We’re a

Carbon Neutral Company

We’re committed to meaningful action to protect our planet. We set bold, science-based targets to reduce our carbon footprint, eliminated, reduced and neutralized our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and a portion of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, and proudly became carbon neutral in 2019.

Becoming the world’s first major carbon neutral food company was a big step in our fight against climate change.

How we became carbon neutral

It all started with a sustainability commitment to reduce our environmental footprint. When we realized that wasn’t enough, we decided to become the world’s first major carbon neutral food company. Here’s our carbon neutral story.

What exactly does carbon neutral mean?

For Maple Leaf Foods, carbon neutral means that we do everything in our power to avoid or reduce our emissions on our own, and any unavoidable emissions that we put into the atmosphere are then equally balanced out by the amount that our offset projects take out of the atmosphere.

To become carbon neutral, we made a lot of changes. We have implemented several initiatives across our operations that have led to gradual reductions in our environmental impact including, a national LED lighting retrofit program, equipment efficiency and optimization upgrades, ammonia heat recovery and wasted heat recovery systems and condensing economizers for boilers. We have avoided activities that would generate a lot of carbon, set science-based targets, and aggressively reduced our greenhouse gas emissions. We then neutralized all the remaining, unavoidable Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a portion of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions.

There are emissions that we cannot avoid, so we “neutralize” them by investing in high-impact environmental projects across North America that help bring our net carbon footprint to zero.

Regenerative Agriculture

Maple Leaf Foods is investing in regenerative agriculture practices within our supply chain to reduce our environmental impact and, outside our supply chain, to support high-quality nature-based solutions that foster sustainable food production and contribute to maintaining our carbon neutral status.
 
For the second year in a row, we have teamed up with Nutrien, a Canadian company and the world’s largest provider of crop inputs, to expand our work in regenerative agriculture and pilot their new carbon program that aims to provide end-to-end support for growers, drives sustainability and boosts profitability. In 2022, we quadrupled our efforts from the prior year and scaled the program to 100,000 acres of farmland within our supply shed where we source feed ingredients in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
 
To learn more about our regenerative agriculture efforts, visit our 2022 Integrated Report.

Regenerative Agriculture
Anaerobic Digestion

Anaerobic Digestion

Anaerobic digestion is a proven and established technology that has the potential to meaningfully reduce GHG emissions and solid waste arising from our animal raising activities and operations while at the same time producing renewable natural gas that could replace our current natural gas consumption at our facilities or inject it back to the grid.
 
Anaerobic digestion is a process through which bacteria breaks down organic matter – such as animal manure, organic waste, food wastes, or wastewater – and converts the organic matter into renewable natural gas (RNG) and digestate. RNG can be used as a clean energy source to provide heat and generate electricity at our facilities or it can be sold and injected directly into the natural gas pipeline grid or compressed and used as transportation fuel. The digestate is primarily used as a high-quality, low-odour, nutrient-rich fertilizer that can be supplied to local farmer fields.
 
Should Maple Leaf Foods proceed with anaerobic digestion technology, it would enable Maple Leaf to have a circular economy by converting organic waste streams into useful renewable fuel and other commodities.

Introducing our inaugural
2022 Integrated Report

Our new Integrated Report builds on nearly a decade of sustainability reporting and presents a more holistic view of our Company. We continue to evolve our reporting process every year to meet changes in the reporting and regulatory landscape and growing demands from our stakeholders.