Words by Smiley Team
Would you want to know the carbon footprint of your food, if you could?
Klimato is a Swedish start-up that works with restaurants to do just that, helping people make better food choices, and encouraging businesses to offset carbon emissions through gold standard certified projects.
The idea for Klimato was sparked in 2017 by a group of friends with a passion for sustainability. Through a university project investigating food-related emissions in school canteens in Stockholm, they came across the shocking numbers - the food industry accounts for over one quarter of global emissions, yet the awareness about the climate impact of our eating habits is low.
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The group of friends identified the need for simple, factual information that people could adopt to reduce the impact from food on our planet. They wanted to raise awareness of how our eating habits affect the climate and bridge the knowledge gap between research and the consumer to empower everyone to make more informed food choices.
“Our climate footprint calculator allows food service providers like restaurants, cafés and canteens to calculate the climate footprint of each dish on their menu based on factors such as ingredients, production method and country of origin using science-backed emissions data," says Johanna Bjarsch Follin, chief marketing officer at Klimato.
"Each dish receives a Klimato climate label based on the footprint, which can be used on menus to communicate its climate-friendliness, making it easier for restaurant visitors to take the climate impact into account when choosing which dish to order."
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“Our solution also allows restaurants to report on their progress towards serving more climate-friendly food by tracking metrics like proportion of climate-friendly meals, average climate impact per meal, total climate footprint. By using these metrics to set and track climate goals over time, our solution both educates and inspires easy adjustments and choices to eat in a way that is good for the planet.”
Positive, sustainable change doesn’t come from pointing fingers, says Johanna, adding: “We believe that we need to empower people to make their own informed decisions if we want action at a larger scale. We want to nudge people in the right direction with simple and easy-to-understand facts about the correlation between climate change and what you put in your mouth.”
Since Klimato was founded in Stockholm in 2017, the company has expanded to the rest of Scandinavia, where it helps hundreds of restaurants lower the emissions from the food they serve and track their progress to becoming more climate-friendly.
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Klimato recently expanded to the UK as the first destination outside the Nordics – and they have big hopes for the future. “We believe that climate labelling on food will be a future standard, just like nutrition labelling is today,” says Johanna.
