The International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 with the goal of raising awareness of the importance of the problem and possible solutions at all levels, as well as promoting global efforts and collective action toward meeting SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production).
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations defines food loss and waste as a decline in the amount or quality of food along the food chain. Food waste occurred during consumption and retail food service sales, while food loss happened during production, processing, and delivery. The analysis found that global food waste totaled 931 million tons across three sectors. The biggest sector is households, who account for 61% of food waste. Food waste from food service accounts for 26% of total food waste, whereas retail accounts for 13% of total food waste.
In recognition of International day of awareness of food loss and waste, IntelliDigest organised a webinar- ‘Delivering a Sustainable Food System with Zero Food Waste’ with fantastic contributions from various experts on sustainable solutions to address food loss and waste.
As we align with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in this decade of action, it is time to expedite action to end edible food waste and maximise nutrient recovery from inedible food waste.
Clementine O’ Connor: THE TRIPLE PLANETARY CRISIS
Clementine spoke at length about the sustainable food systems and the triple planetary crisis (Climate change, Nature/biodiversity, and less pollution waste). She mentioned that the Food systems are responsible for over a third of global greenhouse emissions and food loss and waste alone generate 8-10% of global greenhouse emissions. Preventing food waste is a keyway that each of us can impact our own climate footprint.
UNEP’S APPROACH
UNEP approach is targeted at SDG 12.3 which aims to halve food waste at retail and consumer level and to reduce food loss across the supply chain from the farm up to and excluding the retail level by tracking country level progress on the food waste indicator. Household food waste is a significant problem around the world and needs to be tackled without delay. UNEP has developed regional food waste working groups that support 25 countries in the global south to measure and reduce food waste.
UNEP’S global methane pledge presently aims to reduce methane by 30% by 2030 as food loss and waste is now highlighted in 38 countries nationally determined to contribute to the Paris agreement. A suggested good practice is setting targets and indicators to help reduce food waste. This is an area that the World Food Tracker is leading the way. Learn more and sign up using the link- www.WorldFoodtracker.com
Clementine spoke about a campaign aimed at contributing to the food loss campaign called “Every Plate Count Challenge” will run from September 29th, 2022, till the 15th of October 2022 when the World Food Day will be celebrated.
Helen White: WRAP
Helen White is a special advisor on Household Food Waste at global NGO WRAP. She works with food retailers, manufacturers, and brands on engaging with citizens to reduce food waste.
Helen spoke about WRAP and its approaches in the UK towards addressing the food loss and waste challenge and helping people act as we all look forward to delivering a sustainable food system. WRAP vision is a thriving world in which climate change is no longer a problem. Around 70% of the UK’s food waste (post-farm gate) comes from the home and UK citizens throw away 6.6 million tonnes of household food waste of which 70% or 4.5 million tonnes is food that could have been eaten and wasting food that could have been eaten costs £13.8 billion a year.
In the year 2015-2018 total food waste fell by 480,000 tonnes (-7% per person) which was because of food waste campaigns, food waste collection points, proper food waste and loss awareness etc.
THE COURTAULD COMMITMENT
The Courtauld commitment 2030 is the UK’s voluntary agreement to reduce food waste from farm to fork in line with the target of the SDG 12.3. It’s the primary mechanism to facilitate the achievement of the goal in the UK. The Courtauld commitment allows collaboration actions across the entire UK food chain with the aim of delivering the necessary reductions in the food waste, greenhouse gas emissions and water stress.
Wrap launched the Food Waste Reduction Roadmap to support the delivery of the food waste target by providing guidance to businesses. Businesses with year-on-year data have achieved a 17% average reduction on food waste. WRAP uses citizen food waste prevention, and the approach has been to target the most wasted food group, impactful food waste prevention behaviour and highly wasting audiences/ segments.
In 2021, WRAP launched the food waste action week that brought together businesses and the public to raise awareness of food waste. In 2022 another action week took place and reached over 8 million people all over the UK.
Nomathemba Mhlanga: Agribusiness Officer, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO SFE)
Nomathemba is an Agribusiness Officer and Programme Manager for FAO’s regional work area on decent employment in agrifood systems in Africa. Noma clarified how FAO has distinguished between food loss and waste stating that food waste happening mostly in the retail segment and consumer level and food loss has an impact on available food and the environment.
FAO’s work on food loss and waste reduction is both a global agenda and regional commitment. In 2012, the zero hunger challenge was launched in Rio in the United Nations conference for sustainable development. It’s noted as one of the United Nations SDG goals 12.3 and in 2014 a commitment was made by African union to halve the levels of post-harvest losses by the year 2025 (Malabo Declaration).
Noma says at FAO food loss and waste is not considered as goals, these are essential parts of ensuring that we have efficient value chains and sustainable food systems and once we have that this contributes to food and nutrition security as well as economic growth of our nations and contribute to climate change mitigation.
FAO FOOD LOSS AND WASTE REDUCTION PROGRAMME
FAO food loss and waste reduction programme looks at food system lens and circular economy approach, the triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental sustainability), all sectors (crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture).
FAO has introduced the “Do Good: Save Food”! packaged to educate the young people to value food and reduce its loss. The goal is to raise awareness among school children, teachers, staff and their related families and network on food loss and waste issues and introduce good practices conducive to food waste reduction.
Noma says that FAO has developed courses that provide guidance on how to take measurement of food waste and document practical examples using different case studies of how different stakeholders have tackled food waste.
Peter Ball: STFC PROJECT, UNIVERSITY OF YORK
OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE LOCAL CIRCULAR ECONOMY THROUGH URBAN VERTICAL FARMING
Peter Ball is Professor of Operations Management in the University of York’s School of Business and Society. He is especially interested in progressing sustainability and is engaged in many R&D projects.
Peter says there are many towns that are in decline because of online shopping which has even resulted in unutilized spaces in city centres and other places close by. What about adding value to the town centre in a different way as there is potential for job opportunities, more local food, and greater amount of reuse. Peter in collaboration with other organisations started a circular urban vertical farming (Data, models, and optimization of waste flow).
THE FOOD CHALLENGE
Peter says the challenge was to find out what’s going on in the food industry, obtain and optimise data for local reuse of food waste for urban vertical farming; this is because urban waste has become collectively significant. Once the data is obtained and combined with operational vertical farming it’s going to be evaluated to see if we can optimise the flows and potentially engage people in it.
THE PROJECT
Our aim is providing a demonstrator to show local food flows can be connected using the principles of the circular economy. Peter mentioned the work IntelliDigest is doing, using the iDigest. The iDigest is a nature inspired robot that is set to be installed in hotels, food processing facilities, supermarkets, etc to enhance the recovery of bio-nutrient from food waste so that it does not deteriorate and lose value. Investigations are being carried out on applications of the bio-nutrients to enhance local food production by feeding them back into vertical arms, soil, or animal feed.
Peter highlighted the importance of ensuring the stakeholders of the food system taking a circular approach from production to distribution and finally consumption. The number of breweries have exploded around the world, and they produce waste. We take waste from breweries in York and create samples of building materials from their waste that is of high value. Potentially we have got the ability to create boards, insulation or whatever we need for vertical/green/field farming. So, it’s the ability to get waste that we can not otherwise use for human consumption and turn it into useful things with low impact on the local environment.
Saasha Celestial-One: OLIO
Saasha is the C0-Founder and COO of OLIO, a free app harnessing the power of mobile technology and the sharing economy to provide a revolutionary solution to the problem of food waste. Olio is a free app anyone can download anywhere in the world and presently has 6,500,000 people signed up so far. Saasha says most signups are in the UK, but have strong communities in a few other markets. It’s a tool that connects neighbours with each other to give away food and household items to each other for free and this started way back 2015.
OLIO facilitates two main forms of sharing as OLIO is a marketplace so demand and supply is involved. There are individuals that add listings to the app and requesters who request listings. About half of the items come from C2C sharing i.e., neighbour to neighbour sharing (individuals giving out stuff within their own home).
Saasha stated that demand is always high as half of all food listings are requested within 20 minutes and half of all non-food listings are requested within two hours and over 80% of all listings are picked up.
FOOD WASTE HERO PROGRAME
OLIO has a solution for businesses called “Food Waste Hero Program”. We collect from over 7000 business locations every week and we advertise surplus collection opportunities to users of the app that live nearby and individuals interested go through rigorous food safety training online to qualify and then they can claim the collection opportunity by going to the stores and collect all the food that can’t be discounted or given to charities (most of the food have very short shelf life and needs to be eaten by night), the waste hero takes the food home, add to the app and alerts are sent to neighbours nearby that food is available and the food is picked up.
Saasha says OLIO is a collector of last resort. We redistribute 760 tonnes of food worth £3.4 million each month. Since 2015 environment equivalent of saved food is the same as 58,000 tons of CO2 emissions avoided and 10 billion litres of water saved.
Edmore Gasura (University of Zimbabwe: THE FAST-TICKING TOMATO CLOCK
Dr Edmore Gasura is an Associate Professor of Plant Breeding and Biotechnology at the University of Zimbabwe. He is the head of Department of Plant Production Sciences and Technologies, in the Faculty of Agriculture Environment and Food Systems, University of Zimbabwe.
Efforts are being made in Zimbabwe to market tomatoes produced but market flooding is a big challenge facing everyone on the value chain in tomato production. Youths have decided to involve themselves in mobile marketing, moving around to sell tomatoes but most times value is lost, and they move on to price reduction. Issues like quality and quantity loss result in heavy losses ranging up to 1000% and this is not good for the supply chain.
Waste management issues arise from this also as tomatoes are scattered all over. Dr Edmore says the entry point for Zimbabwe could be trying to use deep learning applications taking advantage of the high literacy rate which Is almost at 94% and 96% of the population has a smartphone with good network coverage which can be leveraged for market information and dissemination.
Decision making tools can be developed for Zimbabwe specifically targeting the proper timing of harvesting itself, proper storage and pricing using market intelligence and not forgetting proper linkage with international supply chain.
Dr Ifeyinwa Kanu: IntelliDigest
THE GLOBAL AGRIFOOD TECHPRENEUR PROGRAMME
Dr Ifeyinwa is the CEO of IntelliDigest, a food sustainability company that combines innovative research with advanced engineering to solve global food sustainability challenges from farm to fork.
We are proud to be supported by Royal Bank of Scotland, UK-Science Technology Facility Council (STFC) Food Network and world class business schools across the globe in delivering an exceptional 6-week interactive masterclass on entrepreneurship, tech, and food system sustainability to young graduates to improve food production and distribution while putting an end to hunger, obesity, malnutrition, and food waste.
Our aim for the programme is to empower, educate and make them understand the importance of creating a sustainable food system while enabling and providing them with skills that will enable them to drive that challenge. Through the programme every participant will have access to the Royal Bank of Scotland business builder platform which is an online platform with detailed information on how you can start and grow your business.
The 6 weeks class covers aspects such as climate and sustainability, business strategy and waste management, customer development, mindset, funding, and finances and providing enabling tools to help build their business.
Ifeyinwa says the programme is for individuals that want to transform the food system and really needs those entrepreneurial skills. We are keen to work with young graduates and partner with more organizations.
Christopher Ross: CITY OF EDINBURGH COUNCIL
Christopher Ross is a strong, commercially minded senior manager with over 12 years of contract catering experience. Christopher represents a body that represents local authority. Christopher says we combine along the 32 local authorities and serve about 500,000 school meals every day. School meal services across Scotland are one of our largest buyers of raw materials. In the last few years, we have been working to increasingly look at food waste, sustainability, and ingredients the local authorities buy.
One of the biggest advances we have certainly seen in technology roundabouts helping us reduce food waste within the school meal services is online pre-ordering systems. What that allows us to do across Scotland is to pre-gauge the numbers of people that are coming in through the service everyday so that we can ensure that no valuable food is wasted, over cooked, or over produced.
We’ve seen over the five years that many local authorities have been using these systems and there has been a reduction of food waste generated through the kitchen between 20%-35%. We ensure staff are trained in a way that they understand the value of food, of what they are cooking and producing. We also take our staff and pupils to farms where products are grown, and it helps with engagement with staff on the food they are using and encouraging them not to waste any food being produced.
We are now targeting waste from the end users, and we’ve been working with organisations like Zero Waste Scotland to look at measuring and reporting on plate waste across Scotland and our schools, and we use this as a tool to educate pupils which makes them have respect for the food that they are serving.
Joseph El Chalfoun: Radisson Hotel Group
DELIVERING A SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM: RHG’S Food Waste Reduction Strategy
Joseph is responsible for the conceptualization and pre-opening of Restaurants and Bars within Radisson Hotels and the Implementation of initiatives to drive profit, control standards and establish brand recognition for all new concepts. Radisson hotel group has taken a major step to becoming Net-Zero by 2050 with approved science based targets. We have been validated by the science-based target initiative which places Radisson among the top companies in the world that align with the party climate goals, to set their carbon reduction target according to science.
Global food waste is estimated to be 1.3 billion tonnes per annum while hotels handle a lot of which inevitably creates waste. Hence there is a pressing concern to implement the right strategies to deal with the amount of waste. It all starts with waste management training at Radisson because food doesn’t waste on its own, people handle food, so education is key.
The biggest part of the hotel that produces a large amount of food is the banqueting and catering. These are the planning, handling, and service stages. We have put in place strategies to reduce food waste as listed below:
- Promoting low waste menu
- Promote plate meals
- Setting buffet time
- Follow up on guest count
- Educate customers that when the food is not consumed it is donated to charity
- Staff checks inventories and inspects them well to ensure nothing spoilt is collected.
- Food is held for a long period of time and regenerated when needed.
- Preparation (encourage staff and create programmes to teach how every part of trimming can be used in the kitchen).
Radisson has an in-hotel hydroponic farm in their iconic fish market restaurant this year created by Czech start-up Greentech, the hydroponic containers are a technological solution to enable local cultivation of vegetables, micro greens, and small fruits.
Radisson is partnering up with companies that take products that are prepared and sell them at smaller rates or donate them to charity.