RISE Food Sustainability Database

RISE Food Sustainability Database developed from RISE Food Climate Database

After 10 years, RISE Food Climate Database has been expanded with information on nutrient density and biodiversity to give food companies and public actors a broader planning and decision-making basis in their sustainability work. RISE Food Sustainability Database provides a better picture of the environmental impact of food and its nutritional content. In parallel, the carbon footprints in RISE Food Sustainability Database have also been developed and refined, for example with separate carbon footprints for land use change (LUC) for most of the raw materials/foods in the database.

Sustainability data for foods consumed in Sweden

Carbon footprints

The basis for the carbon footprints in RISE food climate database is life cycle assessments of more than 800 food products, representative for Swedish food consumption. The life cycle assessment (LCA) is an ISO-standardized method and each food product has been given a carbon footprint that shows the climate impact from its production chain. The carbon footprints are general (not developed for specific producers' products) and should be seen as an approximate value of the food product´s climate impact. The climate impact of products is usually called carbon footprint and is expressed here in kg carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) per kg of food.

The carbon footprints (kg CO₂e per kg food) are linked to and matched with the articles in the Swedish Food Agencies food database and the metadata that describes what the climate data represents in terms of origin and production methods. The total carbon footprint of a food product consists of the climate impact from its production, land use change (LUC), and transport to Sweden for imported foods. The four different carbon footprints (“production”, “transport”, “LUC” and “total”) are reported separately in RISE Food Sustainability Database.

Production emissions

The climate impact (kg CO₂e per kg food) of food production,from primary production (agriculture, fishery etc) to industry (where the food product is produced).

LUC emissions

The climate impact (kg CO₂e per kg food) from land use change (LUC) is calculated according to a RISE method, whish follows the standard SBTi FLAG.  

Transport emissions

The climate impact (kg CO₂e per kg food) from the transport to Sverige for imported food.

Biodiversity footprints

Biodiversity footprints expressed in PDF, Potentially Disappeared Fraction (fPDF per kg food) for various foods consumed in Sweden. PDF stands for Potentially Disappeared Fraction and describes the potential species loss caused by human land and water use plus climate change compared to a reference situation. PDF is originally an index between 0 and 1, which makes the footprints small and difficult to interpret. Therefore, we use the prefix femto (10^-15), fPDF, which makes the results easier to read.

Nutrient-Rich Food Index

The Nutrient-Rich Food (NRF) index is an indicator for assessing nutritional quality of foods. NRF index is a nutritional profiling system that ranks foods based on their nutritional composition and the daily nutritional intake for adults according to the Nordic nutrition recommendations. NRF index includes nutrients beneficial to health as well as nutrients detrimental to health at too high intakes. Thus, NRF index versions are named after the number of nutrients to encourage and limit; for example, NRF 11.3 is based on 11 nutrients to encourage and 3 nutrients to limit. NRF 11.3 is expressed per 100 g of food in the Swedish version of RISE Food Climate Database that include food items from the Swedish Food Agency food database.

A living Sustainability Database

RISE Food sustainability Database is updated annually and a helpdesk function is available year-round for questions etc.