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When you examine a package of M&M's, among the most popular candies in the United States, you'll notice recognizable ingredients like sweetener, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. But, numerous elements are less known: gum arabic, starch gum, carnauba wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.

There are thirty-four components in the candy, with at least 30 nations involved in supplying them. Each has its own supply chain that converts raw materials into ingredients – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.

These components then travel across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are combined and converted into small multicolored candy-coated chocolates.

It's becoming more widely recognized that agricultural networks are a major driver of the climate crisis. Researchers can study deforestation for agriculture or greenhouse gases from animals. But the environmental impact of highly manufactured products – like these candies – is more ambiguous and is just beginning to be understood. A key factor they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of ultra-processed foods: these industrially made items include a huge number of components and processes to put them together, making it extremely difficult to monitor.

However, this doesn't imply it's not important. As ultra-processed foods take over American supermarkets and eating habits – they now account for 70% of food sold in supermarkets, and over 50% of calories consumed – specialists say that understanding their ecological cost is critical to build a greener food system.

The Information We Know

Although researchers are just beginning to examine the ecological effects of UPFs, what's already known about them is worrisome.

"The greater the processing products become, the more deleterious they are to public wellness and the environment," stated a senior researcher. The main reason, he explains, is that the components are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact balloons.

Take M&Ms. The initial phase in producing the sweets is cultivating for cocoa, sweetener, dairy and palm.

It has been well-documented that farming for ingredients like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of deforestation worldwide. For over a century, agricultural expansion has driven almost 90% of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for 30% of worldwide carbon output. Large corporations have been called out in the past for farming practices in their production network, and have since developed environmental initiatives, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, unsustainable.

Then there's, sweetener, dried dairy and palm fat – also significant greenhouse gas emitters.

On top of that are the factory-produced ingredients like food dyes – possibly the hallmark of intensive manufacturing – which M&Ms contain 13 different types of. The blue candies are dyed with artificial blue dyes; these dyes are primarily produced in food dye manufacturing hotspots India and China, through synthetic processes of aromatic hydrocarbons with chemical compounds, accelerated by the elements copper or chromium.

Creating soya lecithin, an additive made from plant oil that's used to change the consistency of chocolate, requires procedures like degumming in a hot reactor, chemically isolating phospholipids, decolorization using hydrogen peroxide and dehydrating under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, starts off as maize that gets steeped in acid before being ground, divided and dried. From there, it's broken down into simpler compounds using enzymes and chemicals, and then reformed into crystals.

Although ultra-processed chocolate products are some of the worst offenders, different types of UPFs are taxing on the environment as well. Consider a well-known chip, which has 39 components. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is released to the atmosphere. Similar to major brands, manufacturers have created their own environmental pledges, but many of these commitments are underpinned by methods that are considered greenwashing.

As a result, researchers have started to calculate the environmental toll of UPFs.

A study estimated that popular candies generate at least 13.2kg of carbon equivalents per kilo produced. With annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the United States, this would mean that the products emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – accounting for zero point one percent of yearly carbon output in the country. But, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the true cost is probably significantly greater, according to specialists.

There's a "unknown element" when it comes to emissions tracking in the processed food industry, notes Patrick Callery who studies how corporations engage with the climate crisis. "There is so much ambiguity as supply chains get complex."

The Gaps We Have Yet to Discover

Calculating precisely of the environmental toll of UPFs is extremely challenging, since, definitionally, these products consist of many ingredients and a high volume of non-transparent procedures. Ingredients aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Instead, these ingredients are altered synthetically, certain portions stripped away, and flavors, dyes or textures incorporated – and it's unknown what the impact of these methods are because numerous providers and parts are included.

A further factor is that every ultra-processed food are the creations of manufacturing corporations that have little incentive to disclose their ecological impact and may not fully understand it to begin with.

As an example, major brands do not cultivate primary components themselves, but instead depend on hundreds of farms that may not have precise emissions tracking in place. This means that emissions from large manufacturers may be underestimated. Experts noted that corporations "don't have real measurements, so they use estimated values, which are approximations."

Researchers say that corporations provide reports on simple things like transportation, which are easier to calculate, and often omit or complicate the farming-related carbon of their items. Ultimately, reporting high emissions goes against the interests of major manufacturers, so the complex calculations needed to determine the environmental impact of large-scale agriculture and complex manufacturing methods used to make processed food components remain understudied.

"The main point of manufactured products is money," said Fardet, pointing out that they're designed to be appealing, convenient and enjoyable to eat.

"Most of the people in the manufacturing sector's production network are not concerned with climate change from an ideological point of view, but they are interested in profit," said a specialist. He clarifies that to shift those incentives, the value of foods and ingredients would need to include their effect on our global environment. But that would require government regulations and financial penalties based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.

Why It Is Important

For less than two dollars, the cost of M&Ms at the supermarket barely represents their real impact on the environment. But to tackle these problems with manufactured products, more than just a few tweaks to the ingredient list are needed.

"Lowering the sodium, or sugar of just a single item is just superficial eco-marketing," stated the expert. "We need to change the entire system." To do that, he suggested eating more regionally produced, unprocessed items, which often take much less energy and transit to create, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.

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