LiveLCA just got a lot bigger. We have added more than 1,800 emission factors for food products from Agribalyse, so you can now look up the CO2e of everything from a baguette to a frozen lasagne and use them in your recipes.

What is Agribalyse?

Agribalyse is France's public database of food footprints. It is run by ADEME, the French Agency for Ecological Transition, together with the research institute INRAE. The project started in 2013 and is published as open data. The latest version, 3.2, covers about 2,500 foods as eaten in France plus more than 200 raw farm products. We filtered the Agribalyse data down to relevant foods, removed duplicates, and matched the rest to LiveLCA products. That updated almost 500 existing products and added more than 1,300 new ones.

How do they calculate it?

Agribalyse uses life cycle assessment (LCA). It adds up the emissions from every step needed to get a food onto your plate, split into six stages:

1. Agriculture
2. Processing
3. Packaging
4. Transport
5. Retail
6. Consumption (storage and cooking at home)

Farm data for French crops and livestock comes from INRAE and the agricultural institutes. Prepared foods are built up from a recipe of ingredients, with losses accounted for along the way. Imported ingredients are modelled with international databases such as ecoinvent and the World Food LCA Database.

Agribalyse reports 16 environmental indicators per product. On LiveLCA we only use one of them: climate change, shown as kg CO2e per kg of product.

Good to know

Each value is an average for food as eaten in France, so a specific brand, farm or country of origin can differ. Agribalyse also counts the full chain up to your plate, including cooking at home. That can make its numbers a little higher than studies that stop at the farm gate or factory, so it is worth checking how many studies sit behind a product before drawing big conclusions.

Try it out

Search for a product, add it to a recipe, or see how much of your daily CO2e food budget it uses. A big thank you to ADEME and INRAE for making this data openly available.

Sources

• Agribalyse documentation
• AGRIBALYSE version 3.2 dataset