Greenwashed groceries: prevalence and patterns of environmental marketing and greenwashing in the retail food sector

Abstract

Food systems must be urgently transformed given their disproportionate environmental impacts and contributions to accelerating ecological crises. As public awareness of sustainability grows, companies across consumer goods sectors are increasingly adopting environmental marketing strategies. However, there is growing concern that some of these claims may be “greenwashed” — misleading consumers about actual environmental benefits, undermining consumer trust, and impeding progress towards sustainability transformations. To investigate this issue in the food sector, we developed a novel coding instrument to identify direct and executional environmental marketing and greenwashing on food products. We applied this tool to all food and non-alcoholic beverage products available on two major online grocery platforms, estimating the prevalence of environmental marketing and greenwashing, exploring patterns by store category and claim content, and assessing the processing levels of environmentally marketed and greenwashed products using the NOVA classification system. Environmental marketing appeared on over 10% of products; of these, 65% at the conventional supermarket and 33% at the natural foods store were deemed greenwashed. Greenwashing was most prevalent in the meat and meat alternatives sections and when claims related to food waste and climate mitigation were used. Environmentally marketed and greenwashed products were disproportionately classified as ultra-processed (NOVA 4). Our findings highlight the need for stronger regulation of environmental marketing among food products as one strategy to protect planetary health and provide foundational evidence to inform its development. The replicable coding instrument developed in this study may also support future research and monitoring efforts in this area.