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When you examine a packet of M&M's, among the best-selling sweets in the US, you'll notice familiar ingredients like sweetener, dried milk, and cocoa butter. But, numerous elements are less known: gum arabic, dextrin, palm wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.

You'll find 34 components in the candy, and no fewer than 30 nations participating in supplying them. Each has its distinct supply chain that converts raw materials into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, oil into artificial coloring.

These ingredients then travel globally to a main manufacturing plant where they are mixed and transformed into tiny multicolored chocolate gems.

It is now better understood that food systems are a major driver of the climate crisis. Researchers can study land clearing for farming or greenhouse gases from animals. Yet the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – such as M&Ms – is more ambiguous and is just beginning to come into focus. One reason they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these factory-produced items include a vast array of components and processes to put them together, making it nearly impossible to track.

But it doesn't mean it's not important. As ultra-processed foods take over US grocery store shelves and eating habits – they now account for 70% of food sold in supermarkets, and more than half of dietary energy intake – experts say that assessing their environmental toll is essential to create a more climate-friendly agricultural system.

What We Already Understand

While scientists are only starting to investigate the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, what's already known about them is worrisome.

"The more processed foods are, the more harmful they are to human health and the planet," said Anthony Fardet. The primary cause, he explains, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. When combined, the toll expands significantly.

Consider the popular candy. The first step in creating the candies is farming for cocoa, sweetener, dairy and palm oil.

It has been well-documented that farming for ingredients like chocolate drives ever increasing rates of deforestation across the globe. 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. Major companies have been called out in the past for agricultural methods in their production network, and have since created environmental initiatives, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, ecologically damaging.

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

On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like food dyes – perhaps the signature of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain 13 different types of. Blue M&Ms are dyed with artificial blue dyes; these dyes are mostly made in industrial color production centers India and China, via a chemical reaction of petroleum derivatives with diazonium salt, accelerated by the metals copper or chromium.

Creating soy lecithin, an additive made from plant oil that's used to alter the texture of chocolate, requires steps like oil refining in a hot reactor, chemically isolating fat molecules, bleaching using chemical agents and drying under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, begins as corn that gets steeped in acid before being ground, separated and dehydrated. From there, it's broken down into smaller molecules using enzymes and acids, and then recrystallized.

Although highly manufactured candies are among the most damaging, other kinds of ultra-processed foods are burdensome on the planet as well. Take for instance a well-known chip, which has thirty-nine components. Maize is the main ingredient, and for every hectare grown, 1,000kg 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 greenwashing.

As a result, some experts have started to calculate the ecological cost of UPFs.

A study calculated that well-known sweets generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of carbon equivalents per kilo produced. Considering annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the US, this would mean that the candies emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – making up 0.1% of annual emissions in the US. But, this is just a calculation based on accessible information; the true cost is probably significantly greater, according to specialists.

There's a "black box" when it comes to emissions tracking in the manufactured food sector, says Patrick Callery who researches how companies respond to the climate crisis. "There is so much uncertainty as supply chains get complex."

What We Don't Know

Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of UPFs is extremely challenging, since, by definition, these products consist of numerous components and a significant number of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Rather, these ingredients are altered synthetically, some parts stripped away, and tastes, dyes or textures added in – and it's unclear what the cost of these methods are because numerous providers and parts are included.

A further factor is that all UPFs are the creations of manufacturing corporations that have little incentive to disclose their ecological impact and might not comprehend it to start with.

As an example, major brands do not farm primary components themselves, but instead depend on numerous growers that don't always have precise emissions tracking in place. This means that emissions from big food corporations may be underreported. 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 shipping, which are simpler to measure, and often omit or convolute the agricultural emissions of their items. After all, reporting high emissions goes against the objectives of large food corporations, so the intricate assessments needed to establish the environmental impact of industrial farming and complex manufacturing methods used to make processed food components remain un-researched.

"The primary goal of ultra-processed foods is money," stated the researcher, noting that they're designed to be attractive, convenient and enjoyable to eat.

"The majority of individuals in the food industry's production network are not concerned with climate change from an ideological point of view, but they are interested in profit," said another expert. He clarifies that to change these motivations, the cost of foods and ingredients would need to include their effect on our global environment. But that would require government regulations and economic consequences based on the actual ecological impact of UPFs.

The Reasons It Matters

At just under $2, the price of M&Ms at the grocery store hardly reflects their real impact on the environment. But to tackle these problems with manufactured products, more than just a few tweaks to the component selection are needed.

"Reducing the sodium, or sugar of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," said the expert. "We need to change the entire system." To do that, he suggested eating more locally sourced, whole foods, which frequently take much less resources and transit to create, and therefore have a significantly reduced environmental impact.

Specialty goods that cannot be sourced locally, like chocolate, should {make up|constitute