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If you examine a package of M&M's, one of the best-selling candies in the United States, you'll see familiar components like sweetener, dried milk, and cocoa butter. But, many more elements are unfamiliar: acacia gum, dextrin, palm wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.

You'll find thirty-four ingredients in M&Ms, and at least 30 nations participating in supplying them. Every one has its distinct supply chain that converts raw materials into usable parts – beans into chocolate paste, cane into sugar, oil into artificial coloring.

These components then journey globally to a central processing facility where they are combined and transformed into small multicolored chocolate gems.

It's becoming better understood that food systems are a significant contributor of the environmental emergency. Researchers can examine land clearing for farming or greenhouse gases from animals. But the environmental impact of highly manufactured products – like M&Ms – is more ambiguous and is only now to come into focus. One reason they have been challenging to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these factory-produced foods include a vast array of ingredients and processes to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to track.

But it doesn't mean it's not important. As ultra-processed foods take over US grocery store shelves and diets – they now comprise 70% of food sold in supermarkets, and over 50% of dietary energy intake – specialists say that assessing their environmental toll is critical to build a more climate-friendly agricultural system.

What We Know

While scientists are just beginning to examine the environmental impact of UPFs, what's already known about them is worrisome.

"The greater the processing foods are, the more deleterious they are to human health and the environment," stated Anthony Fardet. The primary cause, he explains, is that the components are so resource demanding. When combined, the impact balloons.

Consider M&Ms. The initial phase in producing the sweets is farming for cocoa, sugar, dairy and palm.

It has been well-documented that agriculture for ingredients like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of deforestation across the globe. For over a century, farmland growth has driven almost 90% of global deforestation, which has been responsible for thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been called out in the past for agricultural methods in their supply chain, and have since created sustainability plans, but these fail to address that industrial farming are, fundamentally, ecologically damaging.

Additionally, sweetener, dried dairy and palm oil – likewise major carbon dioxide sources.

On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like food dyes – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which these candies 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 diazonium salt, catalyzed by the elements copper and chromium.

Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires procedures like degumming in a hot reactor, extracting fat molecules, decolorization using chemical agents and drying under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, starts off as corn that gets steeped in acid before being milled, divided and dehydrated. From there, it's decomposed into smaller molecules using enzymes and chemicals, and then recrystallized.

Although ultra-processed chocolate products are some of the worst offenders, other kinds of UPFs are taxing on the environment as well. Consider another popular snack, which has thirty-nine components. Corn is the primary component, and for every hectare grown, 1,000kg of carbon dioxide is emitted to the atmosphere. Like other corporations, producers have created their own sustainability promises, but many of these promises are underpinned by practices that are considered greenwashing.

As a result, researchers have begun estimating the ecological cost of UPFs.

A study estimated that well-known sweets generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. With yearly output of over 664 million kg in the US, this would mean that the products emit at least three point eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide – making up zero point one percent of yearly carbon output in the country. However, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the actual impact is likely much higher, according to specialists.

There's a "black box" when it comes to carbon accounting in the manufactured food sector, notes a professor who researches how corporations respond to the environmental challenge. "There is so much ambiguity as production networks get complicated."

The Gaps We Don't Know

Calculating precisely of the ecological impact of UPFs is nearly impossible, since, by definition, these products consist of many ingredients and a high volume of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Rather, these elements are chemically modified, certain portions removed, and flavors, colors or textures incorporated – and it's unclear what the cost of these methods are because numerous providers and parts are involved.

A further factor is that all UPFs are the products of food companies that have minimal motivation to disclose their ecological impact and may not fully understand it to start with.

As an example, large corporations do not farm primary components themselves, but instead rely on numerous growers that don't always have precise emissions tracking in place. This means that carbon output from big food corporations may be underestimated. Analysts noted that corporations "lack actual data, so they use emissions factors, which are approximations."

Researchers say that corporations submit data on simple things like shipping, which are simpler to measure, and frequently exclude or convolute the agricultural emissions of their product. After all, reporting high emissions contradicts the interests of major manufacturers, so the complex calculations needed to determine the environmental impact of large-scale agriculture and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make processed food components remain un-researched.

"The main point of ultra-processed foods is money," said the researcher, noting that they're designed to be appealing, convenient and pleasurable to eat.

"The majority of individuals in the food industry's production network don't care about climate change from an ethical perspective, but they are interested in money," explained another expert. He clarifies that to shift those incentives, the value of products and components would need to incorporate their impact on our global environment. But that would require official policies and economic consequences based on the actual ecological impact of ultra-processed foods.

The Reasons It Is Important

For less than two dollars, the price of M&Ms at the supermarket hardly reflects their true cost on the environment. But to address these problems with ultra-processed foods, not only a few tweaks to the ingredient list are needed.

"Lowering the salt, or sweetener of just a single item is just superficial eco-marketing," stated the expert. "It is necessary to transform the entire system." To do that, he recommended eating more locally sourced, whole foods, which frequently take much less resources and transit to create, and therefore have a much smaller environmental impact.

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