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Climate-Friendly Food (CFF) Labels Data Assessment at AMS Flavour Lab 2022-2023

University of British Columbia. Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability; University of British Columbia. Food Services; University of British Columbia. AMS Sustainability; University of British Columbia. Campus and Community Planning

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 Flavour Lab. This project is a pilot project which serves to inform students at UBC Vancouver of sustainable food options and encourage them to develop climate-friendly dietary habits. The CFFS Food Labeling Project first started with a pilot project conducted in 2020. The pilot project successfully assigned labels to menu items sold at three residence dining halls at the UBC Vancouver campus. Current research is an extension of the pilot project, with a separate workflow but sharing the same research objective, goal, and purpose. The data source provided by the current client, Alma Mater Society (AMS), does not align with that of the pilot project; hence a different workflow was needed. Primary data is collected with the assistance of UBC AMS, which is exported from the food nutrition management service, Optimum Control (OC), as a PDF file. The data on carbon, nitrogen and water footprint factors came from external secondary data sources. One critical change that distinguishes this research from the past pilot project is a change in the programming environment to PyCharm. PyCharm is an ideal environment for script automation and debugging. In total, 26 food items are analyzed from the three residence dining halls: Feast, Gather, and Open Kitchen. 19 items are classified as green, 5 items as yellow, and 2 items are classified as red. This sets the distribution percentage of the green items to approximately 73.01% of all items analyzed, which perfectly adheres to the goal 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 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.”

Report

eng

2023-09-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85841

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/