BRUSSELS, OSLO | PepsiCo Europe and Yara announced a long-term European partnership to provide farmers with crop nutrition programs to help decarbonise the food value chain.
As part of the partnership, which spans multiple countries, participating PepsiCo Europe farmers will be equipped with best-in-class crop nutrition product advice and precision farming digital tools.
This will allow them to increase nutrient use efficiency (NUE), boost yields, and reduce their crops' carbon footprint. Yara, Europe's leading crop nutrition company, will supply PepsiCo with the products and services.
Yara will deliver up to 165,000 tons of fertiliser annually to PepsiCo, covering around 25 percent 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 mix will also include Yara’s standard premium nitrate-based mineral fertilisers produced using natural gas. Thanks to catalyst technology, these fertilisers have a carbon footprint of around 50 percent lower than most non-EU fertilisers.
The partnership has aimed to upgrade to Yara Climate Choice fertilisers over time as production scales up and technologies mature so that all 165,000 p.a. tons are Yara Climate Choice fertilisers by 2030.
The collaboration underlines the companies’ commitment to building a more sustainable food system aligned with the European Union’s climate targets. At the same time, it will support farmers through transition costs to ensure their livelihoods are not adversely impacted.
“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 influence directly,” said Archana Jagannathan, Chief Sustainability Officer at PepsiCo Europe.
“Providing our farmers with fertilisers with a lower carbon footprint and supporting them to improve crop nutrition end-to-end will allow us to make a significant step towards achieving net zero by 2040.”
The collaboration also aligns with Yara’s mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet.
“To grow a nature-positive food future and transform our food system, we must collaborate across the food value chain. We’re excited to work with first movers like PepsiCo to help make this a reality. Decarbonising food production will be critical to delivering on the Paris Agreement – and farmers will play a key role in helping us get there,” said Mónica Andrés Enríquez, Executive Vice President for Europe at Yara.
The partnership, which will help drive the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices, will include approximately 1,000 farms covering around 128,000 hectares across the European Union and the UK.
Efforts will initially focus on potatoes, a key PepsiCo crop, then expand to other crops such as oats and corn.
Fertilisers have been the most significant opportunity to reduce emissions as fertiliser production and in-field emissions account for half of PepsiCo’s average potato carbon footprint in Europe.
This partnership will further scale up sustainable nutrient management practices across the PepsiCo farmer groups. It will include full-season crop and soil data capture and monitoring using PepsiCo’s CropTrak and ML Analytics tool, which will be complemented by Yara's digital solutions offering, such as digital satellite imagery via the AtFarm platform and the MegaLab soil analysis.
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