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When you examine a package of M&M's, one of the best-selling sweets in the US, you'll notice familiar components like sugar, dried milk, and cocoa butter. But, many more elements are less known: gum arabic, starch gum, palm wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.

You'll find thirty-four ingredients in the candy, with no fewer than 30 countries participating in supplying them. Every one has its own production network that converts raw materials into ingredients – beans into chocolate paste, plants into sweetener, petroleum into blue food dye.

These components then journey globally to a main manufacturing plant where they are combined and transformed into small blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.

It's becoming more widely recognized that agricultural networks are a significant contributor of the environmental emergency. Researchers can study deforestation for agriculture or methane emissions from livestock. But the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods – like M&Ms – is less clear and is just beginning to be understood. A key factor they have been challenging to evaluate is the inherent complexity of ultra-processed foods: these factory-produced items include a vast array of components and processes to put them together, making it extremely difficult to monitor.

But it doesn't mean it's not important. Since UPFs take over US grocery store shelves and diets – they now account for seventy percent of products purchased in supermarkets, and more than half of dietary energy intake – specialists say that understanding their ecological cost is essential to create a more climate-friendly food system.

The Information We Already Understand

Although researchers are just beginning to investigate the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, what's already known about them is concerning.

"The more processed products become, the more deleterious they are to human health and the environment," said Anthony Fardet. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the ingredients are so resource demanding. When combined, the toll expands significantly.

Take the popular candy. The first step in creating the sweets is cultivating for cocoa, sugar, milk products and palm.

It has been extensive evidence that farming for components like chocolate drives consistently rising rates of forest clearance across the globe. Since 1850, agricultural expansion has driven nearly ninety percent of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been criticized in the past for agricultural methods in their production network, and have since created environmental initiatives, but these fail to address that industrial farming are, fundamentally, unsustainable.

Then there's, sugar, milk solids and palm oil – likewise major carbon dioxide sources.

Furthermore are the factory-produced components like food dyes – possibly the hallmark of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are dyed with E132 and E133; these colorants are mostly made in industrial color production centers Asia, via a chemical reaction of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, catalyzed by the metals copper and chromium.

Producing soya lecithin, an ingredient made from soybean oil that's used to change the consistency of chocolate, requires procedures like degumming in a heated vessel, chemically isolating phospholipids, bleaching using chemical agents and dehydrating under vacuum pressure. Similarly, dextrose, begins as corn that gets steeped in acid before being ground, divided and dried. From there, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using biological catalysts and chemicals, and then reformed into crystals.

Although ultra-processed chocolate products are among the most damaging, different types of ultra-processed foods are taxing on the planet as well. Take for instance another popular snack, which has thirty-nine components. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, 1,000kg of carbon dioxide is released to the air. Like other corporations, producers have created their own sustainability promises, but several such commitments are supported by methods that are considered superficial eco-claims.

Consequently, researchers have started to calculate the ecological cost of ultra-processed foods.

A study calculated that well-known sweets generate at least 13.2kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. Considering yearly output of more than six hundred million kilograms in the US, this would mean that the products emit at least three point eight million tonnes of CO2 – making up zero point one percent of yearly carbon output in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the actual impact is probably significantly greater, experts say.

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

The Gaps We Have Yet to Discover

Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of ultra-processed foods is extremely challenging, since, definitionally, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a high volume of opaque processes. Components aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Instead, these elements are chemically modified, some parts removed, and flavors, colors or consistencies incorporated – and it's unknown what the impact of these methods are because so many suppliers and components are included.

A further factor is that every ultra-processed food are the products of food companies that have little incentive to disclose their ecological impact and might not comprehend it to start with.

As an example, large corporations don't farm primary components themselves, but instead rely on hundreds of farms that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that emissions from large manufacturers may be underestimated. Analysts noted that corporations "don't have actual data, so they use estimated values, which are approximations."

Specialists say that corporations provide reports on straightforward aspects like shipping, which are easier to calculate, and often omit or convolute the farming-related carbon of their product. After all, disclosing significant carbon output contradicts the interests of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to determine the environmental impact of industrial farming and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make processed food components remain un-researched.

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

"The majority of individuals in the food industry's value chain are not concerned with climate change from an ethical perspective, but they do care about money," explained another expert. He clarifies that to change these motivations, the cost of foods and ingredients would need to incorporate their impact on our global environment. But that would require government regulations and economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of UPFs.

The Reasons It Matters

For less than two dollars, the price of popular candies at the grocery store barely represents their real impact on the environment. But to address these issues with ultra-processed foods, more than just a few tweaks to the component selection are required.

"Reducing the salt, or sugar of just a single item is just greenwashing," said Fardet. "We need to change the whole picture." To do that, he recommended eating more regionally produced, unprocessed items, which often take much less resources and transportation to create, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.

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