Solutions to food waste explored

Reducing food waste is the responsibility of all parts of the supply chain and a central tenet of sustainability goals.

In a recent discussion topic on the LinkedIn Fresh Produce Industry Discussion Group, I put the focus on the supply side with the question, “What is one thing grower-shippers can do to reduce food waste?

Here are some thoughtful responses from industry leaders chiming in on the topic:

• Be 100% transparent to the buyers about the quality of the product;
• Specifically relating to waste that occurs in transit, a huge part of it is caused by errors and or omissions. To fix this, grower-shippers should ensure the entire team is aligned on following best practices and processes religiously. It is now possible to design, test and deploy such processes across all touch points almost instantly with a strong feedback loop for improvements;
• Inefficient warehouse operations creating process errors, overbuying, poor planning and confusion over labels and safety contribute to food waste;
• I believe a good start is identifying the basic reasons for food waste to happen on the products, doing a root-cause search/review. Maybe it is a high price, and adopting certain cost reduction strategies could be the solution. Or maybe it's due to a lack of (knowledge) from the consumer about certain product(s) over how it is eaten/cooked/prepared. And then the item must be promoted, used with cooking shows, demonstrated with different uses and preparations on dishes, recipes, and even some category management and cross- promotions. Go out there and tell the consumer about what you grow with much effort, about how good you are at it, how good it is for their health to consume and how tasty and maybe even not that expensive it can be;
• Convince retailers to drop their prices when markets get cheap;
• Can we reframe this narrative … rather than solving for reducing food waste, can we focus resources on increasing consumption? The great news is there’s plenty of food! So much, that some of it goes to waste. What can we do to get people to eat more healthy, nutritious fresh fruits and vegetables? Isn’t that solving (nearly) the same problem, but putting time, brain space and money resources to work differently? Reducing waste is negative energy. Focusing on consumption flips it. Let’s remove the guilt from consumers and the additional pressure from grower-shippers, and inspire increased demand and consumption for fresh;
• What could be done if we worked harder on positive consumption? What would happen if we ate more fruits, veg and the like and less of the junk? Could health care costs go down? Could we better survive the diseases exacerbated by poor eating habits? We can make the food waste conversation change. Seems like this would certainly spark a cool conversation, not only around the positive costs of food, but the truth about food’s power to help beyond our individual plates.