Food Emissions Database
Our global food system is responsible for 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but fortunately, is one of the easiest sectors to decarbonise!
To help you (or your business) reduce your environmental impact, check out our food emissions database below.
Scroll for the full database
Shifting Your Diet
Eating Locally, Reducing Food Waste Or Adopting A Specific Diet?
There are a million opinions across the internet as to how to minimise the footprint of your diet; do you adopt a vegan diet, eat locally pastured ruminants, or never waste a crumb?
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of depth (food systems are complicated!), so we think the best way to get to grips with this is to see and interact with the raw data. The chart below is a great breakdown of where the emissions come from in the supply chain of various common food products (and is adopted from this excellent piece on Our World In Data, based on the now famous meta analysis by Poore & Nemecek).
A Quick Example
For example, let's consider the commonly posed example of locally grown beef:
Based on our global average in the above chart, the total emissions of beef are 96.80 kg CO₂e per kg of food product (whch is equivalent to about a 300 km car journey!).
Of that 96.80 kg CO₂e, only 0.49 kg CO₂e comes from transport (about 0.05%).
This is partially because a lot of beef is grown locally, but crucially, that 0.49 kg CO₂e is a pretty common value for the transport component of food (have a go at filtering the graph at the bottom to just show transport).
So, in the grand scheme of things, the emissions due to transport are a drop in the ocean compared to the other key components for beef: farm emissions, land use and food waste.
So, when it comes to foods, it's often far more important to focus on what you eat, not where it comes from.
What Does Each Component Mean?
Processing: Energy use requirements to convert whole foods into final products for consumption.
Retail: Refrigeration and other aspects of running supermarket and other stores.
Transport: Emissions associated with transporting the food product from farm to home.
Comparing Units
What About The Protein, Bro?
Whilst it's useful to understand the components of the footprint of a given food, the above chart only provides data per kilogram of food product.
For some comparisons this is perfectly fine. Comparing palm oil to sunflower oil? Then comparing by mass is relatively sensible, as both foods are similar in caloric density. But what about comparing dark chocolate to oatmeal? You might use both in the same porridge recipe, but chances are you'll be using much more oatmeal than dark chocolate by mass, so perhaps it would be better to compare the emissions by kcal, rather than mass.
The chart below contains an interactive toggle which allows you to switch between kg product, 1000 kcal and 100 g protein:
Exploring Geography
Let's Take A Look Globally
If you're particularly curious, you may have explored the previous graph in the location where you live (If you do, have a go at hovering over each bar, as this will give you a breakdown of the different data sources, as these can be more varied than the global averages!).
However, some locations don't have massive datasets, so it's interesting to explore the opposite, selecting a specific food product and seeing how that varies across the globe (if you're curious about a specific datapoint, hover over each circle and you can see the value and data source).
You'll notice that for most foods, it doesn't really matter where you are located, with the exception generally of fruits and vegetables, which can vary significantly based on the use of greenhouses. However, most fruit and vegetables have very low footprints, so it's not worth spending too much mental energy on the difference!
Beyond this, we're presenting quite a complicated dataset, drawing from many meta-analyses and research papers. So, there is not only a difference in locations, but a difference in methodology.
Appendix
Give Me The Data!
Okay, okay, enough fancy charts and maps, here's the full dataset:
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