Oat Drink With Carbon Dioxide Equivalents

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily see and compare the climate impact of different food products — before you buy them? We believe that kind of consumer empowerment should be a law, if not a human right.

If you think about it, a requirement to show a food product’s climate footprint isn’t so different from the rules governing the labelling of fat, sugar or nutritional content. But getting everyone involved to agree on how that could be done will take time — which is why we have decided to take the lead and do it on our own.

Our calculations are performed by a company called CarbonCloud and cover the product journey all the way from grain field to store, including transportation and packaging.

All values are expressed in carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e), the same measure used by the UNFCCC and The European Commission, which converts the varying effects of different gases into the equivalent amount of CO2 it would take to create the same greenhouse effect.

Our CO₂e figures can be found on the back of our packaging and in some cases, in a small bubble on the front of our oat drinks. It’s going to take some months for us to have all figures calculated on all of our products, so if you’re the first-mover type, we suggest visiting our product pages where figures will be posted as soon as we get them.

Now, the one problem with all these numbers is they don’t really say much so long as there’s nothing to compare them with. Is 0.38 CO₂e good or bad? The solution, of course, is for more of the food industry to put their figures on the table. So feel free to contact the food producers you’d like to compare us with and politely demand them to show us their numbers, you can blame this pushy piece of copy, if that helps.

You can read more about how and why we made these calculations here.