Climate-Friendly Food (CFF) Labels Data Assessment Menu Item For The Three Dining Halls (Open Kitchen, Feast and Gather)
Creators: name: Lee, Jenny
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2023

description: As a response to rising concerns about climate change, the University of British Columbia (UBC) proposed the Climate Action Plan (CAP) 2030 to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the next 15 years. 17.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2 eq.), which account for approximately 34% of global GHG emission, is generated through the human-driven food supply chain. To reduce GHG emissions associated with food production, the Climate-Friendly Food Services (CFFS) team aims to display sustainability labels on each menu item sold at a few residence dining halls. This is to inform students at UBC Vancouver of sustainable food options and encourage them to develop climate-friendly dietary habits. This research is a continuation of Silvia Huang’s pilot project in 2021. Calculation metrics, such as emission baseline values and label cut-off values, are directly adopted from the pilot project. One of the concerns that were yet to be properly addressed in the pilot project is the heavy reliance on human labour in data analysis workflow. Current research focuses on improving the automaticity of the workflow to accelerate the analysis process, as well as launching a web-browser-based application that can be accessed from anywhere hence greatly improving the accessibility of sustainability labels. Primary data is collected with the assistance of UBC Food Services, which is exported from the food nutrition management service, Optimum Control (OC). The data on carbon, nitrogen and water footprint factors came from external secondary data sources. One critical change that is made by this year’s research team is moving the programming environment to PyCharm. PyCharm is an ideal environment for script automation and debugging. In total, 775 food items are analyzed from the three residence dining halls: Feast, Gather, and Open Kitchen. 346 items are classified as green, 233 items as yellow, and 196 items are classified as red. This sets the distribution percentage of the green items to approximately 44.6% of all items analyzed, which highly increases the possibility of reducing food production-associated GHG emissions by 50%. Although all menu items are successfully analyzed, the analysis workflow still leaves a few limitations. In the next phase of the study, it is recommended by that a new CFFS Data Analyst student to continue working towards improving the accuracy of the final outcomes. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”