We just cut cheese’s climate footprint by about 68%
Dairy cheese has a massive climate footprint. We’re creating the world’s most ambitious cheese to change that, and now we have the numbers to prove we’re on the right path.
Cheese is an almost universally loved product. It’s been consumed by cultures from all around the world for thousands of years, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Today, thousands of cheese varieties exist, and the global cheese market is worth an estimated US$ 100 billion. Consumers in Europe and North America consume the most cheese per capita, followed by countries such as Australia, Argentina, and Russia. So what does that all mean for the environment?
The real price of cheese
Producing cheese comes at a steep environmental price. Dairy cheese is made from the milk of ruminant animals such as cows, goats, sheep, buffalo and camels. These animals can break down and digest the food they eat with microbes in the fore-stomach (a.k.a. the rumen).
That’s all good news for the animals, but the bad news is that during this digestion process, methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas, is produced as a byproduct in the rumen. Methane is up to 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a 100-year time scale, and over 80 times more potent over a 20-year time scale.
Knowing these numbers, it’s no surprise that the dairy industry contributes 2.7% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. those caused by human influence on nature). And since over half of all raw milk produced in Europe and North America goes into making cheese (after all, it takes 10 liters of milk to make 1 kg of hard cheese), it’s likely that cheese production accounts for over 1% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Mapping our carbon footprint
Stockeld Dreamery was founded to help solve the climate crisis, by driving the shift towards plant-based foods and thereby reducing the huge greenhouse gas emissions linked to cheese consumption.
As a science-driven company, we’re evidence-based. Therefore, we partnered with CarbonCloud to get a third-party verified quantification of the carbon footprint of our recently launched plant-based cream cheese product, Stockeld Spread, to bring more transparency to its climate impact.
Using a solid methodology, we analyzed the CO2e (the carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions at every stage of the value chain, from the farm to the shelf. This means things like agriculture, transport, processing, packaging, as well as distribution to the grocery store shelf.
The analysis showed that Stockeld Spread has a carbon footprint of 4.0 kg CO2e/kg.* Conventional dairy-based neutral flavor cream cheese in Sweden has a carbon footprint of 12.0 kg CO2e/kg, meaning that Stockeld Spread has a roughly two-thirds (≈68%) lower carbon footprint, at retail shelf. As we work tirelessly to improve our product and its packaging, we think we’ll be able to lower the climate footprint of Stockeld Spread even further over time.
Moving towards zero emission cheese
We’ve now mapped the carbon footprint of our product, Stockeld Spread, at the retail and foodservice levels. So what’s next? We’ll dig into the data to understand where our emissions happen. Then we can systematically try to lower these emissions even further — for example by encouraging our suppliers to use zero emissions transportation, and assess novel ingredients and farm production methods that have an even lower carbon footprint.
We will continue to explore other ways of mapping the environmental impact of our products and Stockeld as a company, constantly increasing our ambitions. Our work at the Dreamery never stops.
*So what’s CO2e? It’s carbon dioxide equivalents, the same measure used by the European Commission and the UNFCCC. It converts the various effects of different greenhouse gases into the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) it would take to create the same greenhouse impact. This helps us compare different foods and understand their greenhouse impact.
