Episode 20: Using Life Cycle Assessment to Achieve Carbon Drawdown in Agriculture with Mark Izzo from Bright Future Foods
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25% of the global carbon emissions come from the food industry. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a great tool that can be used to help reduce the carbon footprint of the food we produce. In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with Mark Izzo, Co-founder and CEO of Bright Future Foods, to discuss Bright Future Foods and Airly Foods, how significant the food industry’s carbon emissions are, how Airly is using food to reduce climate change, carbon-converting farms, the use of LCA to reduce the carbon footprint of Airly crackers, regenerative agriculture, and what’s next for Airly Foods.
How significant is the food industry's carbon emissions?
“It's significant, and most people don't realize this. It's not just about meat either. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 25% of the global emissions come from the food supply. So it's huge. The IPCC predicts that as we decarbonize the different energy grids, that number is going to go up. In the future, 30% of the global emissions will come from the food supply. If we could figure out how to decarbonize our food supply and get it to even zero emissions, we'd immediately take out, 25% - 30% of the global emissions that we have. So it's a big piece and it makes a lot of sense. When you think about where emissions come from, they come from producing goods and moving them around.
But the far bigger footprint is from moving things around. Not just people, but things. We have to produce a massive amount of food and move it around the world all the time. So it does make sense that it's a big part of the footprint. People don't see the emissions spewing, so they don't really think of food as a significant part of global carbon emissions, but it is.”
Airly is using food to reduce climate change. Can tell us more about your carbon-converting farms?
“The root cause of climate change that everybody agrees on is that the levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere are too high. We decided that we are going to focus on the root cause. We asked ourselves, ‘Can we actually feed ourselves without emitting greenhouse gas into the atmosphere? Can we not only go to zero, but can we go negative? And can we actually participate in drawdown?’ So what we saw was a disruptive technology.
My goal was to look for new technologies out there, commercialize them, and turn them into new markets. The beautiful thing about new markets is that it becomes a virtuous cycle. Investors want to invest, and then you can do more good for the earth. Then investors invest more and we sell more causing this virtuous cycle of cleaning the air. So we focused on greenhouse gas drawdown and using the new disruptive technology that some folks are calling carbon farming. That's what we call it. Other folks are calling it regenerative agriculture, but I've drawn a fine distinction between the two. So you make sure that you minimize greenhouse gas emissions on the farm. And that gets kind of simple too, because the major emissions coming from a farm are coming from fertilizer.
It's a super high energy intensity process to make fertilizer, but when you put fertilizer on the ground, only a small percentage of it actually gets used by the plant. A lot of it just kind of dissipates into the soil and converts into a gas called nitrous oxide and leaks back into the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is 350 times more damaging than carbon dioxide when it comes to greenhouse gas warming potential. So that's a place you really have to focus on in agriculture and we do what we call precision nitrogen management.
We do things like making sure that we minimize the amount of fertilizer that's used. If we need fertilizer in one part of the field, but not in another part of the field, we make sure we only put that fertilizer on the one part of the field and turn it off in the other part of the field. The other big thing is no-till. So when you rip the ground up, the carbon that's been stored in the ground goes right back up into the air. So you have to make sure that you don't ever disturb the soil. There are a significant number of farmers doing that. Now, I think it's almost 30%, but you have to marry that with a discipline they call cover crops. This means that the soil is never left exposed. That's how you really trap a lot of the carbon in the ground.
That's how we launched Airly. Because then we merely preserved that benefit in a box of Airly by measuring carefully all the other emissions that come from baking a cracker, putting it in a package, putting it on a truck, and shipping it. We measure all of that, and then we offset that with high quality carbon drawdown credits that come from a blend of forestry and more regenerative carbon farming agriculture. So the good we did on the farm is the good we deliver to the consumer because we don't leave any other footprint. That is what allowed this Airly brand to have a conversation of how food can drawdown greenhouse gas and attack the root cause of climate change. We're really out to try and get the whole food industry to do this. That is what our mission is.”
We understand that you are using LCA to understand the total carbon footprint of the Airly crackers. Can you tell us more about how you are doing that?
“Yeah, so in the LCA field, it's the best practice to have third parties conduct the LCA. So what we did is, and again, I credit the work at Colorado State so highly because I've been working with universities for years in new technology and they're not always set up to export the incredible technology that they've created. So what Dr. Paustian had the foresight to do was to form a company. So he is still a professor of soil science at Colorado State University. But he formed a company a number of years ago called Soil Metrics and staffed it with PhD graduates, from Colorado State and other places. Soil Metrics actually did our life cycle analysis. So we didn't interfere with the work of Colorado State, but it was all kind of that same technology.
They actually did all our analyses. What we did is, we pre-screened all of our farmers who supplied Post cereals right now, and we looked for the ones that had the most ecofriendly practices. Then we got out of the way and allowed Soil Metrics scientists to work directly with our farmers and tweak their practices. We basically looked for farms that had high carbon capture potential. A little secret about carbon farming is that the soil is a huge part of it. So you've have to have the right type of soil and the right practices. When the weather cooperates, you really sequester a lot of carbon. So that's what we did. We let the people from Soil Metrics work directly with our best farmers. Every year, we have maybe 15 or 20 farmers in this, and then from that, about seven farmers pass the test and go negative when the crop is harvested.
What's beautiful about this process is if the crop isn't negative, we can then go use the product in other cereal products that we sell. This is a model that I think the whole food industry can follow. All the guys who make all the biggest brands can follow this model and create a brand like Airly. This brand is about a higher calling and a higher purpose. We drawdown greenhouse gas, and then that drives the farmers to get better. Then the things that don't quite make that cut can go into the rest of the foods we eat. Then all of the foods we eat today will be better than they were before. We will have brands like Airly educating the world on what can be done. What I'm hoping will happen is, consumers will support and buy Airly and those increasing sales of Airly will cause everyone to jump into this space, which is the goal.
I mean, we want every product to be grown in this manner. And even further, I'd like every company to take the next step to measure the rest of their footprint and offset the whole thing. This way it is actually a carbon negative business. We could just take the farm level LCA and leave it there and say, ‘okay, that was good. And we're just gonna put it on the box, sell it, and say it's climate friendly.’ But we take that extra step as a business, to make sure that we not only do no harm, but we also help clean the problem up. We want to go negative. We want to engage in carbon drawdown. So I hope more and more businesses do that.”
ABOUT Mark Izzo
Mark and his Bright Future Foods co-founders are focused on accelerating green innovation in the food space to transform our food system into a powerful weapon in the battle against climate change. Bright Future Foods launched the “lighthouse” brand Airly. Airly’s mission it is to reverse climate change through food and prove to the world that it’s possible to create a snack that is not only delicious, affordable, and convenient, but climate-friendly too! Airly is the world’s first cracker to remove CO2 from the air and is the first snack product to empower consumers by printing the carbon footprint right on the package. Prior to Bright Future Foods Mark spent a 30+ year career in various supply chain, R&D, innovation and business development roles with companies including Post Holdings Inc, Conagra Brands/Pinnacle Foods, Campbell Soup Company and Mars Inc. He holds a BS in Biochemistry, an MS in Food Science, and a PhD in Food Science, all from Rutgers University.
