After writing a piece on Quorn, and their introduction of carbon labelling to their packaging, I got a response on Facebook. What Quorn are aiming to do is help people understand the carbon footprint from each serving of their product. But, as this FaceBook response so rightly stated: “I don’t know what would be a good or bad footprint”. And so I did a little research.

Here Quorn state that each serving (75g) of mince has a footprint of 0.16kg or 160g. Now real beef has a footprint of roughly 27 Kg of CO2 per kilo of meat. So, if we do a little bit of maths:

1000g of beef = 27kg of CO2

1000g / 75g (a serving size) = 13.3

27 kg of CO2 / 13.3 = just over 2kg of CO2

So that’s just over 2000 g of CO2 per 75g of real minced beef, compared with 160g of CO2 of Quorn mince. (That’s 12.5 times less CO2!)

Based on figures from - http://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html