The carbon footprint of a pizza

What is a Product Carbon Footprint?

Every product we make leaves a trace on the environment. A Product Carbon Footprint – or PCF – is the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted during the life of that product, from the moment its ingredients are grown, all the way to when it reaches our customers.

We express this as a single number in kg CO₂e – kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent. It brings together all the different greenhouse gases involved (CO₂, methane, nitrous oxide and others) into one comparable figure, based on their warming impact over 100 years.

How we calculate our Product Carbon Footprint

We use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology to calculate our product carbon
footprints, prepared in line with ISO 14067 – the international standard for Product Carbon Footprints. An LCA measures the climate impact of a product across one or more stages of its life. In our case, we measure from cradle to gate, or, as we like to say, from farm to freezer aisle – tracking every emission from the moment ingredients are grown, through production and packaging, to the point our pizzas reach your retailer.

Our Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF) forms the backbone of all PCF calculations. Every year we compile detailed data on energy use, materials purchased, waste generated and transport distances across all our sites and supply chains. From this, we derive product-level footprints using the specific recipe, weight, plant of production and country of sale for each product. We have also incorporated emission factors directly into our recipe database, so that we can design new recipes with carbon footprint in mind from the very start.

For raw materials and packaging – which together account for around 90% of a product's footprint – our calculations are highly specific: the exact weight of every ingredient, multiplied by its individual emission factor. For production energy and distribution (the remaining ~10%), we use verified plant-level and country-level averages, allocated by product weight. All emission factors are updated annually.

Independently verified to ISO 14067

Our PCF methodology was independently verified according to ISO 14067 Annex C by TÜV Nord in February 2026, providing external assurance of our approach and the underlying data.

The stages we include — farm to customer’s gate

• Farming: Growing ingredients & raw materials
• Transport in: Raw materials to our factories
• Production: Energy used to make our products
• Packaging: Making & transporting all packaging
• Distribution: Factory to retail & wholesale gate

What do we include as part of our product carbon footprint?

What we include

• Cultivation & processing of all ingredients
• Upstream transport to our factories
• Gas & electricity use during production
• Production waste treatment
• Packaging manufacture & transport
• Storage & distribution to customer gate
  

What we don't include

• Retailer in-store refrigeration
• Consumer preparation (e.g. home oven use)
• End-of-life packaging disposal
• Employee commuting
• Office & administrative activities
• Production equipment & buildings

FAQ