Tetra Pak Sustainability Report FY22: Food Systems

Contributing to secure², resilient³, and sustainable⁴ food systems⁵

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has defined a “triple challenge” facing our food systems.

• Ensuring food security and nutrition for a growing population in a world where malnutrition persists; where more than 820 million people go to bed hungry⁶ whilst over 670 million adults are obese⁷.
• Supporting the livelihoods of millions of farmers and others in an increasingly modern food chain, where productivity has led to a decline in agricultural commodity prices thus creating economic pressures for small farmers.
• Expanding food production without exerting more pressure on natural resources; where land and use of inputs are associated with environmental degradation and 1/3 of food produced is lost or wasted globally⁸.^.

In addition to overcoming the triple challenge, it has become critical that we monitor and manage the growing environmental impacts of our current food systems, which account for over 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions⁹ and are the leading cause of ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss¹⁰. We believe, as was stressed by world leaders at COP27¹¹, that we need to work together to build more secure, sustainable and resilient food systems and overcome these challenges.

Why it matters 

Food systems¹² are challenged with ensuring food security and nutrition, supporting farmers' livelihoods, and reducing their reliance on natural resources. As well, they contribute over 30%¹³ of global GHG emissions, exacerbating the climate and nature crisis.

Ambition 

Contribute to secure, resilient, and sustainable food systems that provide access to safe, affordable, and nutritious food, and minimise food loss and food waste across our value chain.

Targets 

• Advocate for secure, resilient, and sustainable food system solutions and form or join alliances supporting systems-level change
• Continue to deliver high performance food processing technology and packaging solutions that play a role in giving more people access to safe and nutritious food, and in reducing food loss and waste
• Reduce food waste of our best practice processing lines by 50% by 2030 compared to 2019

Tetra Pak’s role

The complex nature of our value chain includes a wide range of actors involved in the production, processing, distribution, and sale of food and beverages, all of whom are affected by these challenges – thus we have a role in transforming food systems through developing new food processing technologies and packaging solutions that meet the evolving needs of the food industry. At Tetra Pak, we are committed to the action tracks of the UN Food Systems¹⁴, and we are contributing to its objectives by working with our customers, NGOs, governments, and other stakeholders to (1) increase access to safe, nutritious food; (2) reduce food loss and waste; and (3) build sustainable food value chains.

By providing aseptic processing and packaging technology that protects the quality and safety of perishable foods and extends their shelf life, we can help reduce food loss and waste and improve access to safe, nutritious food, even in remote areas or countries with insufficient cold chains. We are committed to building sustainable food value chains that improve the livelihoods of farmers, reduce the environmental impact of our value chain, and, ultimately, help provide healthy and nutritious diets to the global community. Overall, we can help create more secure, sustainable, and resilient food systems that can help withstand shocks and disruptions, benefitting both people and the environment.

Feeding the world’s growing population, while protecting the planet is possible. If all stakeholders come together and deliver meaningful change, we can provide nutritious food to eight billion people every day. We need food packaging to deliver perishable foods safely to people around the world. At the same time, such packaging needs to consider not only post-use recycling but also the climate impact of the materials used, and the operation of the entire value chain. If we do not balance all these areas simultaneously, we risk solving one problem while creating another. 

Ola Elmqvist, 

Executive Vice President Packaging Solutions, Tetra Pak

Read more here

Our progress in 2022

Increase access to safe, nutritious food

Food innovation 
Food processing and packaging can be an enabler for healthy diets through technologies that enhance nutrient content and advance plant-based alternatives. At Tetra Pak, we are collaborating with innovative start-ups in food production to provide them with opportunities to trial large-scale production, validate their results, and understand the needs and challenges in the markets they want to operate in.

Whole soya processing method increasing nutrients 
We developed a breakthrough ‘whole soya’ processing method for soya drinks resulting in a product which is composed of 1.2% fibre compared to 0.26% for traditional, extracted soyabean drinks¹⁵. The method uses the entire soyabean during the production process and leads to a higher yield and therefore lower raw material cost per litre of product. It also enables low to no okara¹⁶ taste which has been a barrier for some consumers, due to its taste. This innovation paves the way for a multitude of new products and presents commercial opportunities for yoghurt, spreads, ice cream, and meal replacements. 
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New plant-based ambient vegan yoghurt alternatives offer convenience 
We have supported the development of plant-based, ambient yoghurt alternatives ('vegurts') by CHr. Hansen and CP Kelco, two global ingredient suppliers. These yogurt alternatives offer convenience and can help enable healthy diets. Our Product Development Centre (PDC) in Lund validated the concept in our pilot plant in Sweden, providing full-service factory-scale line-ups and industry experience. 
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School feeding programmes 

School Feeding Programmes improve children’s health, increase school attendance, and stimulate agricultural development. Since 1962, we have supported our customers and collaborated with governments, NGOs, the UN and international development aid agencies to provide technical assistance in programme organisation, implementation, evaluation, environmental education, and advise on food safety and quality controls in schools by sharing global best practices.

In Kenya, over 650,000 children under five years old living in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) region are acutely malnourished¹⁷. The ASAL region also has a high number of children not attending school. In 2022, we collaborated with Ingredion, DSM, Jetlak Foods Limited, and the National Council for Nomadic Education in Kenya to provide the newly developed Super Porridge, a liquid readyto-drink cereal-based product, to 5,000 children across three counties in the pilot programme. The product is highly fortified with 15 micronutrients including vitamins A, C, and E, calcium, zinc, and iron. This initiative aims to reduce malnutrition rates by 50% and the poverty index by 25% by 2026 and improve school attendance rates. 
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We greatly value being part of this School Feeding Programme and working together in collaboration with all the stakeholders is highly important for Ingredion. We are delighted to see that the children appreciate both the texture and the taste of Super Porridge which has been developed at our idea lab facility in Nairobi, Kenya. After all, if it does not taste good the children will not drink it - no matter how nutritious it is. 

Kennedy Ouma, 
Business Director, Africa & Middle East, Ingredion

Reduce food loss and waste

Avoiding food loss and waste 
Food processing technologies and packaging solutions can help curb losses by extending the shelf life of food and reducing the risk of spoilage.

By collaborating with Fresh Start, a leading food technology incubator that works with a portfolio of start-ups, we are looking to provide technical solutions to some of the challenges facing global food systems such as food safety, availability and waste.

Reducing and transforming food waste 
We are supporting customers with our technology to enable the recovery and reusing of edible biomass, and currently wasted low-value side streams, to create new sources of raw materials for food production and processing.

Valorising low-value side streams into a plant-based beverage 
We have taken steps in the last year to make the food and beverage industry more circular by developing a technology to transform Brewer’s Spent Grain (BSG)¹⁸ into a plant-based beverage. This is part of our overall approach to innovate in similar methods in other food and beverage categories to valorise residues and waste from food production.

We are also working on using connected technology and other innovations to further minimise food loss in our production and customer filling lines. 
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Build sustainable food value chains¹⁹

Dairy Hubs 
Through our Dairy Hub model, we link smallholder farmers with dairy processors to help build sustainable local dairy value chains²⁰, securing a long-term supply of locally produced quality milk in emerging economies without raising the costs of collection. We provide technical training to Extension Service Officers²¹ to improve farm management and milk production, as well as farmers to help them improve profitability and grow their businesses.

In 2022, the Dairy Hub projects involved 43,939 farmers (96.2% of which are smallholders) that have delivered milk to food and beverage manufacturers. Since 2011, when we introduced the first Dairy Hub project, we have reached 67,808 farmers (97% of which are smallholders) and we currently have 22 Dairy Hub projects, four of which are new this year.

In the Dominican Republic, we are supporting our customer Coopesur, a co-operative with around 800 farmers/ members, and Agampta, an association of dairy farmers, to secure a stable supply of local high-quality milk. Their yield improvements in 2022 are as follows:

For Coopesur, the reference farms with an 15% average increase in milk production/ farm increased compared to baseline. Likewise, productivity per cow (L/cow/day) and per hectare (L/ha/day) increased by 8% and 14.6%, respectively.

For Agampta, milk production increased on average by 21.4% in the reference farms compared to baseline. Likewise, productivity per cow (L/cow/day) and per hectare (L/ha/day) increased by 13% and 21%, respectively. 
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What's next? 
Learn more about what is next for Tetra Pak here.

^{1 Brewer's Spent Grain is the industrial moniker used to describe the malt after a brewery has already used it to make beer. Source: https://www.regrained.com/blogs/upcyclist/what-is-spent-grain}

^{2 Secure food systems: As defined by the UN, food security means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Source: https:// www.oecd.org/agriculture/topics/food-security/}

^{3 Resilient food systems: As defined by the OECD, resilience in the context of food and agriculture as the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt and transform in response to adverse events. Source: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-andfood/strengthening-agricultural-resilience-in-the-face-of-multiple-risks_2250453e-en}

^{4 Sustainable food systems mean growing, producing, processing, packaging, distributing and consuming food without negatively impacting the planet. Source: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/ sites/c6fd4d2f-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/c6fd4d2f-en}

^{5 All the elements and activities related to producing and consuming food, as well as their effects, including economic, health, and environmental outcomes.}

^{6 Action Against Hunger: World Hunger Facts. (2022). Source: Actionagainsthunger.org}

^{7 Global Nutrition Report (2022). Source: Inequalities in the global burden of malnutrition - Global Nutrition Report}

^{8 The World Food Programme: 5 facts about food waste and hunger. (2020). Source: https://www. wfp.org/stories/5-facts-about-food-waste-and-hunger}

^{9 Crippa, M. et al. Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. (2021). Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9}

^{10 Source: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-systemprimary-driver-biodiversity-loss}

^{11 Food and Agriculture Organization: Agriculture and food systems finally on the table at COP27. (2022). Source: https://www.fao.org/climate-change/news/detail/en/c/1620205/}

^{12 The term ‘food systems’ refers to all the elements and activities related to producing and consuming food, and their effects, including economic, health, and environmental outcomes (OECD, https://www.oecd.org/food-systems, 2023)}

^{13 Crippa, M. et al. Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. (2021). Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9}

^{14 The UN Food Systems Summit launched five Action Tracks to deliver progress on all 17 SDGs, each of which relies to some degree on healthier, more sustainable and equitable food systems. Source: https://www.un.org/en/food-systems-summit}

^{15 Nutritional comparison of whole bean soya extracted soya, and white dairy milk. Fibre % - 1.2% for whole bean soya, 0.26% for extracted soya, 0% for white dairy milk. Source: https://www.tetrapak.com/insights/cases-articles/whole-soya-beverages-new-production-method#cf-step-thankyoubanner_copy_copy 16 Okara is a pulp consisting of insoluble parts of the soybean that remain after pureed soybeans are filtered in the production of soy milk and tofu.}

^{17 Source: https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue-47/en/}

^{18 Brewer's Spent Grain is the industrial moniker used to describe the malt after a brewery has already used it to make beer. Source: https://www.regrained.com/blogs/upcyclist/what-is-spent-grain}

^{19 We believe this starts with a mindset shift that moves from considering only what is happening in our factories and facilities to what is happening across the food value chain. And we believe it requires close collaboration and innovative thinking from all stakeholders – to truly make food value chains more sustainable. The traditional operating model of a linear supply chain has changed, and a new partnership ecosystem model is emerging, where the entire industry works in close collaboration. This brings together not only producers and suppliers, but also research institutions, universities, and start-ups to find solutions.}

^{20 A sustainable food value chain is a food value chain that: is profitable throughout all of its stages (economic sustainability); has broad-based benefits for society (social sustainability); and has a positive or neutral impact on the natural environment (environmental sustainability). Source: https://www.fao.org/sustainable-foodvalue-chains/what-is-it/en/#:~:text=In%20the%20economic%20dimension%2C%20a,fiscally%20viable%20for%20public%20services}

^{21 Extension Officers are often employed by a processor, NGO or a local authority with the purpose to implement good practices and showcase productivity results.}