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Restaurant & F&B carbon calculator

Convert your restaurant's electricity, town-gas and LPG bills into kgCO2e using official emission factors — free, with full provenance.

Prefer to skip the typing? Upload the bill instead — the numbers get read for you, three documents a day free.

How this calculation works

An F&B operation runs on two energy streams, and each arrives on a different bill. Electricity powers the cold room, the reach-in chillers, dining-room air-conditioning, extraction fans, dishwashers and any induction hobs. Cooking fuel — piped town gas from City Energy, or LPG cylinders for wok stations and sites without a gas connection — powers the flame itself. The calculator takes each line and does one multiplication:

Emissions (kgCO₂e) = activity amount × emission factor

The split matters for reporting. Purchased electricity is Scope 2: indirect emissions from the power stations that generated it. Gas and LPG burned on your premises are Scope 1: direct emissions from combustion you control. Frameworks and customer questionnaires ask for the two separately, so the calculator keeps them separate before summing your total.

Kitchens are unusually energy-dense for their floor area. Refrigeration never switches off, dining rooms are cooled through every service hour, and cooking equipment runs at high load in a space that then needs mechanical ventilation to stay workable. That is why a modest restaurant's energy bill — and its carbon footprint — can rival that of a much larger office.

The factors we apply

Three factors do the work, each from a published, licensed source:

| Input | Factor | Source & licence | | --- | --- | --- | | Electricity (Singapore) | 0.4020 kgCO₂e/kWh (2024 data year, current) | EMA, Singapore Energy Statistics 2025 — Singapore Open Data Licence | | Piped gas | 0.18293 kgCO₂e/kWh | UK DEFRA/DESNZ 2025 conversion factors — OGL v3.0 | | LPG | 1.5594 kgCO₂e/litre | UK DEFRA/DESNZ 2025 conversion factors — OGL v3.0 |

Singapore's grid factor is 0.4020 kgCO₂e/kWh for the 2024 data year — the value applied to current-dated activity. The 2023 data year figure, 0.4085 kgCO₂e/kWh, remains correct only for activity dated 2024 or earlier.

If you pick a different country, the electricity factor follows: the UK uses DEFRA's 0.207 kgCO₂e/kWh, the US uses EPA eGRID's 0.3712, and other regions use Ember's yearly electricity data — approximately 0.61 for Malaysia, 0.45 for Thailand, 0.69 for Indonesia, and 0.48 as the world average. The cooking-fuel factors stay the same everywhere: burning a litre of LPG releases the same CO₂ in Johor as in Jurong, which is why DEFRA's factors are the standard international default for fuel combustion.

One honest caveat on town gas: Singapore's piped gas is town gas, which is not chemically identical to the natural gas that DEFRA's factor describes. We apply the natural-gas combustion factor as the closest published default, and we say so under your result. For most restaurants, gas is a modest share of the total, so the approximation moves your number very little — but you should know it is there.

A worked example

Take a 60-seat casual restaurant, using Singapore's grid factor as one worked case (pick a different region above for your own site). A typical month's bills:

  • Electricity: 4,000 kWh (from the electricity bill)
  • Piped gas: 800 kWh (from the gas bill, already stated in kWh)
  • LPG: none

4,000 kWh × 0.4020 kgCO₂e/kWh = 1,608.0 kgCO₂e (Scope 2)

800 kWh × 0.18293 kgCO₂e/kWh = 146.3 kgCO₂e (Scope 1)

Total: 1,754.3 kgCO₂e ≈ 1.75 tCO₂e for the month

Run twelve similar months and you land near 21.1 tCO₂e a year — with electricity contributing over ninety per cent of it. That ratio is the first practical insight most F&B owners take from this exercise: the flame feels like the carbon-intensive part of a kitchen, but the compressors and the air-conditioning usually dominate.

If the same restaurant served 3,000 covers that month, its intensity is:

1,754.3 kgCO₂e ÷ 3,000 covers = 0.58 kgCO₂e per cover

Why per-cover intensity is the number to track

For F&B, the absolute monthly total is a blunt instrument: it rises in a good month and falls in a slow one, which tells you about sales, not efficiency. Dividing by covers served (or transactions — pick one denominator and stick to it) gives you an intensity metric that is comparable across months and across outlets.

That comparability is where the operational value sits. A failing cold-room door seal, a thermostat set two degrees lower than it needs to be, extraction fans left running after close — none of these show up in the monthly total while trade is growing, but all of them show up as a creeping kgCO₂e-per-cover figure. Multi-outlet groups can rank sites on intensity and send the maintenance team to the outlier first. And when a landlord or corporate customer asks for your numbers, an intensity figure alongside the absolute total shows you manage the footprint rather than merely measuring it.

This calculator gives you the numerator. The denominator — covers — comes from your POS, and it is worth pulling monthly alongside the bills.

What this calculator doesn't cover

Honesty about limitations is part of the method:

  • Ingredients — the biggest slice. For a restaurant reporting at full depth, purchased food and beverages (Scope 3, category 1) are usually the largest part of the footprint: meat, dairy, imported produce, packaging. Estimating that credibly requires supplier-specific data or spend-based modelling, and no free calculator can do it honestly from a utility bill. We would rather give you a solid energy number than a fabricated total.
  • Refrigerant leakage. Cold rooms and air-conditioning lose refrigerant over time, and those gases are potent. This is Scope 1 and can be material for refrigeration-heavy sites — but it needs service records, not bills.
  • Delivery. Vans you own and fuel are Scope 1 — use the fleet fuel calculator for those litres. Third-party delivery platforms sit in your Scope 3.
  • Waste and water. Food-waste disposal and water treatment carry emissions, but quantities are rarely metered per site, so we leave them out rather than guess.
  • Market-based electricity. If you buy renewable energy certificates, your market-based Scope 2 figure will differ. This tool computes the location-based number, the same method as our business electricity calculator.

Where this fits in your reporting

Electricity here is Scope 2; piped gas and LPG are Scope 1 — direct combustion under your control. Those two scopes are what IFRS S2, GRI 305, and CDP all ask for first, and the numbers work the same way for a single outlet, a multi-site group, a school canteen, or a hospital kitchen. Most F&B operators aren't under a formal reporting mandate themselves, but Scope 3 reaches them through someone else's supply chain: a Singapore-listed landlord's mall, a franchisor, or a corporate caterer client will ask tenants and suppliers for exactly the numbers this calculator produces.

Every result on this page shows the factor, source, year and licence used — provenance you can paste straight into a reply. And when you are done typing numbers off bills, upload the bills themselves: three documents a day free without an account, ten a day with an email address, and files are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Is cooking gas Scope 1 or Scope 2?
Fuel you burn on site — piped town gas or LPG — is Scope 1, direct emissions from combustion you control. Purchased electricity is Scope 2, indirect emissions from the power stations that generated it. This calculator keeps the two separate before summing your total, because reporting frameworks and customer questionnaires ask for them separately.
Why doesn't this calculator include food ingredients?
Ingredients are Scope 3 (purchased goods and services) and are usually the largest slice of a restaurant's full footprint, but estimating them credibly needs supplier data or spend-based modelling — not a utility bill. We would rather give you an accurate energy number than a guessed total, so ingredients are explicitly out of scope here.
What do I enter from my City Energy bill?
The gas consumption figure, which City Energy states in kWh. Enter it in the piped gas field; the calculator applies the UK DEFRA/DESNZ 2025 natural gas factor of 0.18293 kgCO2e/kWh as the closest published default for town gas, and states that under your result.
Which emission factors are used for each country?
Electricity uses the official or best-available grid factor for the region you pick — for Singapore, the EMA's 0.4020 kgCO2e/kWh for the 2024 data year is what the calculator currently applies (0.4085 kgCO2e/kWh, the 2023 data year figure, only applies to activity dated within 2024). Cooking fuels use UK DEFRA/DESNZ 2025 factors as international defaults, since combustion emissions don't depend on where the fuel is burned. Every result shows the exact factor, source, year and licence.
Do I need this number if I'm not a reporting company yet?
Most restaurant operators aren't under a formal reporting mandate, but landlords, mall operators, and corporate customers who are increasingly request these figures anyway — a mall's or a franchisor's own Scope 3 total is built from tenants and franchisees like you. Having the number ready, sourced and dated, beats scrambling when the questionnaire arrives.