Of all the forces fighting global food waste, one of the most surprising is a 90-year-old Italian chef named Dino Impagliazzo. For years, Impagliazzo has combined his culinary skills with surplus food from markets in Rome to feed 800 hungry people a week. Watch this video and you’ll grow to appreciate the deeds of this good samaritan. The efforts of Impagliazzo, as well as celebrity chefs like Massimo Bottura and Charles Michel and José Andrés, are wholly welcome in the fight against food waste and the battle to feed the hungry. Unfortunately, food waste has become a worldwide epidemic, one that’s far too gigantic for a few good actors to solve, and one made more tragic by the terrifying number of people facing food insecurity every day.
To curb global food waste and reduce the swelling ranks of hungry people around the world will take more than a handful of Dino Impagliazzos. It will take a commitment by world leaders and innovators. And it will take a global movement led by emerging technologies.
To understand the amount of help needed to solve these problems, we must first understand the full scope of the global food waste problem and the number of people struggling to feed themselves.
Globally, we throw out about 1.6 billion tons of food per year, or 1/3 of all food that we grow. Food waste is projected to become a $1.5 trillion problem by 2030, in part because food isn’t the only commodity that’s squandered in the process. Food loss and waste also work out to be a major squandering of resources, including water, land, energy, labour, and capital. The greenhouse gas emissions produced by food production that contribute to global warming and climate change become even more painful when food waste makes all of that environmental damage essentially pointless.
So what’s the solution to these problems? It starts with a new approach to supply-chain management, one that embraces and deploys next-generation technology aggressively and effectively. A Boston Consulting Group study found that improved supply-chain management efforts could address $590 billion of that $1.5 trillion in projected waste. Among the supply-chain problems that must be addressed, one of the biggest is stakeholder fragmentation. Here’s just one jarring example: in January 2019, Polish authorities said that 2.7 tons of beef sourced from sick cows were exported to other European Union countries despite going through multiple checkpoints, because of an uncommunicative and fragmented supply chain.
Inconsistent data integrity has also been a huge driver of global food waste. According to an Oracle independent study on 100 global supply chains, a staggering 76% of companies do not have a comprehensive and automated flow of information across their supply chain to access all the information they need for safe and efficient movement of goods.
Still, the biggest source of food waste lies in international transportation networks. Many shipping companies remain stuck in the past, using outdated paper-based methods to track shipments. Port authorities exacerbate the problem, leaving food containers unmonitored, resulting in temperature and humidity fluctuations that can ruin food stuffs ranging from fruits and vegetables to meat and fish.
Emerge’s supply-chain solution Theseus works to solve these problems and dramatically reduce food waste. Theseus uses QR codes, NFC chips, and next-gen IoT sensors to digitally track food shipments, ensuring that foods are more closely monitored, and kept under ideal conditions to prevent spoilage. Those codes, chips, and sensors enable stakeholders throughout the supply chain to benefit from greater efficiency, while safely delivering food and preventing waste.
Our 2019 pilot project with Colombian coffee producer La Meseta, conducted with our blockchain partner Penta, highlights some of the benefits of technological upgrades in the supply chain. Through the use of IoT sensors, we successfully tracked coffee shipments from trucks to shipping containers to ports, all the way to retailers at the end of the supply chain.
All told, Theseus tracked La Meseta’s coffee beans across five countries, from Colombia to Panama to the Bahamas to the U.S. to the final destination in Toronto, Canada. Tracking occurred nearly in real time, giving stakeholders the ability to simultaneously monitor fluctuating commodity prices (in this case the price of coffee) and negotiate pricing between buyers and sellers even while a shipment is ongoing.
As successful as the pilot project was, there’s room for further improvement. Of all the technologies that underpin Theseus, IoT is the least advanced. With that in mind, Emerge and Penta are currently developing strategic partnerships with global IoT manufacturers to work with them on co-designing new and improved sensors, informed by information we gleaned from implementing Theseus pilots.
Beyond improving the technology involved, supply chain-based solutions also require creative thinking. The levels of waste in the highest-income countries demand new ideas, and a strong commitment to change.
Consider these food waste facts, courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:
- Every year, consumers in the richest countries waste almost as much food (222 million tons) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons).
- Per-capita waste by consumers sits at 95–115 kg a year in Europe and North America…compared to just 6–11 kg a year per capita in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia.
- In industrialized countries more than 40% of losses happen at retail and consumer levels. That’s because large quantities of food are wasted due to quality standards that over-emphasize appearance.
That last point becomes even more vexing given that more than 800 million people around the world are currently living with food insecurity. When Theseus conducted a pilot project with a Michigan-based apple producer in 2019, it sought alternate destinations for apples deemed too bruised or imperfect for fresh markets. Instead, those apples were sliced and used to make apple sauce, pies, and other baked goods, as well as apple juice and apple-based liquor in certain cases.
As consumers, we must stop demanding that every product look absolutely perfect — that’s not how nature works. Meanwhile, producers need to find alternate uses for the foods they produce. Consumers need to become more open-minded about consuming produce and proteins from root-to-tip and nose-to-tail, while supermarkets and restaurants need to offer that wider range of food choices to better foster sustainability. Finally, every stakeholder along the global supply chain must start seriously addressing the notion of food justice. It’s cruelly ironic that hunger and malnutrition rates are highest in agricultural economies, because those nations are massively producing for export rather than for their own citizens.
Producers can still meet international export quotas while creating price-friendly products for local market if transportation-based food waste is controlled. Supply chains are going to result in some level of food waste even with improved tracking technology. Sending food straight to local markets thus becomes both a smart economic choice and also tremendous progress in the quest to feed the world’s hungriest people.
Image credit: Nick Saltmarsh