Food Miles Calculator

Use this worksheet to estimate one transport leg when you know the shipment mass, route distance, and an emissions factor appropriate to that leg. It reports transport work in tonne-kilometres and a transport-only emissions scenario.

Set up a traceable transport scenario

Enter shipment mass in kilograms, distance in kilometres, and a nonnegative factor in kg CO₂e per tonne-kilometre. The factor is not supplied: record its transport mode, geography, year, system boundary, and source. Also record the factor version and an uncertainty or sensitivity range. These details keep two runs comparable and make a later update auditable.

The supported method is:

tonne-kilometres = shipment mass (kg) / 1,000 × distance (km)

transport emissions (kg CO₂e) = tonne-kilometres × factor (kg CO₂e/t-km)

The result uses the entered values without intermediate rounding, then displays both outputs to one decimal place. Mass, distance, and factor must be finite and nonnegative; the source, provenance, and uncertainty fields are required.

Example: shipment food miles

For a 500 kg shipment travelling 1,000 km, mass is 500 / 1,000 = 0.5 t. Transport work is 0.5 × 1,000 = 500 t-km. With an entered factor of 0.062 kg CO₂e/t-km, emissions are 500 × 0.062 = 31 kg CO₂e, displayed as 31.0 kg CO₂e alongside 500.0 t-km.

Audit a route leg by leg

For a journey involving more than one mode, make one run per leg rather than assigning one factor to the entire distance. In a simple audit table, record leg, shipped mass, distance, factor, factor source/version, and result. Add leg results only when their CO₂e definitions and boundaries are compatible. This preserves which change came from distance, load, or factor instead of hiding all three in one total.

To test factor uncertainty, keep mass and distance fixed and rerun the documented lower and upper factor values. The resulting span is a sensitivity range, not a confidence interval.

Boundary and next step

This estimate excludes food production, packaging, refrigeration or storage energy, retail, cooking, waste, and any transport leg you omit. It is not a product footprint, inventory, certification, or offset quantity. Distance should represent the route covered by the selected mode, while the factor must use the same tonne-kilometre basis.

Next, verify the factor edition and boundary against its original dataset, then save each leg’s inputs and result so the scenario can be reproduced when distances or factors change.

Sources

• FAO, “Livestock and the Environment” — current web edition; lifecycle and environmental-context overview, accessed 2026-07-09. Route-specific boundary: context and terminology only; it does not supply an entered coefficient, uncertainty, recommendation, or approval.