HomeArticles Earth First Eco-score labels promise to reveal the hidden environmental cost of our food choices and drive significant changes in our food system, but measuring the ecological impact of a specific product isn’t as simple as it seems. Picture this: you're standing in your local supermarket, staring at two seemingly identical chocolate bars with different environmental scores. What story do these numbers tell? And more importantly, can you trust them?What are environmental score labels?Environmental score labels aim to help us understand the impact of our food choices. Some focus on a single aspect, like carbon footprint labels that only track greenhouse gas emissions, while others take a broader view. In France, for example, some products display colour-coded labels rating their overall environmental impact – a traffic light system where red signals high impact, orange moderate, and green low. In the UK and Spain, Foundation Earth's A+ (great) to G (not good) grading system considers multiple environmental factors, such as contribution to climate change, ozone depletion, land use, and even toxicity to humans. While these programmes show promise, they remain voluntary, which means that individual businesses can decide if they want to stick one of those labels on their products.How is the environmental footprint of food calculated? Take our chocolate bar. To measure its true environmental impact, we’d need to track every step: the cocoa growing in Côte d’Ivoire, the sugar from Brazil, the milk powder from Austria. At each stage, we’d need to measure not just carbon dioxide emissions, but water usage, land use changes, the energy used for grinding and refining the cocoa beans, and the transport to the shop. But where do we draw the line? Should we also calculate the impact of making the machinery in the chocolate factory? And what about the uniforms of the staff working there? It can be hard to decide exactly how many factors we should include in a sustainability assessment to determine a food’s true environmental impact.How much a chocolate bar impacts the planet can also change dramatically based on factors we can’t control – the same sugar field might need twice as much irrigation in a drought year. A cocoa bean delivery truck might take a longer route due to road works. Or a factory might switch energy suppliers, completely changing its carbon footprint overnight. That is why people creating ecolabels rely on averages rather than measuring every step of their long supply chains. These numbers are made available by studies and databases that have measured the average footprint for a product and can say, "Typically, making a chocolate bar releases X amount of greenhouse gases." But an average always hides a range. It's like saying the average human has 1.9 children – technically true, but not particularly useful for describing any specific person!If environmental impact labels can’t be precise, why bother measuring at all?Some companies resist environmental labels precisely because of this complexity. They argue that if we can’t be precise enough and we have to rely on averages, should we be putting any numbers out there at all? It’s a fair question – but one that misses at least one crucial point: averages can still tell meaningful stories. Take bananas. We know their biggest emissions impact (nearly 70% of their carbon footprint) comes from controlled ripening in massive industrial refrigerators. This immediately shows a banana supplier where to start if they want to reduce their impact on climate change. Averages can also help consumers make decisions. Studies have consistently shown that plant foods are linked to lower carbon emissions than animal products, with ruminants (beef, lamb, and dairy) having the highest impact. But just one-quarter of beef producers are responsible for more than half of the industry’s environmental impact - so choosing beef from some producers is much better for the world’s climate than others. Sadly, most of us still have no idea how to tell the difference between a high-impact producer and a low-impact one, partly because some producers and suppliers don’t even know where they fall on that spectrum. But by developing eco-labels and making it easier to measure this data, both farmers and the people eating their food could learn a lot. How can companies track all of this data?A new wave of digital tools is revolutionising how businesses track climate impact, with dynamic measurements replacing averages across global supply chains. Take Siemens' SiGREEN platform. It tackles a problem that has long plagued corporate environmental reporting: how to gather accurate, current data from specific actors across a specific supply chain while protecting commercially sensitive information. The solution they propose is a secure digital platform where suppliers can safely share their environmental impact data, creating a transparent trail from farm to factory to shop floor. "You can show improvements by actively reporting on them, and that's only possible if you're not basing your calculations on static database averages," says Svenja Aschenbrenner, SiGreen's communication manager. The platform also includes third-party verification of the uploaded data, providing an additional layer of accountability. They're not alone in this race. CarbonCloud, for instance, is also developing 'real-time climate footprints' that adapt to changing conditions rather than relying on static averages. While some companies are turning to blockchain technology, the industry's rapid evolution shows how far we've come from the days when accurate environmental measurements seemed out of reach.So, do eco-score labels actually work, and can we trust them?Studies have shown that while many consumers struggle to understand detailed carbon measurements, simple systems like traffic lights prove effective. Despite different formats, environmental labels consistently help us make more sustainable food choices. The challenge is how to make them clearer and more standardised - so it’s easier to understand how different foods and even different brands compare to one another. As we stand in our supermarkets today, these labels represent our first serious attempt to reveal the invisible environmental costs of our food. When producers, investors, and consumers can all see these impacts clearly, that’s when real change becomes possible. For now, it can be confusing to check what labels measure, who verifies them, and where the funding for the labelling organisation comes from. But if Europe’s plan to make ecolabels mandatory comes to pass, we have a huge opportunity to build a simpler and more accurate way to label food’s environmental impact - and make a real difference to the world with our food choices. These labels aren’t about shaming the polluters, nor should they be about greenwashing. They are about showing all of us the path forward. Because, in the end, you can’t fix what you can’t measure. A red label today shouldn’t be a product’s life sentence. It could instead be the push for its producers and suppliers to transform their operations and climb from the depths of red to the heights of green. And if we had these real numbers – not averages, not estimates, but data coming directly from each supplier – we could create an effective roadmap for change. Editor's Note: This article was created in collaboration with Siemens - with no financial incentive.