On the 27th of September 2026, the EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive took effect. The introduction of this directive marks a turn towards tackling greenwashing and protecting consumers from fabricated sustainability claims.
If companies are providing the public with misleading information about their commitments to sustainability, it becomes impossible for the public to consciously purchase sustainably. EmpCo is a way of levelling the playing field, “and will enable consumers to choose products that are genuinely better for the environment than competing products” (EmpCo Directive).
For food businesses, this means an increased pressure for ingredient-level data, responsible manufacturing processes, and evidencing resilient supply chains. The implications of EmpCo travel beyond the EU, applying to any business that sells to an EU member state or has any presence in EU markets. For businesses that want to scale globally, it’s important to understand exactly what the directive is asking, to avoid the potential penalties of non-compliance.
This article will tackle the following questions:
- What is the EmpCo Directive asking of businesses?
- How will the EmpCo Directive affect businesses outside the EU?
- What counts as a “claim” and how should one be evidenced?
- How can I protect my business from the consequences of non-compliance?
Defending environmental claims can feel overwhelming when the scope of what a claim is seems so large. Here, we will break it down and cover how the evidencing process can be simplified.
What Is EmpCo Asking For?
The EmpCo Directive wants businesses to evidence every claim they make about their sustainability efforts. Ironically, the word “claim” is vague itself, so let’s break down what constitutes one:
- Environmental claims: any message or representation in a commercial context that communicates or implies that a product, brand, product category, or trader has a “positive or zero impact on the environment” (EmpCo Directive). These can take any form (text, visual, pictorial) and can also be comparative.
- Generic environmental claims: a claim with no label or clear specification to back it up.
Greenhouse gas claims are strictly prohibited unless they are based on the actual life cycle impact of a specific product. They cannot be based on the offsetting of a product’s emissions outside its value chain and cannot be attributed to a whole brand.
Here are some other important details to keep in mind:
- A claim cannot be made for a whole product if it only applies to one component. If a food product’s packaging is made from recycled materials, but an ingredient in the product uses a ‘significant’ degree of freshwater from a water-scarce region, the whole product cannot be marketed as sustainable.
- Claims need to be relevant as well as true. Claiming that a bottle of water is gluten free is true, but irrelevant to the product. These claims may also be penalised.
Superficial competitor comparisons may be penalised. If a product’s environmental performance is comprehensively evidenced but the performance of the object of comparison is not, the claim should be removed.
Good and Bad Claims
To make the “claims” systems easier to understand, here is an example of a claim that would be permissible and impermissible under the EmpCo Directive.
“We are committed to using sustainable ingredients”
Impermissible: the claim doesn’t provide the consumer with sufficient information to verify which components of the product are ‘sustainable’. This also implies that every single one of their products alongside their operations are sustainable.
“5 of our core ingredients (peanuts, olive oil, almonds, honey, sugar) are TrackCarbon grade B certified”
Permissible: it is easier to verify claims in relation to 5 specific ingredients rather than a whole company, and TrackCarbon’s ‘A-E’ rating labels are consumer-facing, science-backed, with a methodology peer-reviewed and verified by leading academics.
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How Does This Apply to UK Businesses?
While EmpCo is an EU directive, it applies to any business that sells products to or in the European Union.
This means that any UK company selling one (or multiple) of their products in the EU will be subject to the EmpCo regulation in the same capacity as EU member states. For this reason, it’s important that domestic businesses understand regulatory requirements, and the consequences of non-compliance.
The Consequences of Failing to Comply
Article 10 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) grants EU member states the power to choose the specific punishment they want to give out, meaning that the Directive will to some degree be enforced on a national level (UCPD).
In Article 11, the UCPD outlines the various penalties that EU nation states can enforce on non-compliant companies:
- Take public legal action against unfair commercial practices.
- Fine the offending business up to 4% of their net annual turnover.
- Fine the offending business up to EUR 2 million if they refuse to communicate their net annual turnover figure/the figures are nowhere to be found.
These consequences not only affect the financial position of a business, but also negatively impact their market position as these proceedings take place publicly.
Consumers or stakeholders may be less likely to engage with businesses that are found to be non-compliant with EmpCo. This puts more pressure on a business to properly evidence claims.
How To Protect Your Business – Comply with EmpCo
Evidence needs to be publicly accessible and science based, with data quality being a central component. The two main tools recognised by the EU government are sustainability labels and certification schemes.
Sustainability labels are voluntary “trust marks” (not mandated by other EU regulations) that aim to promote a certain product/business through assuring the consumer of its positive environmental or social characteristics (EmpCo Directive).
Certification schemesare the way sustainability labels are rewarded. They tend to involve assessments conducted by a third party that certify whether a product or business is eligible to qualify for a sustainability label. For food businesses, certification needs to go deeper and tackle the granular details involved in manufacturing food, like ingredient-level data and freshwater use.
Data quality is the key component to compliance. Environmental data must be scientific and highly specific to qualify a claim. If data quality is poor, audit becomes difficult, and the likelihood of a claim being penalised for lack of evidence increases.
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TrackCarbon has been designed to provide food companies with a centralised database where they can track ingredients across four key categories: land use, freshwater use, GHG emissions, and water-weighted scarcity use. This data is then condensed into a traffic light A-E labelling system, designed to assure consumers and provide companies with a simple, comparative metric which they can use to evaluate suppliers and think about product reformulation.
Our methodology is guided by DEFRA/WRAP’s best practice guidelines, aligned with SBTi goals, EU’s CSRD, and approved by experts at the Alan Turing Institute and Loughborough University. Choosing the right platform at the right time is the most important protective factor when it comes to shielding your business from the potential financial and reputational consequences of non-compliance.
For more information on our mission at TrackCarbon, contact us at: info@trackcarbon.com