PepsiCo Europe and Yara recently established a long-term agreement in Europe to provide farmers with crop nutrition programs that will help decarbonize the food value chain. As part of the multi-country agreement, PepsiCo Europe farmers will receive best-in-class crop nutrition products and assistance, as well as precision farming technology tools.

This will enable them to improve nutrient usage efficiency (NUE), raise yields, and minimize the carbon impact of their crops. Yara will deliver up to 165,000 tons of fertilizer annually to PepsiCo, covering around 25% of their crop fertilizer needs in Europe by 2030.

“These fertilizers will be mostly Yara Climate Choice fertilizers, which include low-carbon footprint fertilizers produced from either renewable ammonia (Herøya, Norway) or low-carbon ammonia via carbon capture and storage (CCS), currently under construction in Yara Sluiskil. The mix will also include Yara’s standard premium nitrate-based mineral fertilizers produced using natural gas, which have a carbon footprint that is around 50% lower than most non-EU fertilizers thanks to the use of catalyst technology. The partnership aims to upgrade to Yara Climate Choice fertilizers over time as production scales up and technologies mature so that all of the 165,000 p.a. tons are Yara Climate Choice fertilizers by 2030,” according to a recent press release.

The agreement demonstrates the companies’ commitment to developing a more sustainable food system that aligns with the European Union’s climate ambitions. At the same time, it will assist farmers with transition costs to guarantee their livelihoods are not jeopardized.

“This partnership with Yara aligns with our end-to-end transformation known as PepsiCo Positive (pep+) and will be critical as we transition towards the net-zero food system of the future. Targeting Scope 3 emissions is central to our pep+ agenda, but it can be one of the most challenging areas to influence directly. Providing our farmers with fertilizers that have a lower carbon footprint and supporting them to improve crop nutrition end-to-end will allow us to make a significant step towards our target of achieving net zero by 2040,” Archana Jagannathan, Chief Sustainability Officer at PepsiCo Europe, mentioned.

The collaboration is also in line with Yara’s mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet.

“To grow a nature-positive food future and transform our food system, we need to collaborate across the food value chain. We’re excited to work with first movers like PepsiCo to help make this a reality. Decarbonizing food production will be critical to delivering on the Paris Agreement – and farmers will play a key role in helping us get there,” Mónica Andrés Enríquez, Executive Vice President for Europe at Yara, added.

The partnership, which will help drive the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices, will include approximately 1,000 farms, covering a total of around 128,000 hectares across the European Union and the UK. Efforts will initially focus on potatoes, a key crop for PepsiCo.

Fertilizers are the biggest opportunity to reduce emissions as fertilizer production and in-field emissions account for half of PepsiCo’s average potato carbon footprint in Europe.

This partnership will also further scale up sustainable nutrient management practices across the PepsiCo farmer groups. This will include full-season crop and soil data capture and monitoring using PepsiCo’s CropTrak and ML Analytics tool and will be complemented by Yara’s digital solutions offering, for example, digital satellite imagery via the AtFarm platform and the MegaLab soil analysis.