Sustainability & Health Indicators

Break out of the carbon tunnel and see the bigger sustainability picture. FoodFacts helps you understand how products and portfolios perform across climate, biodiversity, water, and health indicators, creating a more holistic foundation for sustainable decisions.

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Beyond carbon : Why other indicators?

Climate is only one part of a product's overall impact. FoodFacts combines science-based indicators for biodiversity, water, carbon, and nutrition, including Nutri-Score and health flags, to give you a more complete view of your portfolio. Developed with experts from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, RISE, and Chalmers University of Technology, our indicators help you identify hotspots, understand trade-offs, and make better product decisions .

With these indicators you can answer questions like:

  • Which products or categories have the highest overall environmental impact?
  • Where are our biggest biodiversity or water risks?
  • Where are the biggest opportunities to improve the health profile of our portfolio?
  • Where are the biggest trade-offs between health and sustainability?
  • Which products need to be improved in priority from a salt, sugar, saturated fat level?

About the indicators : Product Sustainability & Health Indicators

Biodiversity Risk

Measures potential biodiversity-related risks associated with ingredient sourcing locations, including ecosystem vulnerability and environmental pressures. It helps identify products connected to regions where food production may contribute to biodiversity loss. FoodFacts uses the WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter, retrieving risk scores based on each ingredient's country of origin. These scores are weighted by ingredient share and aggregated into a product-level score .

Biodiversity Footprint

Measures the potential impact of a product on biodiversity across the food production chain, including impacts from land use, water use, and climate change. FoodFacts uses the RISE Biodiversity Database for Food, which provides LCA-based biodiversity impact values for ingredients based on their origin. These values are weighted by ingredient share and aggregated into a product-level score, normalized to a 0-100 scale.

Water Risk

Measures the potential exposure of ingredient sourcing locations to water-related challenges, including water scarcity, quality issues, and governance risks. It helps identify products linked to vulnerable water regions and understand supply chain resilience. FoodFacts uses data from the WWF Water Risk Filter, combining ingredient origin data with ingredient quantities to calculate a weighted product-level score, normalized to a 0-100 scale.

Product Carbon Footprint (CO₂e)

Measures the total greenhouse gas emissions associated with a product's life cycle, from ingredients and raw materials to processing and transportation. It helps identify climate hotspots and compare products across a portfolio . FoodFacts calculates PCFs using LCA-based methodologies and trusted scientific and industry data sources, including Agri-footprint®, SAFAD, and GS1 product and ingredient data.

Nutri-Score

Measures the overall nutritional quality of a product using the official Nutri-Score methodology. This standardized A-E score enables consistent benchmarking across categories and supports healthier product portfolios. Food retailers can calculate Nutri-Score across their full assortment, while food producers can test recipe changes and see their impact in real time, supporting data-driven reformulation and improved nutritional quality.

Health Flags

Measures levels of key nutrients consumers are encouraged to monitor: sugar, salt, and saturated fat. FoodFacts applies thresholds from the UK Traffic Light Labelling system to classify products as low, medium, or high using simple colour-coded flags. This helps identify nutritional hotspots and reformulation opportunities and supports healthier product decisions.

Beyond carbon : Why measure multiple indicators?

  • Understand sustainability trade-offs: Evaluate how product choices perform across multiple dimensions and balance environmental and health considerations.
  • Identify hotspots and prioritize action: Find the products, ingredients, and categories with the greatest impacts and focus improvement efforts where they matter most.
  • Compare and improve your portfolio: Analyze performance across products, brands, categories, and ingredients to identify improvement opportunities.
  • Build a flexible sustainability framework: Customize scorecards based on your sustainability priorities and expand with additional indicators and more detailed data over time.
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FAQ : Frequently asked questions

What indicators are included beyond carbon footprints?

Food production impacts more than just climate change, affecting areas such as biodiversity, water resources, and nutrition. To provide a more complete view of product sustainability and health performance, FoodFacts provides a broad set of standard product-level indicators beyond carbon footprints, including biodiversity risk, water risk, health flags (sugar, salt, saturated fats), and Nutri-Score.

These indicators can be combined to assess different impact areas across products and portfolios, helping companies identify improvement opportunities and support more balanced decision-making. In addition to the standard indicators available in FoodFacts, the platform can also support the development and calculation of company-specific indicators tailored to individual sustainability priorities and business needs.

How is biodiversity risk calculated?

Biodiversity Risk assesses potential risks linked to ingredient sourcing locations, helping identify biodiversity hotspots across the supply chain. By linking ingredients to their regions of origin, FoodFacts highlights products and ingredients associated with higher ecosystem pressure and biodiversity risk. FoodFacts uses data from the WWF Risk Filter Suite, which evaluates biodiversity-related risks across three dimensions:

  • Physical risk (ecosystem degradation and pressure on natural services)
  • Regulatory deficiency risk (weak environmental regulation and enforcement)
  • Reputational risk (stakeholder and market perception linked to biodiversity impacts)

The calculation follows an ingredient-weighted approach, where each ingredient is linked to its country of origin. WWF biodiversity risk scores are applied at country level, weighted by ingredient share, and aggregated to a product-level score. The WWF's 1-5 scale is converted to a 0-100 score with aligned risk categories.

What is water risk and how is it measured?

Water risk evaluates the potential water-related risks associated with producing a product’s ingredients. FoodFacts combines ingredient composition with geographically specific water risk data from the WWF Water Risk Filter to assess exposure to water scarcity, water quality issues, and water governance challenges in sourcing regions.

The product-level score is calculated using a weighted approach based on the share of each ingredient in the product, with higher-risk sourcing locations contributing more to the overall score.

How are nutrition and health indicators defined?

Our nutrition and health indicators are based on the nutritional composition of each product and established scientific assessment methodologies.

FoodFacts uses the official Nutri-Score methodology to automatically calculate each product’s nutritional quality score in the platform. The calculation is based on the Nutri-Score points system, which balances nutrients and components to limit, such as energy, sugars, saturated fats, and salt, with favourable nutritional components, such as fibre, protein, and the content of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. The resulting score is translated into the Nutri-Score scale from A (higher nutritional quality) to E (lower nutritional quality).

We also offer Nutritional Flags for each product that are based on declared nutritional values for sugar, salt, and saturated fat, using thresholds aligned with the UK Traffic Light Labelling system and the EU Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims.

These indicators help food producers and retailers benchmark products, identify nutritional hotspots, support reformulation and assortment improvements, and evaluate health performance alongside environmental impact.

Can indicators be customized to our strategy?

Yes. FoodFacts allows you to combine and prioritize the indicators that matter most to your business, creating customized sustainability scorecards that align with your sustainability strategy, reporting needs, and product development goals. In addition to selecting from existing indicators, FoodFacts can also support the development of company-specific indicators tailored to your sustainability priorities and internal requirements.

How does this compare to carbon-only assessments?

Carbon footprints provide an important view of sustainability impact, but they don't capture other critical sustainability and health dimensions. By combining carbon with indicators such as biodiversity, water risk, and nutrition, FoodFacts helps companies understand more encompassing sustainability impacts of their products outside of the carbon tunnel view.

Why has FoodFacts selected those indicators?

FoodFacts selected these indicators based on their relevance for food companies and their ability to provide meaningful insights into key sustainability and health impacts. The selection was developed in collaboration with an expert group as part of a Vinnova-financed project, involving experts from Stockholm Resilience Centre and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

Through this work, the indicators were identified as the most relevant for helping food companies assess product impacts, identify improvement opportunities, and integrate sustainability considerations into decision-making.

How is the carbon footprint indicator calculated?

The carbon footprint indicator is calculated using the Industry standard methodology (branschgemensam metodik). You can read more about it here. FoodFacts combines product-specific activity data, such as ingredient quantities, packaging, energy use, and transport distances, with scientifically established greenhouse gas emission factors.

Emissions are calculated across relevant life cycle stages and aggregated into a single result expressed as kg CO₂e per kg of product, using IPCC Global Warming Potential values over a 100-year time horizon (GWP100).