Back to the Drawing Board

Big news this week in Europe where Parliament passed greenwashing prevention legislation meant to protect consumers that support legitimately sustainable brands.

Sustainability gets beat up everywhere in marketing circles, and especially in agriculture and food. Everyone seems to have their own definition… conveniently resembling an existing business operating system.

For example, the big ag contingent in Saskatchewan – where variable rate and zero-till monocropping have been popular for decades, on ever-expanding farms – argues that farmers are as sustainable as can be. Meanwhile champions of the certified organic value chain argue, equally adamantly, that organic is the only sustainable farming system out there, and everyone’s making too big a deal out of tillage.

Confusing half-truths in high-level messaging are everywhere in the politics of farming, especially over the past decade that has seen increasing polarization of factions across society. Greenwashing is just the latest topic about which agriculture industry incumbents try to rattle stakeholders with different values, and to fool consumers into buying more of the same because everything’s fine.

Under the new Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition, EU member states have 2 years to implement national legislation to clean up misleading marketing claims and introduce penalties. Brands using agricultural raw ingredients (like wheat, corn, soybean and canola oil) will only be allowed to label products as ‘environmentally friendly,’ ‘climate-positive,’ ‘sustainable,’ etc. with field-level data - and validated ecological improvements - to back it up.

Getting Started

Creatives for Climate trainer and Sustainability Marketing Consultant Gill Willson offers a long list of tips to help marketers begin removing greenwashing from corporate brands – because it’s not a short process. Facing decades of lingo, language, imagery and tone that no previous marketer was accountable to back up, it’s hard to know where to start today to repackage a corporate brand, especially if it remains active in the business of pollution.