In response to the climate crisis, British ice cream company Jude’s has embarked on a program to reduce its carbon footprint – beginning with expanding its plant-based ice cream range.
Ice cream is traditionally made with dairy, which causes more harmful emissions than growing plant-based alternatives: animals on factory farms, including those used for dairy, are notorious for emitting enormous amounts of nitrous oxide, methane, and carbon dioxide.
According to a study, producing one glass of dairy milk emits three times the carbon emissions of a non-dairy alt-milk.
With a target to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, the family-owned business teamed up with Professor Mike Berners-Lee, an expert on carbon footprinting, to ensure that it is removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than it emits.
“The climate and ecological emergency have implications for every aspect of an ice cream business,” said Berners-Lee.
“For an ice cream producer, the big questions include what ingredients to use and how they should be produced, how to cut carbon from every part of the operation, and what else can be done to look after our world.”
According to the company’s impact report, using dairy ingredients have the most significant impact on its carbon footprint, at 80.2 per cent. Currently, only around 25 per cent of the brand’s ice cream range is plant-based.
The company has pledged to increase this to 50 per cent by 2025 by slowly introducing more plant-based varieties to consumers. For example, it recently launched a plant-based strawberry flavour for Mother’s Day.
Aside from expanding its plant-based ice cream range, the certified B Corp company also plans to use renewable energy, minimise waste production, and adopt more environment-friendly packaging as part of its carbon reduction plan.
The company added that it would deduct 10 per cent carbon from the atmosphere by investing in environmental projects such as the Woodland Trust and Trees for Life for emissions that it could not reduce.
