At BrauBeviale 2018, FoodBev’s Harriet Jachec spoke to Joana Carneiro – business director for beverages at DSM Food Specialties – about the growing importance of sustainability in beer.
DSM was showcasing its Brewers Clarex enzyme for stabilising beer, which it says can drastically improve a brewery’s sustainability performance and dispels the myth that reducing the stabilisation time in brewing lessens the quality of the final beer.
Eight of the global top ten brewers already use Brewers Clarex – but the company estimates that if all brewers in the US alone were using the ingredient, the industry could save more than 750 million kilograms of CO2.
Despite consumers’ obvious thirst for sustainable beer, Carneiro believes that brewers could make more fanfare about their achievements.
“DSM believes that, without contributing to a sustainable world, our businesses will also not sustain for long,” Carneiro says.
“At the moment there are no sustainability claims [used prominently on pack] – at least as far as I see. They promote it a lot at a corporate level, on their websites, but I think [brewers] still needs to give a thought about how they can translate sustainability claims into the final products. I think the industry is busy with it, but I believe there are still some steps to be taken.”
With the rise of craft beer, Carneiro agrees that there is massive opportunity for large and small brewers to up their game on sustainable brewing, and to make those achievements more visible to consumers – particularly on the products themselves.
Carneiro also contends that responsibility for sustainability is not a single-brewery issue, as companies such as Heineken, Carlsberg and Ab InBev all have platforms to educate consumers further.
FoodBev’s latest issue features an in-depth report into the state of the craft beer segment, which shows that the number of breweries in the US alone is higher than at any other point on record. In Europe, the movement is being driven by markets like the UK and Italy. And, DSM adds, provenance and sustainability are becoming increasingly prominent concerns.
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Presented by: Harriet Jachec Edited by: Alex Clere
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024
