Helping consumers and businesses make better, greener choices

In the second of our post-COP26 conference blogs, FSS’ Chief Scientific Advisor Prof David Gally discusses how climate change is already changing consumer behaviour, presenting both risks and opportunities for the food industry.

Climate change is already forcing huge changes to the way food is produced and transported, and how it’s consumed by all of us.

But arguably its most immediate effect on the everyday lives of Scots, will be how rising energy costs and those of imported products are likely to increase the proportion of income that consumers will have to spend on food - and I worry this could further exacerbate food inequalities right across the country.

As a regulator, this pressure on food costs will also inevitably lead to more issues with safety, welfare and authenticity – three issues that lie at the very heart of what Food Standards Scotland (FSS) is all about.

The faintly positive impact of the recent news headlines around the UK’s under-pressure food supply chain, was that they focussed consumer attention – probably more than ever before – on how our food systems actually work, and the apparent frailty of our national food security.

It has become abundantly obvious, too, that we really need to reduce our reliance on resources from around the world, especially food with a high environmental footprint, and so product information such as origin is becoming even more important to allow consumers to make informed decisions for themselves.

Companies will need to become fully transparent on exactly where all products come from, and the underlying ‘real costs’ of getting them onto shelves, to keep the playing field level for the competitiveness of our own domestic food production.

Consumers are also becoming a lot more conscious of the new technologies being developed to monitor their diets and their own health. 

Developing areas such as superfoods, probiotics, disease resistant crops and animals, alternative protein sources, and the many ways they might support local food production and therefore their local economies, are becoming mainstream news.

Another crucial element related to our own food production is the vital and now urgent need to increase biodiversity in the UK, and this will require changes in land use, as highlighted in the National Food Strategy [The National Food Strategy - The Plan].

The model proposed in that strategy not only includes re-wilding and more extensive systems mixed with re-wilding but embraces genuine net-zero technologies, including the need for some intensive agricultural practices. However, the emphasis of all of these has to be on sustainability. 

An important example in Scotland is our burgeoning aquaculture sector. This globally recognised sector has ambitious growth targets, but it also needs to tackle sustainability issues around feed, pollution, disease control and welfare.

Some of Scotland’s food production systems are incredibly efficient, while others aren’t, and new technologies such as cultivated protein production (mycoprotein, insect protein and lab grown ‘meat’, for instance) could eventually prove very disruptive to some of the country’s more traditional methods. These also come with their own food safety issues though, that we as Government regulars have to deal with.

In doing so, of course, it’s vital we remain agnostic to some of the heated debates that are now ongoing, for example around animal product consumption and genetic engineering/modification. However, we must also increasingly factor in sustainability alongside our primary obligations on Scottish food safety, and dietary behaviour change.

As we heard so often during COP26, one of the biggest climate change challenges for the food industry will be how to learn from consumers, beyond recording the purchase and consumption data we analyse at FSS.

Supermarkets have been successfully doing this for years on the shop floor, and fantastic practical examples abound within the sector - but as a regulator, FSS needs to adapt too, to the different ways we can reach out and interact with the public.

Sustainability is a complex collaborative journey involving many players – but we are now fully signed up to it, with a view to long-term impact.

FSS’s vision is for “a safe, healthy and sustainable food environment that benefits and protects the health and well-being of everyone in Scotland”, and defined in our Corporate Plan we have five key sustainability-related areas of activity:

• research and policy on sustainable food production
• defining the principles for a healthy sustainable diet
• interventions for mitigating the impacts of climate change on food production
• food waste reduction initiatives and the circular economy for food
• alternative protein sources for food and animal feed

Immediately on that agenda, we are currently seeking to employ an expert consultancy group to help us develop and articulate our sustainability strategy, in our support of the Scottish Government’s Net Zero aspirations.

We will then focus squarely on ensuring sustainability can be knitted into the very fabric of all our plans, in helping Scottish consumers change their dietary health for the better.