Trying to do eco-friendly shopping in a supermarket today resembles a balancing act. Between generic slogans such as “friend of nature” or vague references to CO2 compensation printed by individual companies, the consumer finds himself faced with a labyrinth of private brands without a single and transparent standard. In most cases, food sustainability is reduced to just the carbon footprint. A risky simplification: a food can also boast low greenhouse gas emissions, but hide a devastating impact on the territory in terms of pesticides, consumption of resources and degradation of ecosystems.
To overcome this total lack of uniform parameters, the European network coordinated by WWF Italy has launched Environmental Food Label 2.0 (EFL 2.0). The choice of announcement took place on the eve of June 5th, World Environment Day, created precisely to turn the global spotlight on the unsustainable pressures that production systems exert on nature.
What’s really behind the shelf?
The parameters used so far are based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a system that calculates the impact of a product “from cradle to grave”. A useful model, certainly, but one that struggles to photograph real biological damage. He doesn’t say whether that field is becoming a desert or how much biodiversity has been wiped out to make room for monoculture. EFL 2.0 fills this gap by introducing weighty complementary indicators: soil health, ecosystem protection, circularity and the risk linked to microplastics in supply chains. Only in this way can the consumer understand the true ecological price of what he puts in his cart.
Health is only one (and it starts from the earth)
Eating well is not just a matter of isolated calories or nutrients. The scientific center of gravity of the project adopts the One Health philosophy: human health, that of animals and ecosystems are closely linked. Abused and depleted soil produces less nutritious crops, compromising our well-being. By combining the environmental dimension with the nutritional one, this new label, says the WWF, will guide us towards diets that are good for both the body and the Planet, without forcing us to choose between our health and that of the Earth.
Scientific alliance against greenwashing scoundrels
The project, co-financed by EIT Food and active until September 2027, creates a multidisciplinary network that unites the WWF with research giants such as CREA-AN, the “Luigi Vanvitelli” universities of Campania, Siena, Tuscia and Aarhus, together with FederBio, ECOS and the tech company pOsti. This team is developing an architecture to track and verify data in an armored manner. Consumers are clamoring for clarity and the data from the EIT Food Consumer Observatory speak clearly: transparency guides choices in Europe. The litmus test will come in 2027, when the system will leave the laboratories for an in-store trial in supermarkets. It will be there, in front of the refrigerated counters, that we will understand if we are ready to really change the way we feed the future.
