MEAL'IMPACT
The footprint calculator
We are Meal’Impact, a student group from the School of Management and Innovation (SMI) at Sciencespo Paris.
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Hey there !
We are Meal’Impact, a student group from the School of Management and Innovation (SMI) at Sciencespo Paris. We are 9 students, divided into four different masters: Finance and Strategy; Communications, Media and Creative Industries; Marketing; and Organisation Behaviour and Human Resources. We have been reunited in a class called the Great transition, dealing with the great challenges, the future solutions and the alternatives for economics organizations, societies, and people in general. The class discussed of 3 different challenges, the first one is a most responsible form of capitalism, the second topic is the digital changes, and finally the ecological transition.
Surrounding the merger of the different masters of the SMI and this class, we decided to create a common project.
Why choosing this subject?
We are all interested and sensitive to the question of sustainability. Indeed, it appears that sustainability is the global challenge of the next decades. Thus, this topic was quickly chosen at our first meeting. After long talks, we realised that sustainability is a vast subject. However one of its main challenges is the ecological values of food.
In the first place, we decided to focus on creating an application which would permit to obtain the nutritive details and the carbon footprint of a meal, according to the origins of the ingredients, their transportation, water needs and agriculture. Unfortunately, we are not engineers, and we realised that creating an application was technically impossible for us. Thus, we decided to establish a calculator with the whole food data, then to focus on the ecological footprint of the most important and consumed food.
Meanwhile, to get precise datas, we established a small area of studies: Sciences students and their food habits. We learned that most were sensitive to the ecological question, but just a few have already used a calculator. Furthermore, we found out that most of them bring their own food to the school, go to the CROUS, NOOI or the Basile and they usually ordered sandwiches. Then, the project became concrete and we decided to use the calculator to establish the carbon footprint of the most eating sandwich of the CROUS, Basile and the NOOI Pastas.