Carbon Footprint as an Instrument for Enhancing Food Quality: Overview of the Wine, Olive Oil and Cereals Sectors

The quantification of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions represents a critical issue for the future development of agro-food produces. Consumer’s behavior could play an important role in the requiring of the environmental performance as an essential element for food quality. Nowadays, the Carbon Footprint (CFP) is a tool worldwide used by agro-food industries to communicating environmental information. This paper aims to investigate the role that CFP could have in consumer’s choices in three significant agro-food sectors in the Mediterranean area: wine, olive oil and cereals. A critical review about the use of CFP was carried out along the supply chain of these three sector, in order to identify opportunities for enhancing food quality and environmental sustainability and highlighting how the environmental information could influence the consumer’s preferences. The analysis of the state of the art shows a great variability of the results about GHG emissions referred to agricultural and industrial processes. In many cases, the main environmental criticisms are linked to the agricultural phase, but also the other phases of the supply chain could contribute to rise up the CFP. However, despite the wide use of CFP by companies as communication tool to help consumer’s choices in agro-food product, some improvement are needed in order to provide clearer and more understandable information.