Fast food chain Leon quietly drops “carbon neutral” claims

The company’s “carbon neutral” claims relied on carbon offsets from two truly awful projects

Leon is a fast food chain incorporated in the UK in January 2004. The company sells fast food that it tells us “both tastes good and does you good”.

In January 2021, Leon announced that “Our Better Burgers & Fries are now carbon neutral”. In addition to buying green electricity from Ecotricity, Leon has vegan burgers on its menu. Leon sells several chicken food products, but excludes “higher carbon meats such as beef”.

Following the “carbon neutral” announcement, Leon started buying carbon offsets.

But on 18 May 2023, a food and drinks sustainability publication called Footprint wrote that,

“Fast food chain Leon has quietly started removing high profile marketing claims for its “carbon neutral burgers”.

A Leon spokeswoman told Footprint that “As of last month, we’ve begun phasing out the carbon neutral messaging across our channels.”

Many mentions of “carbon neutral” have been removed from Leon’s website.

For example, Leon states on its website that its chicken burger is “carbon neutral”. But clicking on the link to “find out more” now takes us to this message:

Footprint suggests that Leon’s decision to remove its “carbon neutral” claims could be a result of stricter enforcement of corporate climate claims by the UK’s advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority.

ClimatePartner and Leon

Before its “carbon neutral” announcement in 2021, Leon hired the German carbon credit consulting firm ClimatePartner to measure the company’s CO₂ emissions from its supply chain, packaging, waste, and emissions from food preparation in its kitchens.

“With our support,” ClimatePartner writes on its website, “the resulting carbon footprint is offset with rainforest conservation and afforestation projects in Latin America, as well as a progressive new afforestation project in the UK.”

On its website, Leon explains that,

“ClimatePartner has also helped us select projects to offset with, which are aligned with our values and long-term commitments.”

In its “carbon neutral” announcement Leon reveals that the rainforest conservation project is the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ Project in Peru and the afforestation project is the EcoPlanet Bamboo Central America - Reforestation Project in Nicaragua.

It’s difficult to see how either of these projects could align with a supposedly progressive company’s values and long-term commitments. Let’s have a quick look at each of them.

Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ Project

The Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ Project is a stunningly bad project. It consists of two logging concessions. One of the logging concessions overlaps the territory of the Mashco Piro Indigenous Peoples. The Mashco Piro are living in voluntary isolation.

REDD proponents insist that one of the critical issues with setting up a REDD project is that there must be a process of free, prior and informed consent with local communities and Indigenous Peoples before the project starts.

In the case of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation, contact with them is always fatal, because they have no resistance to the common cold or flu. Free, prior and informed consent is therefore impossible.

Logging in their territory must also be ruled out because of the dangers of contact — not to mention the destruction of the Mashco Piro’s forests.

Despite the obvious problems with logging in the territory of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation, the logging companies, Maderera Río Acre S.A.C. (Maderacre), and Maderera Río Yaverija S.A.C. (Maderyja) were certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as well managed.

On 26 April 2022, FSC blocked and suspended Maderyja. In a statement about the suspension, FSC explains that Maderyja was “unable to justify the volume mismatches and false claims detected over the course of this investigation”. FSC’s statement made no mention of Indigenous Peoples.

The project continued to sell carbon credits despite the FSC suspension. On 2 November 2022, Maderyja was released from its obligations under the VCS system.

EcoPlanet Bamboo Central America

REDD-Monitor first wrote about EcoPlanet Bamboo’s Nicaragua operations in September 2016. EcoPlanet Bamboo hired a series of boiler room companies to raise money by selling “Bamboo Bonds” to retail investors in the UK.

The “Bamboo Bonds” left investors wondering where their money had gone.

The boiler room companies made extremely misleading statements about the returns that these investors might make. For example, an Oxford-based firm called Property Frontiers that promoted investments in EcoPlanet Bamboo’s Bamboo Bonds promised “returns up to 895%”.

After three articles on REDD-Monitor exposing EcoPlanet Bamboo’s investment scam, the company set up a website that included an ad hominem (and completely fictitious) attack on me.

None of this bothered Verra or ClimatePartners. Neither did it bother FSC which certified EcoPlanet Bamboo’s plantations as well managed. The FSC certificate was withdrawn in November 2017, by which time the bamboo plantations had been pretty much abandoned.

Leon Restaurants Limited and EG Group

Leon was founded by John Vincent, Henry Dimbleby, and chef Allegra McEvedy. The company was named after Vincent’s father. In 2008, Leon was a founding member of the Sustainable Restaurant Association.

But in April 2021, Leon was bought by the EG Group for £100 million. The EG Group runs petrol stations, supermarkets, shops, and fast-food restaurants. The company is owned by the billionaire Issa brothers, Mohsin and Zuber, who started with one petrol station in Bury, near Manchester in 2001. The EG Group now has 6,000 petrol stations in the UK and Europe.

The EG Group is the largest franchise operator of KFC in the UK.

The EG Group is a subsidiary of private equity group TDR Capital. In 2020, the Issa brothers and TDR Capital bought Asda from Walmart. In April 2023, the Financial Times reported that,

“[A] series of filings by businesses owned by the brothers and TDR in the tax havens of Jersey and Luxembourg show that all but £200mn of that sum was provided by loading more costs on to their already heavily indebted petrol stations business, EG Group.”

The EG Group has debts of somewhere around £9.6 billion.

Since the deal, Asda has cut costs dramatically. In January 2023, for example, Asda announced plans to cut 300 jobs and to cut the pay of 4,300 staff. And in May 2023, Asda announced plans to cut the pay of about 7,000 workers in supermarkets close to London.

Asda is now finalising a deal to buy EG Group’s UK and Irish petrol stations for £3 billion.

The corporate structure of Leon Restaurants Limited has become somewhat complicated since the sale to EG Group. A company called EG Foodservice Limited has significant control of Leon Restaurants. EG Foodservice has the same directors as Leon Restaurants: Mohsin Issa, and Zuber Issa. Imraan Patel is secretary. A company called EG Finco Limited has significant control of EG Foodservice.

EG Finco has the same two directors (the Issa brothers) and the same secretary (Patel). EG Group Limited has significant control. EG Group has the same two directors (the Issa brothers) and the same secretary (Patel). EG Midco 1 Limited has significant control.

EG Midco 1’s directors are Mohsin Issa and Gary Lindsay. EG Group Holdings Limited has significant control. EG Group Holdings has seven directors: John Carey, Alison Carnwath, Manjit Dale, Mohsin Issa, Zuber Issa, Gary Lindsay, and Lord Stuart Rose. Imraan Patel is secretary. The Issa brothers have significant control over EG Group Holdings. All of the companies have the same address in Blackburn.

Meanwhile, the Issa brothers are worth more than £5 billion. They have a private jets (owned by two Isle of Man companies, Clear Sky LP and Clear Sky 2 LP, and bought with loans from the EG Group). They own Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Bentleys, and Bugatti Vivos. They are building five huge and very ugly mansions in Blackburn for themselves and their family to live in. Locals call them “the McMansions”. In 2017, they also bought a £25 million grade-II listed mansion in Kensington, London.

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