The Carbon Neutral Digestive Initiative – Enhancing Systems (CANDIES)

Published on February 14, 2022

The Carbon Neutral Digestive Initiative – Enhancing Systems (CANDIES) aims to give on-the-spot information to consumers about their food purchases, allowing them to make smarter decisions, while simultaneously working with retailers to improve product placement and incentives, aimed at buying food with lower carbon emissions.

Currently, 31% of an average Swedish household’s annual total CO2 emission comes from food. Unless Sweden tackles its food related carbon emissions, there will be a risk of failing to meet its 2045 commitment to become a net-zero emitter of greenhouse gases.

A transformative shift is therefore urgently needed, requiring the joint effort of consumers, retailers and producers – as mentioned in the recent publication from EAT (Willet et al. 2019) to:

Consume food that emits less CO2e per kilo by moving away from a meat and dairy intensive diet towards a more locally produced, plant-based and seasonal diet; and/or
Produce food that emits less CO2e per kilo consumed either by moving away from high emitting produce, or by innovating production processes where CO2e emissions are reduced (and increase circularity in the production chain).

CANDIES aims to assess how sustainability is embedded throughout the whole food supply chain (from farm to fork), and how digitalization can aid the decision making process.

Through dialogues with producers and government, we aim to assess the trade-offs of our intervention, and support off-setting. For our solution to succeed, we will ensure we achieve solution consensus, affordability, availability and acceptability.