5
Challenges and Solutions

5.1    The Food System Challenge of This Century: Is a Sustainable Diet Now Defined?

We have now seen that the determination of food product carbon footprint can enable the development of dietary planning across populations that result in reduced GHG emission impacts. This has been reported by Wallén, Brandt, and Wennersten (2002),1 where sustainable food production projections for the Swedish national diet included large increases in potatoes, root vegetables and pulses (greater than 50%), and a reduction in sweets and soft drinks (greater than 50%) would result in sustainable health and environmental outcomes. Notable increases in fish and other cereals approaching 50% were also suggested by this research as a possible route to obtaining sustainable food consumption nationally.1 This study, together with established data sets of life cycle assessment (LCA) information, provide important sources of information for the food industry that increasingly has the requirement to identify the sustainability criteria of the products supplied to customers. The Wallén, Brandt, and Wennersten1 study also considers the proportional footprint of fossil energy used to produce a food product. Thus, there is a consideration of products that are not a large proportion of a diet but offer significant health benefits, and those which may use a lot of energy but much of this is not derived from fossil fuel, for example, the use of biofuels (recyclable energy) or nitrogenous fertilisers (non-recyclable energy) for forages and grazing.

Many commentators currently state we are some way from defining what a sustainable diet is and we are far from implementing sustainability policy that is relevant across an organisations supply chain activity of sourcing ingredients and retailing foods. However, there is a growing body of evidence that is providing, LCA data, GWPs, accredited footprints, and conversion factors for water use, energy use, GHG emissions, and other environmental attributes. With these conversion factors and LCA data, directors of supply chain activities can measure the GHG, water, and other attribute impacts of their supply functions. Communicating this in terms of a typical meal and diet has become possible, but there is still a requirement to communicate the complex science that has developed these methods to consumers so that they are able to assess consumption in terms of sustainability and security in a practical way. Of course, current LCAs will typically determine the specific sustainability criteria of products under investigation as a kilogram of product such as a ‘kilo of beef’ or a ‘kilo of wheat grain’. They are not concerned with how these relate to food brand or retailer brand values. As the data concerning sustainability criteria become more open source and available to organisations who wish to define their supply chain sustainably, they will be able to embed sustainability criteria into business values. Clearly, the units of measurement that are typically in the form of mass of agricultural production are not particularly useful to retailers or manufacturers dealing with retailers because the ultimate functional unit a consumer deals with in a food supply chain is a recipe or a plate of food.

The interface between the manufacturer and retailer is critical here because as we have previously stated, food manufacturers are in a position to collate sustainability evidence relating to ingredients that are formulated into food products. This will ultimately add value to products for retailers who increasingly want to report sustainability criteria associated with branded products. Retailers will need to communicate sustainability criteria in terms of meals and diet to consumers because this is how we use food. We have seen this occur for health and well-being attributes of products in Europe for nearly 20 years now. It is time for sustainability to make a similar impact on the retail functions of the supply chain using scientific evidence to support it. The issue of traceability of products still presents major problems because we have uncertainty in the determination of where ingredients come from. Ultimately, regulation will strengthen the application of traceability procedures beyond accreditation. This will include the use the geographic information system (GIS)-based programmes that have been demonstrated here. These approaches can determine where products come from and associate the location of production with specific attributes, such as soil conservation, biodiversity, and GHG emission, wherever the sustainability analysis is made in the food supply chain.

It is important to understand why this situation has presented itself because it is almost blindingly obvious that the food industry is ultimately in the business of supplying meals to consumers, and those meals should be sustainable, safe, and nutritious. Therefore, why has the LCA arena been so dramatically diverted with food such that it reports products in terms of kilogram amounts or individual portion sizes at best instead of diets or meals? An important part of determining what the future sustainable plate of food is will be the impact of how retailers respond to sustainable drivers in the food industry. Current indicators suggest that retailers are responding to a number of issues that promote sustainability and corporate responsibility. This is certainly not unexpected because food retailers have been reporting environmental indicators for many years, and some have strived to obtain an overall sustainability index for all of their organisational efforts to develop sustainable food products. Notable systems have historically been based on providing assurance and traceability in supply chains. These are important attributes of any supply chain, but they are specifically important for food products because they are a prerequisite for providing robust food safety measures.

Assurance and traceability schemes developed by or with retailers have provided environmental reporting, established sustainability criteria for food supply chains, and changed supply chain practices. These include the following:

  1. LEAF Marque: The Linking Environment and Farming systemic approach started in the 1990s and has remained under the leadership of Caroline Drummond as Chief Executive since it was established. The first LEAF audits applied an environmental management system (EMS) approach to assessing farm sustainability. The approach has been a stunning success, and it has extended to a retailer assurance scheme approach where the LEAF Marque label on food products is associated with a farm audit and sustainability criteria.2
  2. Marks and Spencer, Plan A : There are several food retailer assurance schemes that use sustainability criteria. A notable scheme has been developed by the Marks and Spencer company, who have clearly linked assurance to sustainability criteria.
  3. Walmart, Sustainability Index: This assurance scheme has linked sustainability with traceability across supply chains. This type of approach has exposed complexities, and the goal of obtaining an index that describes all sustainability actions across an organisation remains to be met.
  4. Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO): This scheme is focused on a specific ingredient that is used intensively by food and FMCG supply chains, palm oil. RSPO is a global, multi-stakeholder initiative on sustainable palm oil. The principal objective of the RSPO is ‘to promote the growth and use of sustainable palm oil through co-operation within the supply chain and open dialogue between its stakeholders.’ RSPO work to ‘Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Palm Oil Production’ that suppliers must follow. The certified sustainable palm oil (RSPO oil) is traceable through the supply chain by certification of each processing facility along the supply chain that processes or uses the certified oil. This is important because palm oil is produced in areas of the world where changes in land use associated with palm oil production can be related to the clearing of rainforests if RSPO standards are not met, and these changes would not be visible to consumers if RSPO standards did not exist (Figure 5.1). Palm oil represents another case of an ingredient that is utilised in many food products and FMCGs, assuring the supply chain for it is complex and requires a multi-stakeholder approach.
  5. Global Good Agricultural Practice (Global GAP): The value of assurance schemes in the food supply chain needs to be global, and the Global GAPs for agricultural products support this goal. The Global GAPs began in 1997 as EUREPGAP, an initiative by retailers belonging to the Euro-Retailer Produce Working Group. British retailers working together with supermarkets in continental Europe become aware of consumers' growing concerns regarding product safety, environmental impact, and the health, safety, and welfare of workers and animals. The Global GAPs provide a ‘Chain of Custody’ (CoC) Standard across the crop, livestock, and aquaculture product supply chain so that assurance and traceability are developed to enhance trust between functions of the supply chain and due transparency is observed by consumers. The Global GAP CoC Standard identifies the status of products from farm to retailer.
  6. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC): One of the first food assurance schemes developed, it is an independent non-profit organisation that provides sustainable fishing standards for fisheries. The MSC was founded in 1997 by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the food manufacturer Unilever; it became fully independent in 1999. The MSC notably relate the sustainable use of fishery resources to meal choices and provide a significant body of literature concerned with recipes and how to prepare fish and sea food produce. The MSC standard works to the principles of maintaining sustainable fish stocks in certified fisheries, minimising environmental impact of fishing operations, and using effective management by meeting local, national and international laws.
web_c5-fig-0001
Figure 5.1.    Global palm oil imports 1961–2012. The increasing palm oil imports are not only associated with biodiesel production, as significant increases have occurred before biofuels were promoted as liquid fuels that provided carbon neutral options. Palm oil is used to manufacture several household products, such as detergents and cosmetics, as well as food ingredients, and to provide a feedstock for biodiesel production.
Source:  These data were adapted from FAO. FAOSTAT (2009). Trade, crops, and livestock products data set. http://faostat.fao.org/ (accessed 24 April 2014).

A significant theme for many schemes that result in labelling standards are the links of technical and sustainability information to meals and servings of food the consumer experiences. The Livewell diet developed with WWF has been developed to promote the consumption choices associated with a healthy and a sustainable diet. The Livewell example demonstrates this by promoting a diet that generally has 10–15% fewer livestock products and more vegetable protein associated with the meals it is made up of. Reducing livestock products in meals is likely to be a critical change in the look of future plates of food because the consumption of livestock products is extremely variable globally. Protein content of meals may remain at high levels in nations where livestock products are reduced, but the protein sources in a meal may change to include more vegetable proteins or industrially fermented proteins.

5.2    Supply Chain Challenges: Integrating the LCA Approaches in Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Retail

It is clear that a sustainable diet is part of the food security challenge if humankind is to deliver a food system sufficient for a projected 9 billion people in 2050 that uses lower energy inputs and produces lower waste within current land use limits.3 Too often policy analysis of the food system recommends changes in agricultural production system and decreased consumption as the only means to meet this 2050 challenge.4 This results in an oversight of supply chain functions in policy, where there is a requirement to assess impact from production through to consumption. This view is supported by research demonstrating consumption cannot be managed by consumer communication alone and supply chain solutions are urgently required.5 Life cycle approaches to identify agricultural practices as a control point in supply must be integrated with food consumption. Established LCA methods provide assessments of the food system that have been overlooked in tackling the global challenge of doubling calorific and protein outputs. The LCA allows the definition of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission impacts as the global warming potential (GWP) and land use impacts, and it is time to use this thinking across supply chains.

Agricultural production successes will not continue to alleviate food supply chain stresses even though major food crops have achieved typical yield per unit area yield increases of 2–5% per year.6 These trends are not a source of confidence even though increasing crop yields remain a valid target for policy development, because of the challenge of assessing ecosystem and food supply chain criteria with LCA methods.7 The yield and ecosystem service components of agriculture are often analysed independently of the impact of genetic improvement and agronomic management, which has been shown to be an oversight in policy development.8 Thus, an ecosystem service assessment approach to reporting yield is required, and LCA techniques provide this with regard to food supply chain functions. Ecosystem services have been considered part of the agricultural system since 1926, when Transeau first produced his treatise on embodied energy of maize crops when it was considered that the energy available to the agricultural system was boundless.9 This systemic approach has been tested and refined, leading to accurate determination of farming energy balances and carbon footprint of European agriculture.10 LCA methodologies are providing an option to policymakers who require a system-wide analysis of efficiency and ecosystem services associated with food supply chains and product life cycles.11

The life cycle approach not only identifies hot-spots of impact in supply chains, it can show where conservation of resources in supply chains is possible.12 These develop trade-off relationships that would not be found using the yield assessment alone. These trade-offs are also important in the production of wetland rice, for example, where emissions of methane from production are traded with the maintenance of rice wetlands, which are an important global GHG sink.13 Livestock systems provide a specific challenge to LCA methods because of the extreme diversity in production type, which includes grazing, housed, and integrated systems for animal husbandry. Despite variable production and methane emissions, the livestock production system can be defined by LCA, and the GWP or carbon footprint data for livestock products can be used to develop sustainable dietary scenarios. Animal feed conversion efficiencies to edible protein conversion efficiencies range from 5% for beef to 40% for milk in US production systems.14 Thus, although livestock products make up 39.2% of global protein consumption, feed conversion efficiencies mean that LCA data are critical to develop policy that accounts for their ecosystem impact. The LCA approach shows beef production to be the more intensive user of land resources, with pork, chicken, eggs and milk having LCA-derived land use of less than 1 t/ha. Grazing systems are critical to ecosystem services and global permanent pasture accounts for 3356 × 106 ha which is far greater than any other crop (FAOSTAT 2009 data).

The LCA approach identifies beef production as an important system for future improvement of both GWP and land use impact. Grazing systems are critical to the future development of the world food system, and LCA is beginning to account for livestock production impacts (see EBLEX15 and Dairy Co16 roadmaps). Ecosystem services associated with biodiversity in grazing systems are well tested, and there is further scope to assess those associated with soil and water management.17 Thus, the efficient use of feeds and forages in grazing systems is critical to developing sustainable livestock production where it is well documented that the demand for livestock protein will increase.18 This is why we must assess impact across food supply chains using LCA and FAO statistics, that show that the amount of livestock protein consumed as beef, pork, poultry, and fish globally is 43.80 million t/year, and average consumption trends for livestock protein have increased to 31 g of livestock protein per day for each person globally (FAOSTAT data). Accounting for protein balance in this way hides huge variation and millions of individuals experience protein deficiency owing to a failure to optimise production, energy balance and waste across supply chains. LCA approaches will continue to provide insight into livestock supply chain functions, and it is the beginning of greater accountability that will be applied to other attributes, such as social responsibility, where LCA can be used to present changes in dietary consumption in supply chains. This requires linking LCA with census data so that impacts can be projected to population scale. The result must not be austere dietary policy because the culture of food and tastes are changing dramatically with the increased global production of garlic (37.3%), chillies (24.0%), and spinach (47.8%) in 2000–2010, being an indicator of this taste transition (FAOSTAT 2010 data). Taste and sensory factors are as important as production and will be a component of much future planning for the global food system.

In future, LCA application in policy development will map the spatial impact of consumption in urban environments. Martindale19 has reported the mapping of food consumption in urban areas using GIS, LCA outputs, and census data. Examples of the scenarios developed include the consumption of a more sustainable diet containing 5% less meat and 10% more fresh fruit and vegetables as prescribed by World Wide Fund for Nature and the United Kingdom's Rowett Institute research (see the Livewell Diet)20 is mapped across a population of a million urban residents of the South Yorkshire Region in the United Kingdom (Office of National Statistics, 2011).21 The GWP data used for foods is now well tested and established, and the GIS-LCA hybrid approach we have developed allows the mapping of established LCA data with demographic data trends.1 Thus, LCA can be used to measure the efficiency of production and consumption for individual products, supply chains, and urban food systems.

The scenario presented for South Yorkshire in the United Kingdom showed that around 0.9 million tonnes of GHG produced each year are associated with the dietary consumption of 1.14 million people.22 This total figure relates to the UK national GHG inventory for the whole food supply chain of 61 million food consumers in the United Kingdom, which is reported to produce 178 million tonnes of GHG, where 50–60 million tonnes of the inventory is associated with consumption and waste (an additional 20 million t/year) activity.23 The national GHG inventory approach provides a robust test for our GIS-LCA scenario, building a model using the UK national GHG inventory of 549 million tonnes of GHG.24 The GIS-LCA approach is important because the sustainable criteria for supply chains vary spatially and the impact of consumption of products in a city will be dependant on demographic data, behavioural change, and population size.

5.3    Visualising the Data from the Food System Using GIS-LCA

Food supply systems are complex, with many attributes of food production integrating with waste, cooking, and safety behaviours that all require measurement if sensible policy is to guide sustainable development of food systems. While a difficult data acquisition task, GIS-LCA can map the attributes robustly according to the intensity of consumption space. The use of LCA is crucial to account for food supply chain impacts and to develop trade-offs between production, consumption, and impact so that sustainable options can be derived. There is a requirement for policy to interface consumption trends with those of taste so that future impacts such as non-meat to meat and other transitions in populations can be identified earlier and GIS-LCA-based methods can make projections of environmental impact. There is also a requirement to communicate trade-offs and mapping consumption data; providing mapped LCA scenarios represents an opportunity to plan policy for urban populations and their relationships with food supply chains. Mapping methods will also support the international accreditation systems for carbon labelling of individual food products.25 While these accreditations are important sources of standardisation, mapping the impact of food consumption by populations provides an important future communication of carbon footprinting and LCA methodology in sustainability policy.

The food system includes producers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. While this segmentation model of the food system is straightforward, it is composed of several supply chains, and the number of these makes projecting the functioning of the food system incredibly complex. As an example of these complexities of scale, the European food system serves some 480 million people each day with safe and nutritious food and drink.26 The food system is not just defined by volumes of transactions, because the current food needs of customers are becoming more complex, with environmental impact, social responsibility, functional foods, nutraceuticals, obesity, and food miles, among many other issues, driving new products and improved business development.27 These factors are continually stimulating the demand for innovation in the food system.28 Consumer purchase choices are increasingly associated with health, ethical, labelling, and environmental concerns; they are balanced with more traditional choices concerned with product variety, convenience, and out-of-home consumption. A representation of the food system can be provided by surveys that provide a complex continuum of consumer intentions and purchase reality.29 For example, consumer intentions to buy ethical products are often in conflict with requirements of economical price and wide product choice. Developing communications for improved shopper understanding of the resource and social responsibility history (and potential future) of products will be of distinct competitive advantage in the food and beverage retail environment. Purchase decisions currently sum up these choices and can often show distinct gaps in consumer knowledge of food supply chains.30 Identifying knowledge gaps in supply information will provide opportunities to implement more efficient consumer communications that are able to influence decisions for purchase based on evidence. This is critical because understanding supply chains can clarify environmental impact and ‘food miles’ issues associated with food and drink products.31 The impacts of these issues in the food system have been defined by a number of models,32 and the successful implementation of food supply chain sustainability and innovation will follow three goals; these are highlighted as the following:

  1. The ability to utilise new and established technologies in the agri-food arena.
  2. Sensing the regulatory and business environment to deliver products that optimise the use of energy in the supply chain.
  3. Innovative multidisciplinary communications that provide smarter communications for consumers with health and ethical information about the food and drink they consume.

Health- and well-being-focused innovations have transformed how consumers purchase foods, and global production statistics are beginning to show emergent trends that focus on consumer demands for quality, nutrition, taste, and pleasure.33 A broad example of this is evident in global production increases of agricultural products that have already been highlighted for taste transitions with spinach (337%), garlic (230%), and chillies (223%), but noted here for between 1990 and 2005. They suggest a dramatic change in the requirement of not only calories and protein, but also flavour, nutrition, and taste. Food staples, such as wheat (2%) and sugar crops (21%), have more conserved production increases over the same time period.

Furthermore, staple ingredients, such as sugar, provide a case example of how information regarding health, ethics, and environment can change consumer perception of products. The European sugar manufacturing and retailing sectors have experienced significant change because of ethical purchasing responding to differences in the European sugar production framework and the world production of cane sugar. The issues associated with sugar trade have been largely unknown to the consumer until issues such as ‘Everything but Arms’34 and the emergence of organic sugar (from cane and beet) became of increased importance in purchase choice. Furthermore, consumer awareness that overconsumption of sugar is often linked to health and obesity issues and it has produced considerable activities resulting in the increased use of slower release sugars (lower glycaemic indices), lower calorie sweeteners, and ‘balanced’ consumer nutrition policies.35 It is clear health will continue to drive much innovation because it is clearly associated with enhanced pleasure and quality of life. We are also currently seeing the palm oil sector reviewing corporate social responsibility (CSR) systems in supply chains in response to consumer-led pressures. In a similar way, the coffee supply chain has recently experienced high-profile scrutiny of CSR issues.36

5.4    Technology Enablers and Opportunities

Developing supply chain approaches to stimulate food innovation requires the analysis of product life cycle from the farm to the fork (or more accurately, the farm to the home). Ultimately, supply is determined by activities that are pre-farm gate in supply chains. The food system is dynamic, and consumer concerns change according to the availability of food. For example, rapid changes in the distribution of food and beverage processing infrastructure have accompanied improvements in primary production on farms.37 The limits in regional agricultural product supply have been ameliorated by efficient logistical infrastructure, consumer demand, preservation, and packaging of food.38 These developments have hidden the full cost of not producing food regionally for consumers. We are now beginning to account for these limits in agronomic capacity with the emergence of assurance and environmental labelling schemes for food.39 Current food security concerns suggest increased synergy between agriculture, food manufacture, and novel technologies are required in the future food system. This is becoming evident by the emergence of technologies for recipe-ready (eliminating processing and preservation),40,41 lower allergenic,42 and more efficient food materials43 for production. Such technologies have a central role in closing knowledge gaps and increasing nutritive quality and subsequently the health of billions of people. Retailer, consumer, and regulator acceptance of novel technologies will be critical to the market entry of innovative technologies. Indeed, sensing the regulatory environment in the first instance will be essential to the successful market entry of innovative and novel technologies. Further understanding of how shoppers perceive food availability will be an important driver to responding to consumer concerns that surround novel technologies.

Communication portals and databases that provide research and evidence resources for food innovation, nutrition, environment, and health issues will be critical to the development of consumer communications. There is a requirement for communications to be framed within a theme, such as ethical purchase and need for the means of framing to be based on evidence. Ethical values associated with food products are closely related to issues of health for the consumer and CSR for food companies. For example, there is no doubt poor nutrition is a major cause of ill health and premature death in many developing and developed countries. The ‘obesity epidemic’ seems in conflict with the increased use of functional foods in diets and the emergence of health- and well-being-led innovations in the food and beverage industry. Such situations have tiers of the regulatory, policy, and research expertise in the public health arena thoroughly confused about how balanced diet and nutrition should or could be communicated to consumers. Clearly, the interactions between lifestyle, diet, and public health issues are not as simple as many commentators have thought, and understanding the obesity epidemic in emerging economies and developed nations is not straightforward. Communicating the importance of balanced diets is clearly a cornerstone of robust public health communication.

New recipe development and new product development (NPD) is a significant area for much innovation. Innovations need not be new and may solve long-term issues that relate to product quality in manufacture, cooking, storage, and distribution, and subsequently result in customer experience. As an example, regulator and allergenicity issues are currently driving innovative implementation of modified atmosphere packaging solutions. For example, the preservation of fresh produce without using sulfur dioxide and sulfites as preservatives has provided significant impact in the fresh produce sectors.44 Sulfites are used as preservatives and have been associated with allergenicity; regulatory changes have moved to remove sulfites from foods. This has led to manufacturers considering the use of packaging solutions and modified atmosphere packaging that excludes oxygen. The modified atmosphere packing inhibits the action of phenyalanine lyase enzymes that cause browning of fresh foods in oxygen-containing atmospheres.

Thus, companies must integrate current food security policy initiatives into process and manufacturing design and guide many future activities that deliver sustainability and drive future policy. Companies can develop CSR systems that provide fairness by aligning their business operations with policy guidance and use traceability data to define the social responsibility associated with products. Responsibility will not only include lowering environmental impacts, but also consider human rights, welfare, and nutritional outcomes. Responsibility associated with nutrition is a current policy focus because of the rising levels of obesity in developed and developing nations.

The World Wild Fund for Nature has developed the Livewell Diet with the Rowett Institute, which has been highlighted previously, and the approach taken will become an important source of change in the food system. The diet is based on sustainable criteria and independent research carried out by the author shows that the 7-day diet has a reduced carbon footprint based on data derived from Wallén, Brandt, and Wennersten.1 The reduction in carbon footprint as compared with the current diet in the United Kingdom reported by the National Diet and Nutrition Survey is between 5% and 10% lower per person per day. These represent small lifestyle changes that processors and manufacturers can stimulate using portion and product design options. However, initial research shows the waste food generated from more sustainable diets is greater than current food waste. These scenarios place important considerations on planning for sustainability. It is critical that sustainability planning by the processing and manufacturing sectors is integrated with changes in the way in which consumers utilise and dispose of food. This again represents opportunities for processors to consider the value of preservation and freezing options to enhance the sustainability criteria of food products.

The process of benchmarking sustainability criteria across food supply chains and populations will provide applications for food processors and manufacturers because it is clear that the sustainability of a supply chain cannot be assessed by carbon equivalent emissions, water use, or waste production alone. A far broader assessment of sustainability is required that relates social responsibility, carbon, water, and waste to the consumption behaviour of individuals and populations. Many farm and food assurance schemes attempt to consolidate sustainability criteria for products, but there are still significant opportunities to assess and communicate sustainability criteria for individuals and benchmark these to typical population trends.

The development of new products that target the healthiness and well-being markets has increased significantly since the 1990s when the UK government's Foresight group for food and non-food crops supply chain management identified health as being a major factor in the future food industry. However, the link to whole meals was not robustly made and left to recipe publications and popularisation of culinary skills and food preparation. This scant attention to whole meals and diets by the processing and manufacturing industry will not provide sustainable outcomes for food supply and needs to change. There have been significant areas of recipe development that have impacted on the food manufacturing and processing sectors. For example, traditional recipe planning used by manufacturers in NPD has made use of cheaper ingredients, such as fat and salt, to reduce the unit cost of product. However, health policy developments, such as the UK Food Standards Agency ‘Five-a-Day’ programme, have changed the approach of many manufacturers to NPD. For example, in the United Kingdom, commercial and government-led policy pressures have resulted to an increase in the utilisation of vegetables for ‘bulking-out’ (and cost reduction), the attainment of product marketing claims based upon the ‘Five-a-Day’ initiative, and a decrease in the salt content of recipes.

The reduction of salt has been area of much process innovation even though the impetus for salt reduction has been guided by regulators raising the issue of who drives the requirement for changes in recipes so that they align with healthier outcomes. The UK Food Standards Agency emphasised the requirement to reduce salt consumption to 6 g of salt or 2.40 g of sodium per adult per day. The UK government has reported that in 2008, sodium intake, excluding table salt and allowing 10% for wastage, was estimated to be an average of 2.78 g/person/day from household purchases plus food eaten outside the home. This is a reduction of 2.2% on 2007 and a 14% decrease since 2001–2002. Thus, the food manufacturing and processing sector has responded to a national health indicator. This is emphasised by the use of umami flavours that have been derived from seaweed or yeast products as alternative flavour enhancers and have provided innovative product formulation in the food processing sectors. These scenarios need to be integrated into whole meals for sustainable health outcomes.

Consumer data regarding the use of foods in households represents a distinct gap in our understanding of how consumers interact with foods and data on the experience of taste and satiety are an essential part of developing new products and changing how they are manufactured. Flavour and fragrance composition is recognised as a highly complex and technical aspect of formulating foods, but our understanding of how satiety is controlled will impact on how we manage the planning of resulting food product design for sustainable processing. This is an area where nanotechnology is providing new understanding of encapsulation and delivery of nutrients in the body. Understanding consumer experience of taste will provide insights into how nutrition and satiety interacts with consumption. The food industry can respond with novel approaches of formulating products; as an example, that use optimised micronutrient content in foods as a potential means of reducing consumption of energy-dense and nutritionally poor foods that enhance appetite and overeating. The opportunities for understanding taste, satiety, and consumer behaviour should be considered together with those of materials and the texture of foods by processors for innovative outcomes. These criteria are currently being considered with regard to products across the food industry to further develop CSR strategies.

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