Developing a sustainability data map for the UK dairy food chain

This project will develop a map of data collected along the milk food chain from its production on the farm to retail point of sale as bottled/cartoned milk. It involves collaboration from government, policymakers, nutrition professionals and industry stakeholders. A flow diagram of the milk food chain, identifying the types of environmental and nutrition data that are collected along the chain will be developed. Information on the data owners, users, access pathways and a description of the parameters within each dataset will be collected. Finally, the datasets will be examined to assess them for comparability.

This map will enable environmental and nutrition data to be analysed allowing wider societal questions on the sustainability of the food system and its impact on public health to be interrogated. Furthermore, the map can be used to identify key stages along the food chain where changes could be implemented to contribute towards net zero.

Project lead: Maria Traka, Quadram Institute Biosciences

Project members: Nathan King, Food Standards Agency; Emma Gregson, DairyUK, UK Dairy Roadmap; Samantha Royston, DEFRA

Findings from the project

1. A vast amount of environmental sustainability data is collected across the dairy supply chain. It is used for a variety of purposes by different stakeholders across the supply chain for different reasons. These include to produce environmental progress reports, for economic reasons, to inform future actions in terms of sustainable farming practices and emission reduction actions, for audits and to monitor compliance with environmental or animal welfare bodies, and for benchmarking purposes.
2. Data quality assurance practices vary by stakeholder type. On farm, the level of quality assurance is variable depending on the person involved. For processors, stringent quality assurance practices are in place, including on-farm visits to verify data received, automated plausible value limits, ‘possible error’ messages for outliers and manual data inspection. Retailers tended to rely on manual data quality practices to identify outliers and comparison to data submitted in previous years to understand trends. Regulatory bodies and agri-support service stakeholders tended to employ a combination of manual data cleaning and use of automated identification of implausible and missing values.
3. Challenges with data collection also varied by stakeholder type. On farm these challenges centred on the volume of data required and the time commitment necessary to accurately capture this data. Challenges experienced across the supply chain included verifying data, manual data management and the difficulty in collecting some arbitrary sustainability variables as they are highly variable due to factors such as weather and time of year.
4. Attitudes to data openness: Stakeholders could see value in making sustainability data across the supply chain open but emphasised the importance of retaining control over the supporting narrative which accompanied the data to avoid data misrepresentation or misuse.
5. Data sharing practices are well established and overall working very well across the dairy supply chain. This is related to data contractually linked to milk price, historical capturing of data in this chain to ensure security of milk supply and prevention of food safety issues.

Recommendations for future research

Future research should focus on establishing the data capturing, sharing, flows and transformations that occur in other example food supply chains. This research focused on the milk supply chain in the UK for a number of reasons; milk represents a short and relatively simple supply chain, the vast majority of milk consumed in UK is also produced here thus it is a domestic market, and milk is an important contributor to the UK population’s nutritional status. Future use cases could replicate this work but expand into supply chains which represent both national and international markets and composite multi-ingredient dishes with complex supply chains. From a nutrition perspective, future work should encompass products which are alternatives to traditional animal-based foods and foods which contain nutrients of interest among the population.