Sustainability on the menu

Our food system causes 34% of all global CO2eq emissions. If everyone ate the way we do, we would need more than one earth. So what we eat has a major leverage effect. But is the tomato from the field in Spain better than the one from the Swiss greenhouse? And Swiss beef worse than the American Beyond Burger? How do I know what is really climate-friendly?

Our core competence is good cooking. That's why we leave the calculations to the experts at Eaternity.

As a large catering service provider, we see it as our responsibility to offer sustainable options with climate-friendly menus.

How the CO2eq value is calculated

The CO2 assessment of our dishes is based on data from Eaternity. Every product that our chefs purchase is stored in our central recipe database with details of suppliers/producers, ingredients and nutritional values and categorised. Eaterniy evaluates the recipes for our menus using a global food database. The CO2 equivalent (CO2eq) is made up of various assessment criteria.

Bewertungskriterien

  • Origin: reference region
  • Transport: ground, air, sea, train
  • Production: standard, organic, Fairtrade,
    for vegetables: heated greenhouse or field
    for fish or wild meat: farmed, wild-caught
  • Preservation: preserved, boiled, tinned, dried, frozen, fresh
  • Processing: raw
    for meat and fish: with/without bones
    for fish: skinned, headed, filleted
    for vegetables: cut, cooked, peeled
  • Certification: information label to determine rainforest protection and animal welfare. Examples: Bio Suisse, EU Organic or RSPO

The Rating

The different ratings result in a CO2 value for each menu. We categorise the values into three levels.

  1. Green menus are on target for climate-friendly nutrition and 50% better than the average
  2. Yellow menus have a value around the average CO2eq
  3. Red menus cause more than twice as many emissions as the average

What does CO2eq mean?

CO2 is only one of several greenhouse gases, but it accounts for the largest quantity. This is why science uses it as a standardised unit of measurement. A CO2 equivalent (CO2eq) thus indicates the proportion of a product or its released greenhouse gas in the greenhouse effect. In addition to CO2, agriculture primarily produces the greenhouse gases methane (25 times as effective as CO2) and nitrous oxide (298 times as effective as CO2).