Yara partners with PepsiCo Europe to decarbonise food production

• Yara and PepsiCo Europe have announced a long-term partnership aimed at lowering the carbon footprint of food production by providing farmers with industry-leading crop nutrition products and digital solutions

The partnership represents an important milestone for UK agriculture. Joining together two key players in the food value chain will drive the adoption of sustainable agriculture practices across approximately 1,000 farms spanning 128,000 hectares across the EU and UK.

As part of the collaboration, Yara, the leading crop nutrition company in Europe, will equip participating PepsiCo Europe farmers with best-in-class crop nutrition products and advice as well as precision farming digital tools. This will allow them to increase nutrient use efficiency (NUE), improve yields, and reduce the carbon footprint of their crops. Efforts will initially focus on potatoes, a key crop for PepsiCo, and then expand to other crops such as oats and corn.

Yara will deliver up to 165,000 tonnes of fertiliser per year to PepsiCo, which will meet around 25% of their crop fertiliser needs in Europe by 2030. These fertilisers will be mostly Yara Climate Choice fertilisers, which include low-carbon footprint fertilisers produced from either renewable ammonia (Herøya, Norway) or low-carbon ammonia via carbon capture and storage (CCS), currently under construction in Yara Sluiskil. The product mix will also include Yara's standard premium nitrate-based mineral fertilisers produced using natural gas, which have a carbon footprint that is around 50% lower than most non-EU fertilisers thanks to the use of catalyst technology. The eventual goal is to upgrade completely to Yara Climate Choice fertilisers by 2030.

Fertiliser production and in-field emissions account for half of PepsiCo's average potato carbon footprint in Europe*, so deploying lower carbon footprint fertilisers provides the biggest opportunity to reduce emissions.

Supporting sustainable nutrient management practices with technology across the PepsiCo Europe farmer groups is also another key focus for the partnership. Farmers will be able to capture crop and soil data and monitor their fields throughout the season by using PepsiCo's CropTrak and ML Analytics tool. This will be complemented by Yara's digital solutions offering, including the AtFarm platform, which allows farmers to monitor their crops using satellite imagery, and Megalab, which enables the analysis of soil or plant tissue to support their crop nutrition decisions.

The collaboration underlines the companies' shared commitment to moving towards a more sustainable food system in line with EU and UK climate targets. At the same time, it will support farmers with transition costs to ensure their livelihoods are not adversely impacted.

"Yara's continued investment in sustainable agriculture makes the company a desirable partner for others in the food supply chain that want to improve the sustainability of their operations. We have the tools, services, products, agronomic knowledge, and farm level understanding to support farmers, and we're excited to be working with an ambitious partner like PepsiCo to transform our food system and make a nature-positive food future a reality," said Dale Turner, Head of Value Chain Partnerships at Yara UK & Ireland.

For Yara, the partnership is in line with its mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet. Key to this mission is collaboration across the food value chain.

"This partnership with Yara aligns with our end-to-end transformation known as PepsiCo Positive (pep+) and will be critical as we transition towards the net-zero food system of the future. Targeting Scope 3 emissions is central to our pep+ agenda, but it can be one of the most challenging areas to directly influence. Providing our farmers with fertilisers that have a lower carbon footprint and supporting them to improve crop nutrition end-to-end will allow us to make a significant step towards our target of achieving net zero by 2040," said Archana Jagannathan, Chief Sustainability Officer at PepsiCo Europe.

*29 percent is related to fertiliser production emissions and 25 percent to fertiliser in-field emissions. The partnership will support the 24-percentage point reduction target in production emissions and the 5-percentage point reduction target for in-field emission while maintaining crop quality and yields.

Follow me!