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If you examine a package of M&Ms, among the most popular candies in the US, you'll notice familiar ingredients like sweetener, dried milk, and chocolate fat. However, many more elements are unfamiliar: acacia gum, dextrin, palm wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.

There are thirty-four ingredients in the candy, and at least 30 countries involved in supplying them. Every one has its own supply chain that converts base substances into usable parts – beans into chocolate paste, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.

These components then travel globally to a central processing facility where they are combined and converted into tiny blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.

It's becoming better understood that food systems are a major driver of the environmental emergency. Researchers can study land clearing for farming or methane emissions from livestock. But the environmental impact of highly manufactured products – like these candies – is less clear and is only now to come into focus. One reason they have been challenging to evaluate is the inherent complexity of ultra-processed foods: these industrially made foods include a huge number of ingredients and processes to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to track.

But it doesn't mean it's unimportant. Since ultra-processed foods dominate US grocery store shelves and diets – they now comprise seventy percent of food sold in supermarkets, and over 50% of dietary energy intake – experts say that understanding their environmental toll is essential to create a greener food system.

What We Already Understand

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

"The greater the processing foods are, the more harmful they are to public wellness and the environment," stated a senior researcher. The primary cause, he explains, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact balloons.

Take the popular candy. The initial phase in producing the candies is cultivating for chocolate beans, sweetener, dairy and palm.

There is well-documented that farming for components like cocoa drives ever increasing rates of deforestation worldwide. Since 1850, farmland growth has driven nearly ninety percent of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been called out in the past for farming practices in their supply chain, and have since created sustainability plans, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, unsustainable.

Additionally, sweetener, dried dairy and palm oil – likewise significant greenhouse gas emitters.

Furthermore are the factory-produced ingredients like food dyes – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are colored with E132 and E133; these dyes are mostly made in food dye manufacturing hotspots India and China, via a chemical reaction of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, accelerated by the elements copper and chromium.

Creating soy lecithin, an additive made from soybean oil that's used to alter the texture of candy, requires procedures like oil refining in a hot reactor, extracting fat molecules, bleaching using chemical agents and drying under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, starts off as maize that gets steeped in acid before being ground, divided and dried. Afterward, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using enzymes and chemicals, and then reformed into crystals.

Although highly manufactured candies are some of the worst offenders, other kinds of ultra-processed foods are burdensome on the environment as well. Take for instance another popular snack, which has thirty-nine ingredients. Maize is the main ingredient, and for every hectare grown, 1,000kg of CO2 is emitted to the atmosphere. Like major brands, producers have created their own environmental pledges, but many of these commitments are supported by practices that are considered superficial eco-claims.

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

A study calculated that popular candies generate at least 13.2kg of carbon equivalents per kilo produced. Considering yearly output of over 664 million kg in the US, this would mean that the products emit at least 3.8 million tons of CO2 – making up 0.1% of yearly carbon output in the country. But, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the actual impact is probably significantly greater, experts say.

There's a "black box" when it comes to emissions tracking in the manufactured food sector, notes a professor who researches how corporations engage with the environmental challenge. "There exists so much ambiguity as supply chains get complicated."

The Gaps We Have Yet to Discover

Calculating precisely of the ecological impact of ultra-processed foods is extremely challenging, given that, definitionally, these products consist of numerous components and a significant number of non-transparent procedures. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these elements are altered synthetically, certain portions stripped away, and flavors, dyes or consistencies added in – and it's unclear what the impact of these processes are because so many suppliers and parts are involved.

Another reason is that all UPFs are the products of manufacturing corporations that have little incentive to reveal their ecological impact and may not fully understand it to start with.

As an example, major brands don't farm primary components themselves, but instead depend on numerous growers that don't always have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that carbon output from large manufacturers may be underreported. Experts said that corporations "don't have actual data, so they use estimated values, which are guesses."

Specialists say that corporations provide reports on straightforward aspects like shipping, which are simpler to measure, and frequently exclude or complicate the agricultural emissions of their product. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output contradicts the objectives of large food corporations, so the intricate assessments needed to establish the carbon footprint of industrial farming and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make UPF ingredients remain understudied.

"The main point of manufactured products is profit," stated Fardet, noting that they're designed to be attractive, convenient and pleasurable to eat.

"Most of the people in the food industry's production network are not concerned with global warming from an ideological point of view, but they are interested in money," said a specialist. He explains that to change these motivations, the cost of foods and ingredients would need to include their effect on our shared climate. But that would require official policies and economic consequences based on the actual ecological impact of ultra-processed foods.

The Reasons It Matters

At just under $2, the cost of M&Ms at the grocery store hardly reflects their true cost on the environment. But to tackle these issues with ultra-processed foods, more than just a minor adjustments to the ingredient list are required.

"Reducing the sodium, or sweetener of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," said the expert. "It is necessary to transform the entire system." To do that, he suggested consuming more regionally produced, unprocessed items, which often take far fewer resources and transportation to produce, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.

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