Since the first check was logged on 25 March 2009, the Food Miles calculator has been used to check the origin of a food item 9,888,474 times. Every one of those checks calculates the great-circle distance between where a food was grown and where it's being eaten - and together, they add up to a real picture of how far the modern food system stretches. Here's what over seventeen years and nearly ten million calculations reveal.
Laid end to end, that total distance would take you around the Earth over 1,066,000 times, or to the Moon and back more than 55,500 times. The average food item checked here has travelled further than a direct flight from London to New York (3,459 miles).
Most-checked foods
The hamburger is the single most-checked item on the site by a wide margin - nearly double the next entry, and fitting for a food that's itself an assembly of many separately-sourced ingredients. Fresh produce dominates the rest of the list; blueberries and pineapples travel the furthest on average, both well over 5,000 miles per check, while pasta and strawberries average under 2,300.
| Food | Checks | Avg. miles | Total miles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hamburger | 590,390 | 3,742 | 2,209,167,204 |
| Banana | 320,514 | 4,797 | 1,537,477,989 |
| Apple | 279,140 | 4,356 | 1,215,863,368 |
| Tomatoes | 150,744 | 2,316 | 349,175,620 |
| Oranges | 142,266 | 3,658 | 520,375,042 |
| Strawberries | 139,725 | 2,205 | 308,139,054 |
| Rice | 117,660 | 4,609 | 542,261,219 |
| Pineapple | 116,485 | 5,025 | 585,388,852 |
| Grapes | 105,004 | 4,023 | 422,443,813 |
| Potatoes | 104,345 | 2,674 | 279,023,940 |
| Mango | 88,022 | 4,597 | 404,620,654 |
| Chocolate | 71,659 | 3,983 | 285,414,474 |
| Pasta | 69,484 | 2,186 | 151,871,933 |
| Blueberries | 68,659 | 5,270 | 361,810,899 |
| Avocado | 66,980 | 4,877 | 326,661,522 |
Where it's all coming from
The calculator's audience is heavily UK-based, and it shows: every one of the fifteen most common routes checked ends in the United Kingdom. Southern Europe dominates as a point of origin, followed by a long tail of far larger journeys from the Americas, Asia and Africa. "UK to UK" is the third most-checked route outright - a reminder that curiosity about food miles isn't just about imports.
Most-checked origin countries
| Country | Checks |
|---|---|
| Italy | 394,184 |
| Spain | 375,587 |
| United Kingdom | 370,018 |
| United States | 355,118 |
| China | 313,828 |
| India | 245,079 |
| Brazil | 231,124 |
| Australia | 213,709 |
| France | 209,216 |
| New Zealand | 190,721 |
Most common routes
| Route | Checks |
|---|---|
| Spain → UK | 312,692 |
| Italy → UK | 279,706 |
| UK → UK | 268,748 |
| China → UK | 197,634 |
| India → UK | 179,652 |
| USA → UK | 174,145 |
| Brazil → UK | 172,887 |
| France → UK | 149,932 |
| New Zealand → UK | 131,495 |
| South Africa → UK | 122,198 |
See the full leaderboard for the complete top-20 rankings, kept live and up to date.
Does distance actually matter?
It's a genuinely contested question. A 2022 study in Nature Food found that food transport accounts for roughly 19% of total food-system emissions - 3.5 to 7.5 times higher than earlier estimates. Set against that, Our World in Data's analysis of the Poore & Nemecek dataset finds transport typically makes up less than 10% of any single food's own footprint, with production and land use dominating instead. Both are true at once, at different scales - see our full research page for the detail.
These figures are drawn from foodmiles.com's own usage records. Want them in a shareable format? Download the full report as a PDF.
Sources: Li et al., "Global food-miles account for nearly 20% of total food-systems emissions," Nature Food (2022); Our World in Data / Poore & Nemecek (2018); Defra, Agriculture in the United Kingdom 2025.