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IKEA to introduce eco-friendly vegetarian meatballs

IKEA to introduce eco-friendly vegetarian meatballs

Come for the cheap furniture, stay for the... veggie balls?

Swedish furniture giant and meatball haven IKEA announced at a sustainability conference recently that a vegetarian version of their quintessential meatball is currently in the works.

"We are aware of the meat issue with greenhouse gases," Joanna Yarrow, head of sustainability for IKEA in the UK, announced at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in London. "We are looking at all our food products from a sustainability perspective but specifically meatballs. They are very popular and they are also our most carbon-intensive food item on our menu."

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Fear not, though, carnivores -- the carbon-heavy pork and beef meatballs aren't going anywhere, a representative from IKEA Canada tells Yahoo Canada Shine.

"We will continue to sell the regular meatballs that our customers enjoy every day at IKEA," says corporate communications manager Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick.

In addition to the vegetarian meatballs, IKEA will also be launching chicken meatballs as a lower emissions, eco-friendly option.

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IKEA sells a whopping 150-million meatballs each year, which, when you factor in the environmental cost of raising and transporting all that meat, adds up to the equivalent carbon output of 126,300 cars, reports The Telegraph.

As the veggie balls are still in development, IKEA has yet to confirm what ingredients will be in the new product, though judging by the ingredient list of most vegetarian meatballs, soybeans are likely to be the main component.

While soy might seem like an environmentally-friendly alternative when compared to factory pork and beef production, IKEA may just be going from one bad option to another -- that is, if the meatballs do end up being made with soy.

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WWF reports that the growing demand for soy products leads to deforestation and soil contamination in areas where the legume is grown. Not exactly a win-win scenario for environmentally-conscious consumers.

IKEA spokesperson Joanna Yarrow also noted that the company is considering altering the recipe of their original pork and beef meatballs to be more sustainable.

She's confident the alteration won't affect the product's popularity, pointing to the brief period when the meatballs were temporarily removed from the menu during the great horsemeat scandal of 2013.

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"We had people begging us to put them back on the menu whatever was in them," Yarrow said.

IKEA Canada confirms that both the meat-free and chicken meatball options will be available in Canada in 2015.