Carbon Footprint Calculations for Food Products in the Danish Market

About the project

Commissioned by the Danish Veterinary and Food Authority (DVFA), this project establishes an open list of generic climate footprints for food products sold on the Danish market. “Generic” means a real or virtual product that represents current production in general, based on the Danish market mix, rather than the product of any single company.

Each footprint is reported as kg CO₂e per kg food product, covering the life cycle from production up to the retail store, and broken down into four stages: agriculture, preparation, packaging and transport. The list begins with around 200 products across sixteen food groups, from vegetables and cereals to meat, fish, dairy and beverages. The long-term goal is to cover up to 3,000 products, and the ambition is to update the footprints every three years.

The DVFA owns the results in perpetuity. They can be publicly displayed and shared without restrictions, user registration or additional costs, and are freely usable for substantiating consumer climate labels on food and drink in Danish retail stores, as well as for other product information and claims made by businesses and authorities.

Background

Denmark has decided to introduce climate labelling on food as one route towards its climate-neutrality commitment. Labelling only works if the numbers behind it are sound. A wide range of environmental labels already exists across EU markets, which has meant costs for companies and confusion for consumers. The European Commission’s response was to recommend a single common method, the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). Aarhus University’s PEF-wise method applies that approach to food products on the Danish market, together with a set of Denmark-specific methodological decisions.

This project builds the data layer that climate labelling needs. The footprints are generic rather than brand-specific: each one represents current production of a product in general, weighted by the Danish market mix, and is not an average of the footprints of individual companies’ products. Because every product is calculated with the same reference flow, system boundary, impact assessment method and data quality rules, the results can be compared with one another and applied consistently across an entire labelling scheme.

The open list is also intended to serve as a starting point for others. Producers can calculate product-specific footprints for their own products using the same method and their own company data, and third parties may calculate footprints for multi-ingredient products by drawing on the generic footprints from the list.