Climate labelling

At Salling Group, we have advocated a national climate label to make it easier for consumers to navigate according to the products' climate footprint. We are happy to be part of the taskforce for preparing a concrete model for what the climate label should look like, tasked by the Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries.

Netto Allinge presents Denmark's upcoming climate label

At Folkemødet 2023, we showed how Denmark's future climate label might look and be used in the country's grocery stores. The label displays a clear colour scale that makes it easy to decode whether the product has a high or low CO2e footprint. At the same time, the label indicates the calculated CO2e footprint of the individual product. The label therefore feeds in quite precisely to the recommendation made by the Danish Food Agency's working group to the Minister of Food and Agriculture for a national climate label to be taken into use.

Many Danish consumers want to make a difference to the climate and reduce their climate footprint. This also applies when they shop for groceries. In a busy everyday life, however, it can be difficult to change habits, so there is a need to make it easier to shop for groceries while taking the climate into consideration. This can be achieved with a climate label.

That is why Netto launched Skyen (‘The Cloud’) in 2021, which should make it easier to make climate-friendly choices in the stores.

In concrete terms, the testing of this climate label meant that customers in the store were presented with new signs and labels on the shelves. Here, as a customer, you could see which products have a low climate footprint across all products in the store and which have a low climate footprint within the individual product's category.

The cloud was based on the Big Climate Database, which CONCITO has produced. In the database, the climate footprint of 500 foods is mapped so they can be compared across categories. Both CONCITO and a number of other experts assisted Netto with the preparation of the cloud.

A national climate label

The cloud provided useful insights, which have been used in the climate label taskforce during 2022 and 2023 to discuss how a climate label can help consumers in the best possible way. Salling Group advocates that a climate label should be based on a scale model, which most people know from the energy label on white goods, and go across all food categories. By doing this, we believe that as many customers as possible can make an informed choice in the easiest way.