Food production is estimated to be the largest cause of global environmental change, and the food sector is responsible for up to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Vermeulen et al.
2012). Replacing production and consumption of animal-based food sources by plant-based alternatives could be a way to reduce the current impact of food production (Ranganathan et al.
2016; Poore et al.
2018; Willett et al.
2019). Previous studies show that the production of some plant-based spreads (seven products in UK, Germany and France) have lower climate change impacts and less land use compared with dairy butter (Nilsson et al.
2010; Milà i Canals et al.
2013); however, several critical gaps remain to fully understand the environmental performance between large variety of plant-based spreads and dairy butters sold in broad consumer markets. Firstly, a large spatial heterogeneity in environmental impacts may exist when producing the same agricultural products sourced from different producers and locations, with different agricultural practices (Poore et al.
2018) and embedded natural variabilities in different locations (Hellweg and Milà i Canals
2014); thus, there is a need to consider more geographies than the three country markets that were included in the earlier study. Furthermore, plant-based fat spreads sold in different countries have various product recipe design influenced by consumer preferences, packaging choices and supply chain logistics; however, these product-specific variabilities have not been comprehensively examined in terms of their influence on environmental impacts, from agricultural ingredient sourcing and production, through to processing, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, retailing, use and product end-of-life. Secondly, Poore et al. (
2018) shows that the farm stage dominates GHG emissions from food, with most of them involving deforestation. Recent studies (Sandström et al.
2018; Pendrill et al.
2019) also find global agricultural commodity trade contributes to land use change (LUC) emission. The Nilsson study (Nilsson et al.
2010), comparing plant-based spreads and butter, only considered the GHG emissions from land use change (LUC) for a small selection of ingredients, such as palm oil; so the effect of comprehensively including LUC induced GHG emissions has yet to be considered. Thirdly, the available water remaining (AWARE) approach (Boulay et al.
2018) is recommended by the UNEP (UNEP
2016) and is also the default recommended method for assessing a water scarcity footprint by the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) Guidance (European Commission
2017). However, we did not find publications demonstrating an approach to operationalise regionalised LCA for a large portfolio of product recipes with complex agri-food supply chains for the same functionality, thus the feasibility of applying AWARE has yet to be tested. In light of the importance of the sustainable diet debate (Willett et al.
2019; Poore et al.
2018; Ranganathan et al.
2016), in this study, we aimed to propose an operational framework for performing a large-scale regionalised LCA to answer the following questions: (i) does the climate advantage hypothesis of plant-based fat spreads and creams over dairy butter and cream hold regardless of the variabilities of product recipes, geographies and the influence of inclusion of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from LUC)? (ii) Considering the climate-water-land nexus (Ringler et al.
2013; Kraucunas et al.
2015; Conway et al.
2015), is there a risk of shifting impacts from climate to water scarcity and land occupation, and what are the key opportunities for impact mitigation?