A University of Michigan study has found meal kits have a much lower overall carbon footprint than the same meals bought at a supermarket, despite having more packaging.
It found average greenhouse gas emissions were a third lower for meal kit dinners than the store-bought meals when every step in the process — from the farm to the landfill — was considered.
The report’s senior author, Shelie Miller from University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems in the School for Environment and Sustainability, says the main reason was pre-portioned ingredients and a streamlined supply chain lower the overall food loss and waste for meal kits.
“Meal kits are designed for minimal food waste,” Miller says.
“So, while the packaging is typically worse for meal kits, it’s not the packaging that matters most. It’s food waste and transportation logistics that cause the most important differences in the environmental impacts of these two delivery mechanisms.”
Meal kits also displayed emissions savings in what’s called ‘last-mile transportation’ — the final leg of the journey that gets food into the consumer’s home. Meal kits rely on delivery trucks. Since each meal kit is just one of many packages delivered on a truck route, it is associated with a small fraction of the total vehicle emissions.
The study found the largest emissions source, for both meal kits and grocery store meals, was food production, with 59 per cent tied to agricultural production. Meals with the largest environmental impact either contained red meat or were associated with large amounts of wasted food.
The research was published in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling.
