corsus presented the Food Impact Toolkit (FIT) at the International Life Cycle Management Conference

At the 12th International Conference on Life Cycle Management (LCM 2025), held from September 9 to 12, 2025, in Palermo, Italy, Talita F. Amado, presented the Food Impacts Toolkit (FIT), developed at corsus. This biennial conference is recognized as a foremost global forum on environmental, economic, and social sustainability, bringing together academics, practitioners, policymakers, and industry leaders under the theme “Global to Local,” which emphasizes practical tools and methods for a sustainable transition.

During the presentation on Thursday 11.09, Talita introduced FIT—a user-friendly, open-source API designed to calculate environmental impact scores for food products and recipes. Developed as part of the CLIF project funded by the German Ministry of the Environment, FIT generates impact scores for multiple environmental impact categories, including climate change, water use, and biodiversity, allowing users to understand the environmental footprint of the food products.

One of the standout features of FIT is its ability to provide a single aggregated score along with a letter-grade classification, ranging from A to E. This grading system simplifies complex information, making it easier for consumers and food service providers to make informed decisions. Additionally, FIT maintains transparency by flagging instances where proxy data is used, ensuring users are aware of the data’s origins and limitations.

The tool leverages proxy datasets to expand regional applicability, meaning it can adapt to various local contexts without requiring exhaustive datasets for every country. This flexibility is achieved by adjusting existing life cycle assessment (LCA) data using region-specific factors, such as the AWARE water scarcity index and crop yield data from FAOSTAT. Users simply input a food item or recipe, and quantity, and FIT matches this input to relevant environmental data, normalizing and weighting it to calculate an overall impact score. Results are presented in a way that breaks down the impacts by life cycle stage and environmental category, providing both high-level insights and detailed information. The API is open source, so it can be easily integrated into any front end – i.e. a user-friendly interface – and thus incorporated into websites.

Talita felt honored to showcase a tool that aligns closely with the conference’s goals: translating life cycle approaches into real-world decision-making. The engaging conversations and practical insights shared during the event were invaluable for advancing sustainability in food systems.

The results presented were developed as part of the CLIF project, which is funded by the BMUV as part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI).