Daily Food Unit (DFU) is a standardized unit representing one person's daily food intake — the 2026 definition, whose five denominators all derive from one reference person (WHO/FAO 60 kg adult, 2,000 kcal/day). It is calculated as a 5-component average:

Each component normalizes a nutritional dimension to its daily reference value. Rest-energy and dry weight both strip protein and fat symmetrically, so those two macronutrients are counted exactly once; the 325 g dry-weight reference is the reference person's macro-stripped daily dry matter (carbohydrate 289 g + fibre 25 g + ash 11 g). The engine's exported Food Unit is the sum of the five components — exactly 5× the DFU — which is why per-FU figures on this page equal the per-DFU figure divided by five. The DFU ensures fair comparison across food types with different nutritional profiles.

Benchmark calculation: For each metric, the benchmark equals the consumption-weighted average — total impact divided by total DFU delivered — across the observation set. The 2026-08 benchmark is measured on real purchasing data: 108 kitchens, three years (2019–2021), 1,738,698 delivery rows on the Swiss (UVEK/BAFU) inventory basis, with the DFU of every row recomputed from its own declared nutrients under the 2026 DFU definition.

Rating thresholds for CO2 are derived from the benchmark using fixed multipliers: A ≤ 0.5×, B ≤ 1.0× (benchmark), C ≤ 2.0×, D ≤ 4.0×, E > 4.0×. Water thresholds use the ladder A ≤ 1.0× (benchmark), B ≤ 2.0×, C ≤ 4.0×, D ≤ 11.57×. Vita-Score thresholds are derived from FU-weighted percentiles: A = benchmark × 0.80 (~P10), B = benchmark (~P50), C = P80 (worst 20%), D = P90 (worst 10%).

Derivation record: the full measurement behind the benchmark — every product family, every tonne, traceable to source rows — is maintained as an internal review record and made available to the CAB during the engagement; a client-facing change communication (what moved against the previous ecoinvent basis, and why) is prepared separately.

EmpCo Scheme Document

This benchmark is built bottom-up: real purchasing rows × life-cycle inventories. Global studies estimate food-system emissions top-down from emission inventories. The two must agree within their boundary differences — and they do. The chain below makes the comparison explicit; every step is arithmetic on published figures, not a dietary statement.

The residual (~10–20%) is consistent with the boundary differences — but its attribution is not yet fully quantified. EDGAR-FOOD counts stages this delivered-food benchmark does not carry in full: end-of-life waste management (6% of the food-system total), domestic food preparation (~2%), the full breadth of land-use-change accounting, and refrigerant F-gases (4%) — and it averages the world's diets, while this benchmark measures a European contract-catering basket. A further 13% of food is lost between harvest and retail (FAO); those upstream losses are largely embedded in the life-cycle inventories themselves. Within these differences, an independent bottom-up measurement landing 10–20% below the top-down world average is mutual confirmation, not disagreement. (UNEP attributes 8–10% of global GHG emissions to food loss and waste alone — consistent with the waste-related wedge of this residual.) The named wedges quantify to at most ~0.27 t of the 0.48 t world-basis residual. What remains open is stated here rather than absorbed into the narrative:

• U1 — Unattributed share: the named wedges (end-of-life 0.134 t, domestic preparation 0.051 t, F-gases 0.088 t) cover at most ~0.27 t of the 0.48 t residual; at least ~0.2 t is currently unattributed.
• U2 — Boundary double-claim (the annex statement yielded, 28 September 2026): the pathway annex used to declare cradle-to-grave coverage including end-of-life. Pathway annex PA-07.4 now declares the operated boundary: Eaternity Gastro ratings run from agricultural production to delivery at the kitchen; end-of-life and the consumer phase are excluded, and kitchen preparation is not systematically modelled (open point: tag-triggered heat treatment, to be confirmed). The end-of-life and domestic-preparation wedges can therefore explain part of the residual, subject to that open point and to an inventory-level check of whether matched inventories embed such flows.
• U3 — Basket direction: Europe's more animal-heavy supply (77.7 vs 44.5 kg meat/cap/yr, FAO) should raise per-kcal intensity above the world average, yet the European-scaled figure (2.00 t) sits below the world top-down (2.2 t); the compensating forces are plausible but unquantified.
• U4 — GWP metric vintage: EDGAR-FOOD's GWP100 basis is unverified against our EF 3.1 / AR6 characterisation (35% CH₄ share ⇒ several-percent sensitivity).
• U5 — Missing like-for-like comparator: a European per-capita top-down figure from EDGAR-FOOD's country data would turn U1/U3 into arithmetic — the cheapest item to close.
• U6 — kcal-only scaling: the supply scaling treats one DFU as 2,000 kcal; the DFU also normalises protein, fat, water and dry matter — a sensitivity check on pure kcal is defined.

None of these endangers the order-of-magnitude conclusion; each carries its resolution path in the evidence dossier, and the list shrinks — never silently — as items close.

Sources: Crippa et al. 2021, Nature Food (food systems = one third of global GHG emissions); EDGAR-FOOD, EU Joint Research Centre (2024 update: 18 Gt in 2023; 2.2 t CO2eq per person); FAO Food Balance Sheets 2010–2022 (global dietary energy supply 2,985 kcal/cap/day, 2022); UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024 (19% of consumer-available food wasted; FAO: 13% lost post-harvest to pre-retail); Poore & Nemecek 2018, Science (independent bottom-up global estimate: 13.7 Gt CO2eq, 26% share). The comparison is a reference-frame reconciliation between system boundaries; none of these figures is a statement about what any person eats or should eat. Every claim above is documented with its verbatim source quote, access date and archive hash in the evidence dossier.