How do you calculate a food’s climate impact?
The best way is to make a life cycle analysis, that is, to carefully analyze all the steps in the product's “life" — from farm to shop. Then you not only see how much CO2e the product generates in total, it also becomes clear which steps generate the most emissions — and quite often, the biggest offenders may not be what you’d expect.
Looking closer at the different steps, you can see, for example, that the greatest impact in the production of a food is neither the transport nor the packaging, but it is almost always in the "farm step” — during the creation of the raw material itself. Below, you can see how much CO2e is generated in each step of production of our oat drink as compared to cow's milk.