MAJOR supermarkets will soon require food and wine producers to measure and monitor their carbon emissions.

This is according to UK-born New Zealand sustainability consultant Roger Kerrison.

And he believes carbon off-setting and food miles accounting are looking less popular in the eyes of major retailers.

Roger runs a consulting company, Aura Sustainability, in New Zealand's Marlborough wine region and will speak at the WineTech conference in Adelaide later this year.

He said signals from major retailers such as Walmart indicated that within a few years, all products will carry a carbon or sustainability index to allow consumers to make a choice.

"So producers need to start measuring and understanding where hotspots are and where reductions can be made," Roger said.

Large supermarket chains such as Tesco, are keenly focused on carbon, he said.

Roger said carbon footprint labels could be mandatory in France next year, and voluntary carbon footprinting in the US was on the rise.

Concepts such as organic and fair trade had worked well to capture public imagination and were supported by retailers, but others, such as food miles, had gone by the wayside, he said.

"Food miles has been debunked because everyone is looking at life cycles more now," Roger said.

He said carbon footprinting would be the next "big thing".

Figures showed that wine shipped from the south of France to London had about the same carbon footprint as wine shipped from Auckland.

Roger said there had been a slow uptake by New Zealand wineries of a government carbon-offset program called CarbonZero.

The program allowed companies to use the CarbonZero logo on their products after measuring their carbon emissions, from production to destination, which was audited by a government agency.

Roger worked for the first winery to adopt the scheme, Grove Mill at Renwick in the Marlborough region.

He said CarbonZero had generated a lot of worthwhile publicity for Grove Mill, but the program was under pressure.

"Suppliers are not participating in the scheme and academics decided if anyone wanted to claim a carbon-neutral product, they would have to offset absolutely everything that went into the making of that product," he said.

Roger said there were a number of reasons why carbon neutrality had not taken off around the globe.

These included bad publicity in the UK over offsets that never existed, accusations of "buying your sins" as well as insufficient promotion to convince consumers that buying carbon neutral was important.

Roger said its carbon measurement and reduction labelling would be more popular with retailers.

"The way I read it, carbon measurement and reduction will be big elements," he said.

"This (concept) will be rolled out in Australia in September by Planet Ark which has the rights to the CarbonTrust footprint label in Australia.

"That is the way I see carbon and carbon certification of products panning out."

Roger predicted supermarkets would follow the example of chains such as Walmart which were developing their own sustainability labels based on a 15-point sustainability questionnaire sent to all their suppliers.

He said producers exporting to the UK and US needed to look at what companies such as Walmart were doing.

They had the market control to set the environmental parameters producers need to be working towards, Roger said.

Roger said the UK was developing a marketing standard called PAS20-60, which would standardise carbon-footprinted products.

"Until there is standardisation, I don't think there will be too much of a problem," he said.

"But if different programs start competing and criticising each other, they will only do themselves damage and harm."