LEAF: Predicting the Environmental Impact of Food Products based on their Name

Bas Krahmer

Keywords: food, environment, NLP, Eco-Score, products, multilingual, BERT, classification, Open Food Facts, climate

Abstract:

Although food consumption represents a sub- stantial global source of greenhouse gas emis- sions, assessing the environmental impact of off-the-shelf products remains challenging. Currently, this information is often unavailable, hindering informed consumer decisions when grocery shopping. The present work introduces a new set of models called LEAF, which stands for Linguistic Environmental Analysis of Food Products. LEAF models predict the life-cycle environmental impact of food products based on their name. It is shown that LEAF models can accurately predict the environmental im- pact based on just the product name in a multi- lingual setting, greatly outperforming zero-shot classification methods. Models of varying sizes and capabilities are released, along with the code and dataset to fully reproduce the study.

Archival Submission: arxival

Submission Number: 14