PepsiCo Europe has entered a long-term partnership to provide farmers with crop nutrition programmes to help decarbonise the food value chain. 

As part of the partnership with crop nutrition company Yara, which spans multiple countries, farmers will be equipped with best-in-class crop nutrition products and advice as well as precision farming digital tools. This will allow them to increase nutrient use efficiency (NUE), boost yields and reduce the carbon footprint of their crops.

Yara will deliver up to 165,000 tonnes of fertiliser per year to PepsiCo, covering around 25 per cent of their needs in Europe by 2030. These will be mostly Yara Climate Choice, which include low-carbon footprint fertilisers produced from either renewable ammonia (Herøya, Norway) or low-carbon ammonia via carbon capture and storage (CCS), currently under construction in Yara Sluiskil.

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

“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. Providing our farmers with fertilisers 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,” said Archana Jagannathan, chief sustainability officer at PepsiCo Europe. 

The partnership will include approximately 1,000 farms, covering a total of around 128,000 hectares across the EU and UK. Efforts will initially focus on potatoes, a key crop for PepsiCo, and then expand to other crops such as oats and corn.  

The 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. 

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