At UniCafe, you can choose a lunch based on its carbon footprint – soon the other environmental impacts will be in the spotlight

UniCafe will begin providing its restaurant customers with information about the environmental impacts of foods, in addition to the carbon footprint of each meal.

UniCafe has long enabled customers to choose lunch options based on their carbon footprints. The menu shows the carbon footprint of each meal.

UniCafe’s lunch menu app at menu.unicafe.fi allows you to filter items on the menu according to nutritional requirements, as well as by their carbon footprints, so the app only shows Climate Choice options. This makes it easy for customers to make sustainable choices.

Further transparency will be introduced in 2026 with the inclusion of the environmental impacts of meals, as UniCafe is researching the nature footprints of all its lunches. This will enable UniCafe’s customers to compare lunch options and choose the most environmentally sustainable meals.

“Our goal is to continuously increase our own understanding of the impact of our operations and, based on this, encourage our customers to make choices that benefit people and nature,” summarises Anne Immonen, CEO of Ylva.

Climate Choice and a carbon footprint calculation that is unique to the business sector

UniCafe’s Climate Choice label, launched in 2022, uses a threshold value based on the WWF’s One Planet Plate model, which calculates the food emissions budget needed to keep global warming within 1.5°C: 11 kg CO2e per person per week. The model indicates that an environmentally sustainable main meal should cause no more than 0.5 kg CO2e of emissions.

UniCafe’s carbon footprint calculation is based on the Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) principle: meals are examined at the recipe level by assigning an emissions coefficient to each ingredient based on peer-reviewed research, and the result is expressed as a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e per meal). This calculation consistently takes into account the main climate impacts of a meal and allows for a fair comparison of foods using the same method.

Presenting this information alongside each meal also improves transparency: the customer can see the climate impact when they choose what to eat.

Plant-based foods and local ingredients are at the heart of reducing environmental impacts

UniCafe joined the Science Based Targets Network, established in autumn 2023, and applied knowledge from the network for a 2024 study of the nature footprints of UniCafe’s main ingredients. The study aimed to identify the impacts of UniCafe’s meals on biodiversity and identify tangible ways to reduce them.

In 2025, UniCafe worked with Nios Earth Oy to expand its nature footprint calculation to cover 80% of UniCafe’s purchases.

The results highlighted land use and climate impacts, as well as how the choice of ingredients affects biodiversity. For example, plant-based meals leave a significantly lower nature footprint than animal-based alternatives. In addition, it was found that using local ingredients from Finland supports regional diversity and reduces biodiversity loss.

“Ylva’s groundbreaking research into the natural footprint of its meals is very valuable, and we see it contributing to the development of the entire market. The results reveal how crucial the origin of ingredients and animal feed is: for example, the use of water in the US affects species hundreds of times more than in Finland, according to the LC-IMPACT database,” says Nios Earth Oy’s founder, Henrik Suikkanen.

The collaboration with Nios has facilitated an in-depth analysis of the origin of ingredients, changes in land use, and supply chain accountability.

Thanks to its nature footprint calculations, UniCafe is able to identify the impact on biodiversity of individual meals and of its entire supply chain, so it can take an informed, long-term approach to developing its business practices.

UniCafe’s customer communications also take into account the EU Directive on empowering consumers for the green transition (known as the EmpCo Directive), which will take effect in the autumn. UniCafe endeavours to ensure that the information it provides about environmental impacts is easy to understand, verifiable and not misleading.

Additional information:

Anne Immonen
CEO, Ylva
+358 40 512 5008
anne.immonen@ylva.fi

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Nature impacts and the coverage of climate reporting

Nature impacts in brief

• The nature footprint indicates, among other things, how much the land use, climate emissions, pollution and water use associated with the production of a product cause the potential for biodiversity loss in a given region or globally.
• It is important to note that there is still no standard international unit of measure for the nature footprint. The study carried out by UniCafe and Nios Earth Oy used the Potentially Disappeared Fraction of Species per year (PDF-yr) value to assess the biodiversity impact.
• Biodiversity impact is a metric used in life cycle assessment (LCA) to describe the risk of species extinction associated with a particular product or activity.

Scope 3 emissions and CarbonLink collaboration

• Ylva’s climate reporting covers significant Scope 3 emission sources: the emissions from the food purchases of restaurants have been monitored since 2020 and reported as part of Ylva’s carbon footprint.

• In 2024, Ylva expanded its examination by analysing all of its purchase invoices in cooperation with CarbonLink. The analysis revealed that earlier reports had overlooked approximately 50% of the annual Scope 3 emissions.

• In the future, Ylva will include the most relevant Scope 3 categories (e.g. purchased products and services, such as ingredients and building materials, as well as waste management) in its reporting and pay more attention to the measurement of indirect emissions.

The calculation and reporting uses international standards (such as the GHG Protocol) to ensure best practices.

Photo: Jarmo Heimala, Perho Liiketalousopisto