IN Brief:
- Beneo is expanding independently verified life cycle assessments across its ingredient activities.
- The methodology considers water, land use, and other environmental impacts alongside greenhouse gas emissions.
- Ingredient level data is increasingly being used in procurement, formulation, Scope 3 reporting, and environmental claims.
Beneo is extending independently verified life cycle assessments across its ingredient portfolio, widening environmental measurement beyond product carbon footprints to include factors such as land and water use.
The ingredient manufacturer has been working with sustainability consultancy BrightWolves on a common approach to life cycle assessment, or LCA, as customers ask for more detail about how environmental figures are calculated rather than accepting a single headline carbon number.
Beneo completed externally validated LCAs for its Meatless, faba bean, and rice ingredient portfolios during 2025. The wider programme is intended to make comparable environmental information available across more products and production routes, giving customers data that can be used in purchasing, formulation, sustainability reporting, and claims assessment.
A product carbon footprint concentrates on greenhouse gas emissions. LCA can examine a broader group of environmental pressures across an agreed system boundary, including water consumption, land use, energy, agricultural inputs, transport, and processing. The broader view matters because improving one measure can worsen another.
An ingredient produced with lower greenhouse gas emissions, for example, may require more irrigation or land. A change in agricultural practice can alter fertiliser use, soil effects, energy demand, and yields simultaneously. Reducing that complexity to one number makes comparisons easier, but it can conceal where environmental burdens have moved rather than disappeared.
Beneo processes raw materials including chicory roots, sugar beet, rice, wheat, and faba beans across an international manufacturing network. Environmental performance therefore begins well before material reaches a processing plant. Crop yields, farming methods, fertiliser, water availability, transport distance, and local electricity generation can all affect the eventual assessment of an ingredient.
Processing then adds another set of variables. Drying, separation, extraction, heat generation, refrigeration, water treatment, and waste handling can dominate the footprint of some ingredients while playing a smaller role in others. A common methodology allows those differences to be examined without changing the calculation rules every time a new product is assessed.
The resulting information is becoming increasingly relevant to food development teams. Environmental data can now sit alongside nutrition, flavour, texture, functionality, availability, cost, and process behaviour when ingredients are compared during formulation. That does not make the environmental option automatically preferable, but it turns sustainability into another measurable design constraint rather than an assessment carried out after a recipe has been fixed.
Procurement teams face the same shift. Scope 3 reporting depends heavily on information supplied by businesses further along the value chain, making the consistency of supplier data as important as the figure itself. A footprint that changes substantially because the methodology has changed is difficult to use in year-on-year reporting or supplier comparisons.
Independent verification is intended to reduce that problem by testing whether the selected boundaries, assumptions, datasets, and calculation methods are applied consistently. It cannot eliminate uncertainty, particularly where agricultural inputs rely on averages or secondary data, but it makes the basis of a number easier to examine and challenge.
Claims are adding further pressure. European rules are tightening around environmental statements made to consumers, increasing the need for companies to understand exactly what their evidence supports. A life cycle assessment can contribute to that evidence base, but it does not turn a broad claim such as “green” or “sustainable” into an automatically defensible statement.
The wording still has to match the evidence. An LCA showing lower greenhouse gas emissions in a defined system boundary does not necessarily support a claim of lower overall environmental impact if water, land, biodiversity, or end use has not been assessed in the same way.
Beneo’s Healthy Planet Plan already covers emissions, water, circularity, farming resilience, and responsible sourcing. Extending LCA work provides a route for translating those wider programmes into ingredient data that customers can use during purchasing and product development.
Keeping the calculations current will be the more difficult task. Electricity mixes change, crop yields fluctuate, factories install new equipment, transport routes move, and agricultural practices evolve. Portfolio assessments therefore need regular revision if they are to remain useful rather than becoming polished snapshots of conditions that no longer exist.
The value of Beneo’s programme will ultimately sit in those updates and in how consistently the data can be compared between ingredients. Food businesses already have plenty of sustainability figures; the shortage is data robust enough to survive scrutiny from procurement, technical, sustainability, and legal teams at the same time.