Dataset about the Life Cycle Assessment of new fermented food products mixing cow milk and pea protein sources

Abstract

In recent years, the food industry has expended considerable effort to design novel products that replace animal proteins with legumes; however, the actual environmental benefits of such products are often not quantified. Here, we performed Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) to evaluate the environmental performance of four new fermented food products based on different mixtures of animal (cow milk) and plant (pea) protein sources (100% Pea, 75% Pea-25% Milk, 50% Pea-50% Milk, 25% Pea-75% Milk). The system perimeter encompassed all stages from agricultural production of the ingredients to the creation of the final ready-to-eat products. Impacts were calculated for all environmental indicators included in the EF 3.0 Method in SimaPro software based on a functional unit of 1 kg of ready-to-eat product. Life cycle inventories included all of the flows analyzed by the LCA (raw materials, energy, water, cleaning products, packaging, transport, waste). Foreground data were acquired directly on the manufacturing site; background data were taken from the Ecoinvent 3.6 database. The dataset contains details on the products, processes, equipment, and infrastructure considered; mass and energy flows; Life Cycle Inventories (LCI); and Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). These data improve our understanding of the environmental impact of plant-based alternatives to dairy products, which is currently poorly documented.

Keywords

• Inventory data
• Environmental impacts
• Environmental performance
• Sustainability
• Sustainable proteins
• Legumes