://time.com/5573333/are-meal-kits-bad-environmental/
By Jamie Ducharme
April 22, 2019