What's the carbon food-print of your yogurt?

One of the projects I’ve been working on this summer is to calculate the carbon ‘food-print’ of Stonyfield’s incoming (non-dairy) ingredients.  You know, the fruit, sugar, soy, and other ingredients that go into your yogurt.  To do so requires digging into a minute level of details from the company’s suppliers.  The idea is that, as a user, you would enter the volume purchased of each product into a dashboard.  You would paste the volume numbers into this dashboard year after year to get updated (and hopefully lower) CO2 numbers.  I’ve been working with a team to build the architecture and details behind that dashboard.

 

I started off with packaging, needing to know the weight in grams, material component parts, and total capacity of the containers, bags, and big metal totes in which these ingredients arrive to Stonyfield’s yogurt factory.  I’ve mainly used the industry tool “Compass” to get this CO2 output of packaging per item, but today I spent some time actually weighing the bag that the soy powder comes in, and then peeling apart unbleached paper bag and plastic lining to get individual weights and an accurate CO2 footprint. 

 

 

 
 

Additionally, I’ve been calculating the road distance from the warehouses of the various suppliers to the yogurt factory, collecting information on how many trips a year they make to the factory, and whether suppliers ship a full truck or “LTL” (less than truckload, or an un-full truck).  Also figured in is the temperature at which the products are shipped in the truck – be they room temperature, refrigerated, or frozen.

 

And it works!  All of this compiled data, organized neatly into a few spreadsheets, spits out the carbon footprint of these ingredients from the warehouse to Stonyfield, allowing Stonyfield to identify ‘hotspots’ in its supply chain for CO2 reductions.   This is huge, as ~ 12% of the carbon footprint from US households come from the whole process of food production, from the farm to the plate.  Next step for Stonyfield’s ingredient calculator will be to move further upstream in the supply chain, from the warehouse to the farmhouse, and eventually from the farmhouse to the field.  Eventually this, combined with the dairy and yogurt packaging footprint projects, will provide you yogurt-lovers with the whole picture on the carbon 'foodprint' of your yogurt!

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