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A simple carbon label that everyone understands
It should be easy to understand the carbon footprint of your food.
The My Emissions carbon label mimics nutritional labelling, to help consumers make more sustainable choices.
About the My Emissions food carbon label
Using the same principles as nutritional labelling, we’ve designed a simple carbon label that everyone understands. Here’s how it works.
Simple A-E rating
Based on the food’s ‘carbon intensity’, we rate it from A (Very Low) to E (Very High).
Our standard carbon label uses traffic light colours, so it’s really easy to see the impact of your food.
Carbon intensity
Carbon intensity is the carbon footprint per kilogram of food. Just like ‘per 100g’ nutritional labels, it allows us to easily compare the impact of different foods.
Examples
How our clients use the My Emissions carbon label
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Frequently asked questions
All values are calculated in ‘CO2e’, which means ‘carbon dioxide equivalents’. This is a measure of all greenhouse gas emissions released, where each gas is given an equivalent impact compared to carbon dioxide. You can read more about this on the Eurostat website.
We collect data on each meal, including its ingredients (and how they’re grown or farmed), processing, any packaging used, and all transportation. This then allows us to complete our calculations.
Our rating system is based on a statistical analysis of all the 3,000+ ingredients and recipes in our database.
We believe the thresholds for a carbon label should be set by regulation (just like nutritional thresholds), and are actively engaging with Government about this.
But sadly climate change can’t wait for that, and that’s why we’ve adopted our own rating system!
Carbon intensity means the carbon footprint per kg of food. Using carbon intensity, rather than the total emissions produced, allows us to easily compare the impact of different foods and meals. Otherwise, we’d need to create lots of different thresholds depending on the type of food (eg, a starter versus a main course meal), and it could easily be manipulated by misleading serving sizes.
This system copies existing nutritional labelling, which often also use thresholds based on the ‘per 100g’ nutritional content of food.
All our calculations use the same ‘system boundary’, to ensure consistency across our labels. This includes the core emissions of the food product or meal, including emissions from farming, processing, packaging and transport to the store or restaurant.
Yes! Our calculations include the core emissions of a product up to a store or restaurant. This includes packaging of the ingredients and/or final product, and transport to the final location.
At the moment, our carbon label doesn’t look at emissions from stores (e.g. lighting), cooking and disposal. This is because it’s harder to collect data for these stages, and they are generally a much smaller proportion of the food’s carbon footprint.
My Emissions does not take into account any offsetting when setting the carbon rating. We believe a true carbon rating should just show the emissions needed to produce the food.
Companies like you use My Emissions to be more sustainable
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