The global food system is responsible for around a quarter of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the food sector has a major role to play in decarbonisation. It is critical that all stakeholders in the food industry work together across the farm to fork supply chain to place decarbonisation of food production and distribution at the heart of business strategy (p15). In order to set a successful strategy to reduce GHG emissions, it is necessary for companies to understand their emissions footprint and this can be achieved using a data-driven approach (p20). Knowing where emissions are greatest can enable businesses to focus on the most important areas to target. There are many different ways in which the food sector can reduce its GHG emissions and recycling food waste represents a major opportunity for achieving this (p24). The waste can be used to produce renewable energy for heat and power, bio-methane for transport and carbon dioxide for food processing operations, sequestration and renewable fertiliser for storing carbon and maintaining soil health. Precision farming can optimise use of resources to minimise emissions from growing crops and raising livestock (p33), but these farming practices should be balanced with the need to sequester and store carbon in soils to promote soil health and to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (p36). A circular approach to food packaging will also help to preserve and reuse valuable resources and prevent leakage and emissions to the environment (p28). Due to the intensive use of resources required to rear livestock for food, many consumers are choosing to reduce the amount of meat in their diets and this is creating some exciting opportunities for the food industry (p40). email mb@biophase.co.uk Letters to the editor about any of the articles published in Food Science and Technology are welcomed. An international research project led by the University of Illinois and the US Department of Agriculture has engineered tobacco plants to express an alternative photorespiratory pathway allowing the plants to grow more efficiently at warmer temperatures1. This approach could help mitigate crop yield losses caused by higher temperatures as the climate warms. According to lead author, Dr Amanda Cavanagh of the University of Essex (an affiliate faculty with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois), as temperatures rise, a key enzyme involved in photosynthesis, RuBisCo, finds it more difficult to distinguish between carbon dioxide and oxygen and so rates of photorespiration rise. The research, published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, grew the engineered tobacco plants under current and elevated temperatures (+5°C) in agricultural field conditions2. The engineered plants exhibited higher photosynthetic efficiency under heated conditions than the control plants, and produced 26% (16-37%) more total biomass than wild-type plants under the same conditions, compared to 11% (5-17%) under ambient conditions. Hence, engineered plants sustained 19% (11-21%) less yield loss under heated conditions compared to non-engineered plants. Adapting crops to warmer temperatures is a major challenge in mitigating the impacts of climate change on food production. Warming temperatures cause more evaporation and can interfere with plant growth and reproduction. Most crop species have C3 photosynthetic metabolism for which increasing temperature means higher rates of photorespiration, with the enzyme responsible for fixing CO2 fixing O2 instead via an energetically costly pathway. In C3 crops like wheat, rice and soybean, photorespiration causes large yield losses that are predicted to increase as global temperatures warm. The researchers believe that engineering less energy-intensive photorespiratory pathways into crop chloroplasts could potentially drive increases in C3 biomass production under agricultural field conditions. The results of this research provide insight about the strategies that could be adopted to help sustain or improve C3 crop yields in a warming climate. Now the concept has been proven in tobacco plants, research is underway to use the same approach in food crops like potatoes and soybeans, with the aim of increasing food production. From an economic standpoint, the yield loss, reportedly as high as 40-50% in the southern United States, cost producers around $500m in 2012. Producers in regions around the equator can see even greater losses due to increased temperatures, with the issue expected to escalate worldwide due to climate change. The University of Birmingham and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) have launched a new research group, which aims to lead a sustainable manufacturing revolution3. The group will bring together the expertise of each institution across the R&D and product development lifecycle and, working with a range of industrial partners, will establish a research group firmly focused on the decarbonisation of the sector. Researchers within the group will work across both organisations as well as with industrial partners to apply fundamental science, engineering and thought leadership to transform the sector through sustainable future growth. The University of Birmingham has made significant recent investment in engineering, and the new group will be based in the state-of-the-art £85m engineering complex, which includes the new School of Engineering. The MTC is part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, supported by Innovate UK, and was established to prove innovative manufacturing processes and technologies in an agile environment in partnership with industry, academia and other institutions. Housing advanced manufacturing equipment and with facilities in the Liverpool City Region, the Midlands and the South East, the MTC provides an environment for the development and demonstration of new technologies on an industrial scale, supporting skills, productivity and growth across the UK manufacturing industry. Partnership Front: Clive Hickman (Chief Executive, MTC); Professor Stephen Jarvis (Head of the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Birmingham) Back: Heather Clarke (Non Executive Director, MTC); Professor Clive Roberts (Head of the School of Engineering, University of Birmingham); and Professor Karl Dearn (Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham) Green hydrogen energy services company, Protium, and its partner, Petrofac, will explore the deployment of green hydrogen technology with Quorn, a meat alternatives specialist4. The partners will assess how the introduction of dual-fuel boilers (combusting a blend of both hydrogen and natural gas) can meet the expanding production capacity at Quorn's facility in Billingham in the North East. Protium and Petrofac will explore the feasibility of supplying hydrogen via a pipeline from Protium's green hydrogen project in Teesside. This is located at Wilton Engineering's site one mile from the Quorn plant, and will deploy up to 40MW of electrolysis, which will produce over nine tonnes of green hydrogen per day. Initially, Protium will aim to displace part of Quorn's natural gas demand with green hydrogen, which could save as much as 13,200 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. This would be equivalent to removing 7,600 cars from the road. Quorn is considering all options to drive down the carbon intensity of its process heat and electricity consumption to achieve Net Zero emissions within its operations by 2030. This will involve changing well-established manufacturing processes and comes with major challenges. However, given the ongoing natural gas shortage and high gas prices, the company believes that green hydrogen could potentially present a realistic, sustainable alternative energy source. Illustration by Veronica Giacintucci MIFST, Teaching Fellow in Food Science A new report from IGD's Social Impact Sustainability team, How To Help Consumers Adopt Reusable Packaging, provides suppliers and retailers with insight into consumer attitudes towards refill and return packaging solutions6. Identifying current usage and factors that will potentially drive growth, the report is a free tool for industry to help formulate sustainable packaging strategies that influence longer-term behaviour change. It is the first phase of the IGD's programme, which is aiming to halve the environmental impact of all packaging by 2030. Of the 2,000 UK consumers surveyed for the report, 41% have already adopted reusable grocery packaging in a bid to reduce their environmental impact. A further 42% are ‘thinking about’ using reusable packaging, highlighting the opportunity for the industry to take ownership and drive usage of this type of packaging. These findings are reinforced by the latest IGD ShopperVista* research, which tracks shopper attitudes towards climate change and corresponding shopper habits. This research has found that 41% of shoppers have reduced or stopped using single-use plastic and 63% consider reusable or recycled packaging to be ‘very important’ to them when choosing grocery products. It also indicates that shoppers believe that brands have a responsibility to provide reusable and refillable packaging options – 78% of shoppers think more big brands should offer the ability to refill their packaging. The IGD suggests that collective action is needed now, across the industry, to help consumers adopt refill and return packaging. Building consumer familiarity is seen as critical for long-term success. This work has led to the discovery of a new gene described as a game changer for global agriculture. The gene allows natural reproduction by cloning in annual plants, enabling highly desirable traits to be carried through to the seed of the next generation rather than lost when the plants reproduce through pollination. The newly-discovered gene, named PAR, controls parthenogenesis, a process whereby plant egg cells spontaneously grow into embryos without fertilisation. Normally, the PAR gene is triggered by fertilisation, but in plants that reproduce by apomixis – a type of reproduction which does not require fertilisation – the PAR gene switches on spontaneously, so the egg cells are triggered to start dividing into a new embryo. Plants that naturally reproduce by apomixis were found to have a transposon (a small piece of DNA that can jump around the plant DNA) in the promoter of the PAR gene. Long term research on parthenogenesis in hawkweed by the New Zealand team has been combined with similar work in dandelion in the Netherlands. Apomixis is generated by the PAR gene together with the DIP gene, which was discovered previously by KeyGene, and which ensures that the number of chromosomes is not halved during the formation of egg cells. For perennial crops, such as kiwifruit and apple, new plants are already cloned by taking a graft from a parent plant, which retains the parent's characteristics in the new individual. But currently, creating seed for an annual plant, such as wheat or rice, requires pollination. As each seed combines genetic characteristics from two parent plants, no two seedlings are the same. Researchers at KeyGene have already started investigating whether the PAR gene can cause parthenogenesis in plants that do not normally reproduce by apomixis, such as lettuce and sunflower, to further understand how this gene could be used in crop plant breeding. Standard cell culture media commonly consist of a basal medium supplemented with animal serum (such as fetal bovine serum) as a source of nutrients and other ill-defined factors. The technical disadvantages of this type of medium include its undefined nature, batch-to-batch variability in composition and the risk of contamination. The new chemically defined approach in which all the chemical components enabling the in vitro culture of animal cells are known, provides greater consistency and safety, making it suitable for manufacturing new lab grown food products. The cell lines developed have the ability to permanently grow and differentiate into multiple cell types, e.g. muscle and fat. They can be genetically manipulated using the Crispr/Cas9 gene editing tool and can be used as donors for nuclear transfer. According to the researchers, this technology could accelerate the pace of genetic selection of livestock and cultured meat to improve productivity and adaptation to climate change as well as reducing the environmental impact of livestock production. 9-10 March 2022 31ST WORLD CONFERENCE ON FOOD AND BEVERAGES Venue London Web https://foodandbeverages.foodtechconferences.com/ 21-23 March 2022 INTERNATIONAL FOOD AND DRINK EVENT Venue ExCeL London Web ife.co.uk/ 25-27 April 2022 FOOD AND DRINK EXPO Venue NEC Birmingham Web foodanddrinkexpo.co.uk/ 2-13 May 2022 VITAFOODS EUROPE Venue Geneva, Switzerland and online Web vitafoods.eu.com/ 4-6 May 2022 IFST SPRING CONFERENCE Venue online 10-13 July 2022 IFT22 FOOD EXPO Venue Chicago, USA and online Web iftevent.org/ 6-8 December 2022 FI EUROPE AND HI EUROPE Venue Paris Web expobeds.com/event/fi-europe-hi REFERENCES