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If you inspect a packet of M&M's, one of the best-selling sweets in the US, you'll see familiar components like sugar, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. But, numerous items are less known: gum arabic, dextrin, carnauba wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.

There are thirty-four ingredients in M&Ms, and at least thirty nations participating in providing them. Every one has its own supply chain that converts base substances into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, plants into sweetener, oil into artificial coloring.

These ingredients then travel across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are mixed and transformed into small blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.

It's becoming more widely recognized that agricultural networks are a significant contributor of the environmental emergency. Researchers can study deforestation for agriculture or greenhouse gases from animals. Yet the ecological footprint of ultra-processed foods – such as M&Ms – is less clear and is only now to be understood. A key factor they have been challenging to assess is the very nature of UPFs: these industrially made items include a vast array of components and procedures to put them together, making it nearly impossible to monitor.

But it doesn't mean it's not important. As UPFs take over American supermarkets and eating habits – they now comprise 70% of food sold in grocery stores, and more than half of dietary energy intake – experts say that understanding their environmental toll is essential to create a more climate-friendly agricultural system.

What We Already Understand

While researchers are only starting to examine the ecological effects of ultra-processed foods, existing knowledge about them is worrisome.

"The greater the processing products become, the more deleterious they are to human health and the environment," said Anthony Fardet. The main reason, he clarifies, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact balloons.

Take M&Ms. The initial phase in creating the sweets is cultivating for chocolate beans, sweetener, milk products and palm oil.

There is extensive evidence that farming for ingredients like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of forest clearance worldwide. For over a century, farmland growth has driven nearly ninety percent of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for thirty percent of worldwide carbon output. 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 industrial farming are, at their core, ecologically damaging.

Then there's, sweetener, dried dairy and palm fat – also major greenhouse gas emitters.

On top of that are the factory-produced components like food dyes – perhaps the signature of ultra-processing – which these candies contain 13 different types of. The blue candies are dyed with artificial blue dyes; these dyes are mostly made in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, through synthetic processes of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, catalyzed by the metals copper and chromium.

Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to alter the texture of candy, requires steps like oil refining in a hot reactor, chemically isolating fat molecules, decolorization using chemical agents and drying under reduced air pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, starts off as maize that gets soaked in chemicals before being ground, separated and dried. From there, it's broken down into simpler compounds using enzymes and acids, and then reformed into crystals.

Although ultra-processed chocolate products are among the most damaging, other kinds of ultra-processed foods are taxing on the environment as well. Take for instance another popular snack, which has 39 ingredients. Maize is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is emitted to the air. Like other corporations, manufacturers have developed their own sustainability promises, but many of these commitments are underpinned by methods that are considered superficial eco-claims.

As a result, researchers have begun estimating the environmental toll of ultra-processed foods.

One analysis estimated that well-known sweets generate at least 13.2kg of greenhouse gases per kilogram produced. Considering yearly output of more than six hundred million kilograms in the United States, this would mean that the products emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – making up 0.1% of annual emissions in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on accessible information; the true cost is probably much higher, according to specialists.

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

The Gaps We Have Yet to Discover

Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of UPFs is extremely challenging, given that, definitionally, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a significant number of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Rather, these ingredients are altered synthetically, some parts stripped away, and flavors, colors or textures added in – and it's unclear what the impact of these methods are because numerous providers and parts are included.

A further factor is that every ultra-processed food are the products of manufacturing corporations that have little incentive to disclose their ecological impact and might not fully understand it to begin with.

As an example, major brands don't cultivate primary components themselves, but instead depend on hundreds of farms that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that carbon output from big food corporations may be underestimated. Experts said that corporations "don't have actual data, so they use emissions factors, which are guesses."

Researchers say that corporations submit data on straightforward aspects like transportation, which are simpler to measure, and frequently exclude or convolute the agricultural emissions of their product. After all, disclosing significant carbon output contradicts the interests 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 primary goal of ultra-processed foods is money," stated the researcher, noting that they're designed to be appealing, easy and pleasurable to eat.

"Most of the people in the food industry's production network don't care about climate change from an ethical perspective, but they do care about money," said another expert. He explains that to change these motivations, the value of products and components would need to incorporate 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.

Why It Matters

For less than two dollars, the cost of popular candies at the grocery store hardly reflects their real impact on the planet. But to address these problems with manufactured products, more than just a minor adjustments to the ingredient list are needed.

"Lowering the salt, or sweetener of just a single item is just superficial eco-marketing," said Fardet. "It is necessary to change the whole picture." To do that, he recommended consuming more regionally produced, unprocessed items, which often take much less energy and transit to produce, and therefore have a significantly reduced carbon footprint.

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