H

Haivenly

Start free trial

H

Haivenly

Kitchen Insights

How we calculate our food numbers

Every number in Kitchen Insights comes from public U.S. government data you can check yourself. Here's what we use, how we combine it, and where it falls short.

By Justin and Mary Katzman

Who we are

We're Justin and Mary Katzman, the couple behind Haivenly. Justin works with the data and checks every number against its source. Mary writes the kitchen tips and ideas for using food up, from our own kitchen with two kids and a dog.

Sources

  • Storage times: USDA FSIS FoodKeeper (dataset). We show its ranges as published, and the date tool uses the longest time listed.
  • How much people buy and how much goes uneaten: USDA ERS Loss-Adjusted Food Availability, the consumer-level share uneaten for each food. Latest years: 2019 for meat and eggs, 2021 to 2022 for dairy and produce, 2010 for rice. For meat, USDA's uneaten share also counts weight lost in cooking.
  • Prices: BLS Average Price Data, monthly U.S. city averages. Chicken is priced as boneless breast, beef as ground beef, pork as pork chops. Produce BLS doesn't price uses 2023 averages from USDA ERS Fruit and Vegetable Prices.
  • Packaged foods (bread, cereal, frozen meals, snacks, sweets): what the average household of 2.5 people spends a year, from the 2024 BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, brought to today's prices with the matching Consumer Price Index. These aren't counted in pounds or CO₂e.
  • Climate: kilograms of CO₂e per kilogram of each food (global averages) from Poore and Nemecek (2018), via Our World in Data. Driving comparisons use EPA's figure of about 400 grams of CO₂ per mile for a typical passenger car.
  • Recipes: MyPlate Kitchen and the NHLBI.

The formulas

yearly cost   = pounds per person × people × price per pound × share uneaten
pounds wasted = pounds per person × people × share uneaten
CO₂e          = pounds wasted × 0.4536 × kg CO₂e per kg of that food
cost per day  = package price ÷ days it keeps

For packaged foods, USDA doesn't track waste, so we use the closest USDA food's share uneaten and label the result as an estimate.

What we write ourselves

The kitchen tips, ideas for using food that's past its best, and food-specific questions are ours. We check safety advice against USDA FSIS and FoodKeeper guidance, and we keep two things apart: safety (when to throw food out) and quality (when it's just not at its best). Freezer times are about quality. Food kept frozen at 0°F stays safe longer.

Limits

  • These are national averages. Your household, your fridge temperature and when you shopped all change the real answer.
  • USDA's waste data is several years old. We apply today's prices to it.
  • Storage times assume food was handled safely. When in doubt, throw it out.

Updates and corrections

Prices update monthly from BLS. We last checked storage times against FoodKeeper in November 2026. Spot something wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it.