TASTE Food: The Automated Scope 3 Tool
for Tracking Emissions from Food

About

TASTE Food was developed by Rebecca Grekin, a graduate student at Stanford University in the Benson Lab in the Energy Science and Engineering department, as part of her Master’s work which can be found here!

This tool facilitates food purchase categorization to determine emissions from food purchases. Please see the More Info tab which includes documentation for how the tool works. Three versions of the tool are currently available for use: one that categorizes purchases into the 18 Basic SIMAP categories, one that identifies plant-based foods as defined by AASHE STARS, and one that will be made available shortly.

TASTE Food is continually being improved and is being made available to users for free through this website. Feedback would be greatly appreciated. Please email with any questions and/or feedback.

Output Details

Select the appropriate tab above for the context that is relevant to you and your data. After pressing submit, the program will run and once it is finished, the final categorized file will be downloaded and emailed to the provided email address. You will know the program is running because the refresh button at the top of your browser will be an X instead of the usual arrow loop.

Please download the explanation document in the More Info tab for details on how the software works, how to use this website, and what the different sheets in the final categorized file mean.

To ensure continued improvement, categorized files are monitored. All data is anonymized before any analyses are run. Please email if you would not like your data to be used for improvement of the tool or anonymized in future publications.


Last updated: 11/15/2024 10:00AM PST


Academic Software License: © 2022 Rebecca Grekin. Academic or nonprofit researchers are permitted to use this Software (as defined in attachment below) subject to Paragraphs 1-4


SIMAP Analysis

Summary

This tool was developed in partnership with SIMAP to categorize food purchases into the 18 basic categories as defined by SIMAP. The output of this tool can be used to directly upload into SIMAP. For more information please see the SIMAP Website. You will know the program is running because the refresh button at the top of your browser will be an X instead of the usual arrow loop.

File Upload

Calculate weight per category?

Calculate spend per category?

Use Common Abbreviations?

Use Advanced Autocorrect?

Please upload your food file below. Make sure to follow the template provided in the Templates Tab.

These inputs are not required but help with the development and impact of the tool. If you would not like to provide or do not have the data to provide this information, please leave the defaults.


Advanced inputs

If you are using Advanced Inputs, upload files before pressing submit above

Use custom Keywords document?

If you selected yes for using custom Keywords, please upload your Keywords document. Make sure to follow the template provided in the More Info tab.

Use custom Edge Cases document?

If you selected yes for using custom Edge Cases, please upload your Edge Cases document. Make sure to follow the template provided in the More Info tab.


AASHE STARS

Summary

This tool was developed in partnership with AASHE to identify plant-based food purchases for AASHE STARS Reporting. You will know the program is running because the refresh button at the top of your browser will be an X instead of the usual arrow loop.

File Upload

Please note that for AASHE STARS Reporting, you must include spend data in the file you upload. Select Yes below to indicate that you have included spend data in the dataset uploaded.


Please upload your food file below. Make sure to follow the template provided in the Templates Tab.

These inputs are not required but help with the development and impact of the tool. If you would not like to provide or do not have the data to provide this information, please leave the defaults.
How many meals served does this food data represent?
How many students attend your university?
What state is your university located in?


TBD

Coming Soon!


Templates

The food template document below is the template that must be filled out and uploaded in the SIMAP Basic and/or STARS tabs in order for the tool to be able to categorize the data correctly. Title (Item Name) is the only required column. Fill out other columns based on your available data and categorization intended use. Download the guidelines document below for more information.

Please see below to download a filled out example of the input template.


Please download the document below for a detailed explanation of how to use TASTE Food, the website, and interpretation of the outputs.

Provided Inputs

If you are interested in looking at the key words document and edge cases document please download them below. These have been created using food purchasing data from 40+ universities and counting. They are constantly being amended and improved. If you have any comments, questions, or improvements that you would like to suggest, please email. The advanced inputs in the SIMAP Basic tab allows the user to upload of both of these documents to help account for idiosyncracies of data sets.

Video Tutorial

A video tutorial/walk through is available on youtube which explains the basics of how to use the website. Please feel free to watch the video here.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank many individuals and partnerships for their help in developing TASTE Food. Without them, this tool would not be as good as it is today. In alphabetical order these are: Sally Benson, Mateus Bezrutchka, Isabel Kaspriskie, Allison Leach, the SIMAP Nitrogen Working Group Members, the Stanford University Office of Sustainability, and the Stanford University Residential and Dining Enterprises.

Donations

If you would like to donate to help maintain the server on which TASTE Food runs, the recommended donation is of $0.01/1000 lines of data processed through the tool. You can donate here!

FAQ

Q: I am getting an internal server error page which says: "The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application."

A: The tool is being hosted on an external server and because of cost constraints, the amount of time before the server times out is on the shorter side (on the order of a couple of minutes), which is what causes the error you are seeing.

There are a couple of ways to circumvent this:

• First, if you are not using a pivot table to consolidate all the items with the same name, you can do this in order to reduce the total number of items that the software has to look at (there is information on how to do this in the explanation document available on the website, but if you have any questions or difficulties with this I am also happy to help).

• Second, you may have a large number of non-food items included in your data set. These can include gloves, utensils, hair nets, and other commonly purchased items for dining halls that are not food. Please remove these and the probability of seeing the error should decrease.

• Third, you can split up the file into a couple of files and run each one through the tool. It should be able to handle ~1000 lines without running into this time out issue as long as there aren’t a significant number of items the tool cannot categorize

• Fourth, you are welcome to send me the file, and I can run it locally on my laptop and then there is no time out issue since everything is happening on my laptop so you don't have to do any of the things above

Q: What should I do with the items in the deleted sheet in the output file?

A: There are a couple of options:

• Simply disregard this data. If the total weight or spend of the deleted items in this sheet is small compared to your entire data set, you can simply not include the data in your analysis

• You can hand categorize the items that are deleted and copy them from the deleted sheet to the main Categorized Data sheet. If you do this, you will also need to include the weight or spend information from those line items into the spend per category or weight per category tabs if you are using those.

• The leftmost column of the deleted sheet shows the row number of each data point in the original file fed into the tool. If an item was not tagged because it is misspelled or not enough information was able to be obtained from the original item name, you can go into your original file, find the line item and add an appropriate key word to the item name (for example, apple for red delicious, pretzel for snack mix) and re run the file through the tool with the edited line item names. If this is done instead of the hand categorization of deleted item, then the spend per category and weight per category will include the weights and spend from the lines that had previously been uncategorized.

Q: Why is one (or more) of the totals for my weight or spend per category blank?

A: This means that there are some values in the data set you fed into the program where either the weight or spend is missing. Please either delete this line item if you do not know the spend or weight for this item, try to find the appropriate weight or spend from your original data source, or put a zero in that space if the missing data is not particularly important to the analysis you are planning to do after.

Q: I only have spend, or I only have weight data. Can I still use the tool? Which columns are required?

A: Yes! You can leave either column empty and just make sure to not ask the tool to calculate the spend or weight per category if you do not have that data. Only the title column is required for categorization.

Q: Why is, for example, Cereal or Donuts not being categorized to Sugars as well as to Grains? (Can replace any food with any other two categories)

A: The recommendation for categorization is that the weight or spend should be evenly split between the categories. Thus, if the categorization does not make up 50% of the weight for a two category item or 33.3% of the weight for a three category item, it should not be assigned to the additional categories. For example, often, people are confused why things such as cereal or donuts are not categorized as Sugars as well as Grains, and this is because both of those, although they are very sugary, are not 50% by weight sugar, therefore only Grains is assigned to this category.

Q: Why is Category2 not in position 1?

A: There is no difference in assumptions made for the first or second or third category. Therefore, the order of the categories should not matter.

Q: I believe an item should have been tagged as plant-based but it was not. Why?

A: The ASHEE STARS version of the tool aims to tag only items that are definitely plant-based. In order to do this, some items which are ambiguous or sometimes are and sometimes aren't plant-based are not tagged by the tool. Thus, the tool provides a lower-bound of the percentage of spend on plant-based items. If you submit the underlying data to AASHE STARS, someone from the AASHE STARS team will look over the underlying data and may be able to add additional items which should have been tagged. You are also welcome to edit the output yourself before inputting to AASHE STARS if you feel certain an item was incorrectly tagged as not plant-based when it should be plant-based. It is also important to know that food items that are predominantly composed of ingredients of neither plant/fungi nor animal origin that are not intended as alternatives to meat or dairy (e.g., packaged mineral water with fruit flavoring) do not qualify as plant-based. Therefore, things such as wine or vinegar, even though they do not contain animal products are not considered plant-based by AASHE STARS. This means that not all items that are vegan are considered plant-based but all plant-based items are vegan.
Have another question? Please email me, and I will respond as soon as possible!