JBS Just Abandoned Its 2040 Net-Zero Target. Big Food's Climate Retreat Is Now Impossible to Ignore

The world's biggest meat company just erased more than 90% of its carbon footprint. It did not shut a plant or change a single farm. It deleted the target.

JBS, the Brazil-based giant behind Seara, Swift and Friboi, has scrapped its pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. Gone with it are the Scope 3 goals that cover the emissions from every animal it raises and slaughters, the part of its footprint that dwarfs everything else. On paper, most of JBS's climate problem has vanished. In the real world, its emissions have not fallen at all.

The 90% problem

Company emissions come in three buckets. Scope 1 is what a firm burns directly. Scope 2 is the power it buys. Scope 3 is everything else in the value chain, like the farms that raise the cattle and the trucks that carry the meat.

For a meat company, Scope 3 is almost the whole story. JBS says Scope 3 makes up more than 90% of its emissions, while the sites and power it controls sit under 4% of the total. That is why the 2040 pledge always looked shaky. To hit it, JBS needed millions of farmers and ranchers to change how they raise animals, and it has no direct control over any of them.

Its sustainability chief, Jason Weller, made that the whole argument. He told the Financial Times the company would now set goals only "where we have operational control". "Bold ambition is fine," he said, "but you now need to actually have really good, measurable, accountable goals." JBS is keeping a goal to cut the intensity of its own site and power emissions, the amount per unit of product, by 30% by 2030 and 70% by 2050, from a 2019 base. It is about a fifth of the way there.

JBS is not acting alone

The same retreat is spreading across big food. PepsiCo pushed its own net-zero date back by a decade last year, and both Coca-Cola and Unilever have quietly softened their climate goals. The Science Based Targets initiative, the body that validates these pledges, has itself loosened its rules on value-chain emissions in its latest 2026 standard.

The reason is the same everywhere. The easy part of a climate pledge is Scope 1 and 2, the emissions a company owns. The hard part is Scope 3, which a company can only nudge. When the deadline gets close and the value-chain cuts have not landed, the pledge turns into a liability. JBS failed to get its goals validated by the SBTi inside the required window, so the body now lists it as "commitment removed".

Wall Street changed the math

Timing matters here. JBS listed on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2025 at a value near $30 billion, which put its climate claims in front of US investors and, more importantly, US courts. Months later it settled a case with the New York attorney general, who had argued the company had "no viable plan" to reach its 2040 goal. JBS said the deal was not an admission of wrongdoing.

That case is the tell. A public net-zero target used to be a marketing asset. Now it is a document a regulator or a short-seller can hold against you. For a firm that earned $77.2 billion in revenue last year and answers to US shareholders, a promise it cannot keep is a risk it does not need. Critics see it differently. Greenpeace called the retreat "unspeakably reckless", noting that JBS's supply chain pumps out more methane than Shell and ExxonMobil combined.

What to watch next

The move quietly hands a problem to everyone who buys from JBS. A meat supplier's Scope 3 is a supermarket's and a food brand's Scope 3 too. Every retailer and manufacturer still holding a net-zero claim now has a bigger gap to explain, or a reason to shop for cleaner sourcing. Watch three things next: whether more big food names follow JBS and reset their targets to what they control, whether lenders and customers with their own goals apply the pressure that voluntary pledges never did, and whether "net zero" gives way to narrower promises a boardroom can defend. The lesson for any operator is blunt: in 2026, the climate target that survives is the one you can measure and own.