The latest version of Agribalyse is now up-to-date in Open Food Facts!
Since the late 2000s, a consensus has emerged on the need for environmental labelling of agricultural products. In 2013, the first version of Agribalyse was jointly unveiled by the ADEME (The French Agency for Ecological Transition) and the INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment).
Agribalyse ? What is it ?
Initiated in 2013, Agribalyse is a collective and innovative programme that provides reference data on the environmental impacts of agricultural and food products through a database built according to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology.
The signatories of an official partnership since May 2021, the INRAE and the ADEME make this database available in open access. We have thus integrated these LCA results for the calculation of the Eco-Score in Open Food Facts.
Indeed, Agribalyse contains the LCAs of more than 2,500 product categories, which are the very basis of the Eco-Score calculation; having direct access to them guarantees a quick update of the data necessary to determine the Eco-Score.
What are the changes brought by the update ?
The 3.0.1 Agribalyse version was introduced in late 2020, it has been enhanced and improved to make way for version 3.1 in late 2022.
This new version contains more accurate data and had an impact on many Eco-Scores on Open Food Facts and helps to better inform interested consumers, contributors, and professionals.
The Eco-Score calculation is available on more than 350,000 products out of more than 2.8 million worldwide. Thanks to the data matching work done by Open Food Facts and initially by Data4Good, users have access to the environmental impact details of many products.
The big advantage of the Eco-Score methodology through the use of Agribalyse is its ability to estimate the environmental impact of products on a large scale.
This version of Agribalyse also contains new LCAs, and therefore the possibility to calculate the Eco-Score on even more products. It also allows for methodological, structuring and diffusion improvements, for instance, by expanding the product categories covered in version 3.1 compared to version 3.0.1.
A contributor’s story
| “My job would be to update OFF* to use the latest version of AGRIBALYSE. […]The changes resulted in changed Eco-Scores for over 150,000 products. […] I then, finally, got to add in the new categories for vegan and other products that had recently been introduced. This now meant that around 9,000 products had an EcoScore where they didn’t have one before, including many of my favourite vegan products. The change was deployed to production just over a month after that first introduction to the team on Slack.” – John Gomersal, English contributor at Open Food Facts*. |
We would like to thank all of the contributors to Open Food Facts who are making it possible for the database to grow from day to day and thus actively participate in food transparency. Today, we would like to thank John Gomersal, a contributor to the database, who enabled us to promptly update Open Food Facts to Agribalyse 3.1.
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