What’s going on in Eco Food Choice?

Talita F. Amado joined corsus one year ago. Amongst other she is working in the EU LIFE project Eco Food Choice. She is biologist and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) expert.

1. Talita, what is the content of Eco Food Choice and what is the main focus of your work in the project?

The Eco Food Choice project is all about helping consumers make more environmentally conscious food choices by laying the groundwork for a reliable ecolabelling system across Europe. To do this, the project is developing and testing harmonised methods for life cycle inventories (LCIs) and environmental impact assessments of food products. It brings together nine organisations from France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, working collaboratively to create a shared approach. Among its key goals are building adaptable LCA datasets for 30 different food products in three countries, developing a scoring system that translates environmental impacts into a clear food-environment score, and designing an easy-to-understand label. Backed by the EU LIFE Programme, the project ultimately aims to turn environmental data into everyday decision-making tools at the supermarket shelf.

2. How is this done, adapting LCA datasets? How is the method working?

The method we developed focuses on adapting existing national food LCA databases — like France’s Agribalyse database — to other countries, instead of starting from scratch. This approach saves time and ensures consistency across borders. We begin by identifying the key parameters that need to change, such as agricultural practices, transportation distances, and electricity mixes. The process is especially detailed for the farming stage, which varies a lot between countries and has a big impact on results. We use a mix of expert workshops, hotspot analyses, and literature reviews to guide the adaptations. In the end, we aim to produce high-quality datasets that reflect local conditions while still fitting into a harmonised European system.

3. What happens next in the project? What are the next steps?

So far, we’ve created six datasets for fruits and vegetables in Germany. Right now, we’re working on a more complex one—chicken breast fillet—which also involves adapting data on animal feed mixtures, making it a bit more challenging. At the same time, our colleagues in Spain and the Netherlands are developing complementary datasets, which we also need to extrapolate and adapt to the German context. So, the work is highly collaborative and interconnected, with constant exchange between partners to ensure consistency across countries. In June, we plan to deliver our first full set of datasets and begin evaluating them in terms of data quality and overall coherence.