Carbon-neutral food chain

Energy and resource-efficient industrial activity

Our goal is to reduce the energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of our industrial production significantly by 2025.
Fossil energy sources account for about 85% of the world's total energy consumption, causing the most significant carbon emissions that are accelerating climate change. For this reason, our short-term goal hase been to reduce the carbon footprint of our own industrial production by 25 percent by 2025 compared to 2016 levels.
This target was already reached in 2020, when emissions were 27% lower than in 2016. The reduction was due to the increased use of renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, and bio-based fuels in heat production.

Improving the efficiency of primary production

Food accounts for about 20 percent of carbon emissions from consumption. The most significant environmental impacts of food production when looking at the entire chain are in primary production. Our other partners, as well as trade and consumers, also have responsibilities. With our operations, we strive to make a carbon-neutral food chain possible throughout the chain - from the field to table.
Our experts support farms in the development of sustainable primary production. We encourage our primary production farms to adopt energy-efficient solutions, to use renewable energy sources and to minimise waste while putting animal welfare first.

Reducing waste

The reduction of food waste is an efficient way to reduce the food chain’s climate impact. Ecological packaging innovations help consumers reduce waste.
In industrial production, our work against food waste has been going on for a long time – it is a self-explanatory part of our operations.
Improving the productivity of primary production and healthy animals also contribute to reduce waste. Atria's experts support producers in developing sustainable primary production. Quality systems enable comprehensive monitoring at the farm level, e.g. economy, feed, condition management and animal welfare.

Accumulating scientific data

We work in close cooperation with industry research to be able to thoroughly identify the environmental impact of our operations and the entire food chain. Only then can we focus on the right development measures.

In practice this means studies investigating the actual emission factors of emission sources that account for Nordic conditions and the industry’s cooperation in standardising the calculation principles. We want the review of our food chain’s environmental impacts to be fair, transparent and comparable.

Utilizing the calculation of the carbon and environmental footprint helps Atria verify the measures taken in the chain as effective and ensure the right direction of development measures. The aim is to develop a carbon footprint calculator that will also give producers concrete access to climate work and enable them to target development measures at farm level.

Technological innovations

We actively follow and support our industry’s technological development and the related research. We contribute to the development of technologies and new innovations with business potential by applying them to our operations.
And now we have one of Finland’s biggest solar power parks at our disposal in Nurmo. The electricity it generates covers around 5 per cent of the annual energy need of our production plant. We are also participating in the construction project of Finland’s biggest biogas plant, which will, likewise, be located next to our plant in Nurmo.