Let's push sustainability forward together
We're Arla® Pro - the brand of Arla Foods made for kitchen professionals. You might know us for the dairy products you use in your professional kitchen, but behind those products, there’s a lot you don’t see.
Arla Foods is a cooperative owned by dairy farmers - who are rewarded to drive sustainability progress on their farms. Choosing Arla Pro products for your kitchen means choosing a partner that is working to drive sustainability progress.
Cooking more sustainably starts with collaboration.
Our ambition
Together with our farmer owners across seven European countries we have set our climate target of reducing CO2e emissions as follows (Approved by Science Based Targets initiative and aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative’s Forest, Land and Agriculture (FLAG) guidance):
- 63% by 2030 (base year 2015) absolute reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from production, owned logistics and energy usage (consistent with reductions required to keep global warming to 1.5°C)
- 30.3% by 2030 (base year 2020) absolute CO2e reduction on all raw milk and externally sourced whey emissions
- 82.6% of our supplier-related emissions — across purchased goods and services, capital goods, transportation and distribution, waste, and investments — will come from suppliers that have set science-based targets by 2029
To help us meet these targets, we have created a set of tools for measuring, tracking and accelerating the climate progress at our owners' farms. We call it FarmAhead™.
What is it?
Arla's FarmAhead™ Check is a tool developed specifically for our farmer owners to identify their carbon footprint and make a plan to reduce their emissions effectively.
Through our FarmAhead™ check tool, almost 8000 farmers from 7 European countries have assessed and submitted data to 203 questions about their herd, feed production, manure handling, energy usage etc. This gives us one of the world's largest externally validated climate data sets from dairy farms.
The data collected by our farmer owners is verified by an external climate advisor, who also helps farmers create a personalised action plan to further climate reductions based on their individual data.
As FarmAhead™ Checks are conducted every year, they enable the farmers to follow their own progression and to benchmark against data from other Arla farms.
Carbon emissions vary from farm to farm, so it is particularly interesting to learn from the high performers who show greater potential to reduce carbon footprint.
And because we're committed to helping drive a transition for the whole dairy industry, we also share the insights gathered from the compiled data with politicians, research partners and industry stakeholders.
Our progress
Arla farmers have already made significant improvements, reducing emissions per kilo of milk by 12% since 2015. Our most recent FarmAhead™️ Check data shows that the Arla farmers' average carbon footprint is 1.08 kg of CO2e per kilo of milk.
With help from our FarmAhead™ Check, our farmer owners now have a clear blueprint for how they can accelerate the reductions on their farms.
What is it, and why have we introduced it?
Together with our farmer owners, we are committed to accelerating sustainability progress. That's why we have created FarmAhead™ Incentive: to support our farmer owners in their efforts to accelerate sustainability progress on their farms, by rewarding them for the actions they take to reduce their carbon footprint and improve protection of nature and biodiversity - and that help us meet our 2030 goal of emissions reduction.
The FarmAhead™ Incentive Model is a points-based system that rewards past and future climate and environmental sustainability activities taken on farm. Simply put, the more actions they take, the more our farmer owners are paid for their milk.
The model enables farmers to speed up the transition on their farms, working together to build a more sustainable future for dairy.
How does it work?
The FarmAhead™ Incentive is a points-based system that rewards past and future activities that are aimed at lowering the carbon footprint and improving the protection of nature and biodiversity on farms. The more points a farmer earns, the more they are paid per kilo milk.
For every activity in the Incentive model, farmers can collect points if they meet specific criteria. Each point that a farmer achieves triggers 0,03 eurocent per kilo of milk they deliver. Activities with the biggest improvement potential trigger the most points.
The activities that are included in the model are based on our annual FarmAhead™ Checks and consultancy from external experts.
Introduced in August 2023, the model is designed to reward farmers with up to 3 eurocents per kilo milk, plus 1 eurocent per kilo milk for taking part in the annual FarmAhead™ check. Up to 500 million euro annually are earmarked to reward our farmer owners' sustainability activities.
Farmers can currently score a maximum of 81 points for 2025 and 85 points for 2026, and as the sustainability agenda and science matures, we will add more options to the model.
The journey isn't over
Behind every Arla® Pro product you choose in your professional kitchen, Arla Farmers are taking action to drive sustainability progress on their farms. If you’re curious to hear more about our farmers and their specific work in sustainability, you can read more on the Arla sustainability pages.
Read more on Arla.com