Paths to a sustainable food sector guided by LCA - exemplified by pork production.

To describe a more sustainable food sector, a supply chain approach is needed. Changing supply chains inevitably means that a range of attributes of the product and its system will change. This project will take on this challenge and deliver detailed descriptions of supply chains of six commodities from a Swedish region in 2012; Milk, cheese, beef, pork, chicken and bread. The set-up of the project was that experts on production along the supply chain design environmentally improved systems. The next step was to challenge the improvements considering their possible consequences on products and systems from different perspectives: food safety, sensory qualities, animal welfare, and consumer appreciation and (only for primary production) costs. The final supply chains were quantified by life cycle assessment (LCA), and they were again assessed from the perspectives mentioned above. Results will be generated during August 2014 and comprise both single-product LCA and region-wide impacts of the future scenarios.