Food industry's hidden emissions expose need for supply chain overhaul at Food Tek Pack 2025

At Food Tek Pack 2025, expert Ishita Bhatnagar reveals that over 80% of a food product’s carbon footprint lies outside the factory, urging companies to act on logistics, packaging and farm practices through systems engineering and digital traceability.

At Food Tek Pack 2025, held alongside the Intrapack exhibition, Ishita Bhatnagar, co‑founder of Zissions, delivered a keynote that reframed where the food sector’s carbon burden really sits and what companies mu...

Her opening provocation , a quiz asking the audience to estimate how much of the carbon footprint of a 10‑rupee packet of chips comes from logistics, packaging and farm‑level activity , set the tone. When the answer “80 to 95%” appeared on screen, the reaction was audible. “For most food brands, less than 10% of the carbon cost is actually spent inside the factory,” Bhatnagar said. “More than 80% lies in the farm, on the truck, or in the wrapper.” That, she argued, implies corporate sustainability programmes that focus only on factory emissions are missing the “hidden 90%”.

Bhatnagar pressed companies to treat their supply chains as systems engineering problems rather than a string of compliance checkboxes. “You have been swiping it every time you send a plastic packet. Now, the bill is due,” she said, paraphrasing the effect of India’s revised plastic rules and recent EPR amendments. According to the announcement around those regulatory changes, the immediate requirement to incorporate 30% recycled content , rising under staged targets for rigid packaging in later years , should be read as both an obligation and a strategic opening. Industry commentary and regulatory summaries note the 30% mandate for 2025–26 and propose a pathway to higher targets through 2028–29, alongside digital traceability measures intended to strengthen recycling claims.

Crucially, Bhatnagar distinguished carbon‑positive supply chains from simple offsetting: “a balance equation” in engineering terms where recycling and sequestration must exceed emissions. That emphasis echoes broader evidence that the largest greenhouse‑gas sources in food systems are upstream. Government and agency reports show primary production and farm activities account for a substantial share of food‑system emissions: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis, for example, highlights that primary production is a leading source of agricultural greenhouse gases and that transport typically contributes a noticeably smaller share , often single‑digit percentages , of cradle‑to‑consumer food emissions. Those findings reinforce Bhatnagar’s contention that logistics, packaging and farm practices are the hotspots to tackle.

She outlined three immediate levers. Logistics, she said, is “the most convenient emitter” , high impact, under‑measured, yet tractable. Minor route and load optimisations can cut both carbon and costs, she argued, pointing to modelling work Zissions has applied to large logistics customers. Packaging, the second hotspot, is where regulatory pressure and engineering opportunity meet. Bhatnagar advocated mono‑materials , “like Lego bricks” , over complex multi‑layer laminates, because they simplify recycling, reduce EPR fees and accelerate circular‑economy outcomes. That technical shift aligns with the regulatory direction: the 2025 rule changes and industry guidance increasingly require digital identifiers and traceability to substantiate recycled content claims, and set a framework of rising targets and penalties designed to move the market toward reuse and verified recycling.

Yet recycling cannot scale without collection. “You cannot ignore the informal sector,” Bhatnagar told the audience, urging conversion of waste‑picker networks into formal, traceable value chains. She highlighted digital aggregation , registering informal collectors via apps, tracking material flows and marking packaging with QR codes , as a practical route. That approach reflects recent government initiatives to verify material recovery organisations and enable companies to buy credited recycling outcomes, and mirrors amendments that introduce digital labelling and traceability for batteries and other waste streams to reduce fraud and improve accountability.

To move from diagnosis to action, Bhatnagar presented Zissions’ work as examples of how engineering and data can convert compliance into revenue. Three case studies illustrated the point:

• A digital twin for a recycler that enabled real‑time energy and mass‑balance tracking, allowing recycled polypropylene to be certified and sold at a premium. “We turned compliance into revenue,” she said.

• Logistics optimisation using computational models adapted from heavy industry to shave kilometres and inefficiency from routes; clients included large e‑commerce and industrial logistics firms. The message: every kilometre saved reduces carbon , and operating expense.

• Simulation‑based material optimisation using finite‑element analysis to stress‑test packaging changes in silico, enabling firms to reduce plastic content without market failures. “We want the product to fail in software so it doesn’t fail in the market,” she said.

Bhatnagar also signposted opportunities beyond packaging and transport. Upstream interventions , solar irrigation pumps, precision fertiliser use , and downstream investments in cold‑chain infrastructure could slash losses and create tradable carbon reductions, she argued. That point is consistent with international analyses showing primary production and food loss are major sources of agricultural emissions and waste‑related methane and nitrous oxide.

Her closing admonition was procedural as well as strategic: “You can do nothing if you do not measure your footprint.” With EPR reporting and digital traceability becoming both a compliance requirement and a market differentiator, Bhatnagar urged industry leaders to adopt digital models immediately. Regulatory summaries and industry guides indicate governments are tightening both content mandates and verification mechanisms, from QR codes and barcodes for battery and packaging labelling to broader EPR performance linkages , a policy environment that makes rigorous measurement a precondition for both legal compliance and commercial advantage.

Taken together, the messages from Food Tek Pack 2025 amount to a simple rerouting of corporate attention: real climate gains in food require moving decisively beyond factory walls into fields, trucks and wrappers, pairing regulatory response with systems‑level engineering, verified circularity and investment in the infrastructure that turns waste into value.

Source: Noah Wire Services