Yara International ASA has signed an agreement with PepsiCo Inc. to provide lower-emission crop nutrients to participating PepsiCo Europe farmers, with a goal of helping decarbonize the food value chain, the companies announced on July 16. Yara will also provide advice and precision farming digital tools.
As part of the partnership, Yara will provide up to 165,000 mt/y of fertilizer to PepsiCo, consisting mostly of Yara Climate Choice fertilizers that include low-carbon products produced from renewable ammonia out of Heryøa, Norway, or from low-carbon ammonia produced via carbon capture and storage (CCS) from a plant planned in Sluiskil, the Netherlands.
Yara will also provide standard fertilizers produced using natural gas, but the aim is to upgrade to lower-carbon Yara Climate Choice fertilizers over time with a goal of fully transitioning to low-carbon fertilizers by 2030.
“To grow a nature-positive food future and transform our food system, we need to collaborate across the food value chain,” said Mónica Andrés Enríquez, Yara’s Executive Vice President for Europe. “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.”
The fertilizer delivered under the partnership will cover around 25% of Pepsi’s crop fertilizer needs in Europe by 2030 and the regenerative agricultural practices will include approximately 1,000 farms covering 128,000 hectares across the EU and UK. PepsiCo, the snack and beverage giant that makes Lay’s potato chips, has said that efforts to decarbonize will focus on potatoes initially before expanding to other crops.
“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,” said Archana Jagannathan, Chief Sustainability Officer at PepsiCo Europe.
“Targeting Scope 3 emissions is central to our pep+ agenda, but it can be one of the most challenging areas to directly influence,” Jagannathan added. “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.”
Yara has inked similar collaborations with companies in the past. In January 2022, Yara signed an agreement to bring fossil-free fertilizers to market with Lantmännen, the Swedish ag cooperative (GM Jan. 14, 2022) and later that year Yara signed an agreement to provide low-carbon fertilizers to Argentinian potato producer El Parque Papas (GM Dec. 9, 2022).