Packaging-Prevented Waste?

Starting in November, the Canadian food packaging industry will tackle food waste.

Canadian-based, though North American in scope, The Packaging Association (PAC) announced plans on Monday to seek food waste solutions through packaging. Citing the global scope of waste (1/3 of global food wasted), PAC’s board of directors will launch the PAC Food Waste Initiative.

Here’s PAC Chairman Bruce Smith, of Molson Coors:

There are opportunities to reduce food waste through packaging improvements throughout the supply chain. PAC wants to investigate the causes, identify opportunities for innovation, extend product shelf life, and inform and educate to the broader community.

Images from WRAP's Sustainable Longer campaignThe initiative will launch despite that slight sustainability tension between food packaging and food waste. Minimizing packaging and damaged food are usually at odds, but I’m hopeful some potential double solutions will arise.

Then again, there are some packaging improvements in the works. And PAC could do a lot worse than this UK campaign promoting packaging’s role in combating food waste.

Regardless, the initiative will likely support research on waste, publish findings and distribute suggested solutions. PAC hopes interested parties from all parts of the food chain will participate in the program, which launches at PAC’s November 14th meeting.

October 8, 2013 | Posted in International | Comments closed

Panera Proudly Pushes Donation

I was pleasantly surprised to bump into this Panera Bread ad touting their donation program. As you can see, through a Feeding America partnership, Panera will now donate the remaining bread at the end of every day to those in need.

Now, this won’t be easy to pull off, given the uniqueness of every market and the detail that many Paneras are run by franchisees. But that’s where the Feeding America network of food banks will hopefully come in handy. And even if it doesn’t work perfectly, the increased donations and attention to excess is still quite helpful.

One final thought: It’s great to see someone take credit for their food donations. Too often, retailers and restaurants are leery of publicizing their actions, meaning the donor and the practice of food recovery miss out on some well-earned and much-needed publicity.

October 4, 2013 | Posted in Food Recovery, Restaurant | Comments closed

Danes Demand an End to Waste

On Friday, Copenhagen will be…United Against Food Waste. The day will be a first: industry, government and consumers joining in a public event to tackle food waste.

image courtesy of United Against Food WasteEven more encouraging, stakeholders from various stages of the food chain will speak at the event, which falls under the EU FUSIONS umbrella. In addition to the speeches, the day will feature design contest winners and, of course, music by DJ Master Fatman.

Event organizers (led by the Danish non-profit Stop Wasting Food) will serve free food made from items that would otherwise have been thrown out. Organizers will divert any remaining food at the end of the event to Copenhagen’s hungry. And the organic waste will be collected and converted into biogas

United Against Food Waste follows successful Feeding the 5000 and New York City events as indication that the world is waking up on the food waste issue. And not a moment too soon!

October 2, 2013 | Posted in Events, Food Recovery, Hunger, International | Comments closed

Food: Too Good To Waste

King County (Washington) just launched an amazing campaign called Food: Too Good To Waste. They ran a pilot program last year, but have scaled up the initiative to include, among other things…videos!

In the videos, Chef Jackie, of campaign partner PCC Natural Markets, is the star. After watching her help families reduce their food waste in numerous ways, Chef Jackie is my new web crush. I’m hoping that she can make like Santa and visit every household in America.  

As a leftover lover, I’m particularly fond of the Love Your Leftovers video:

It has neat messages on buying smaller quantities, keeping a  refrigerator “Eat Now” box  and planning a leftovers night. My one quibble is that, in light of the new date label study, I wasn’t fond of the insinuation that the family would have to throw out the chopped garlic when it reached its expiration date (but I liked the larger point advising against buying too much).

Some of the topics may sound a bit obvious–Shop Smart. Keep Fruits and Vegetables Fresh and Eat What You Buy–but these pages and their corresponding videos all contain useful tips and tricks for avoiding waste in your home. And, given that we discard about one-fourth of what we buy, the advice likely won’t be too basic for a most folks.

Finally, I’m grateful that the campaign creators resisted the urge to call it 2 Good 2 Waste. That’d be 2 much.

September 27, 2013 | Posted in Household, Leftovers, Repurposing | Comments closed

Visualizing Food Waste’s Footprint

Courtesy of the UN FAO, here’s a nice overview of the environmental footprint of food wastage*:

* Note–‘Wastage’ includes both waste and loss. All the food produced but not eaten, globally.

September 26, 2013 | Posted in Environment, International, Stats | Comments closed

Could Cookisto Conquer All?

These days, web-based peer-to-peer services are all the rage. If it has worked for accommodation, cab rides, and deliveries, why not with selling prepared foods?(What’s that you say? Health code rules? OK, fine–that may be an issue.)

The web site/concept Cookisto is filling that edible void by allowing home chefs to post and sell their wares to the foodie public. The site started in Greece, where it has done well. The UK site is now collecting “Cookistas” (and their creations) and will launch soon. When it does, Britons could buy everything from a sausage roll to a slice of pie from participating neighbors.

The concept is interesting because it could provide a novel way to avoid having too many leftovers. You prepare and/or eat a meal, determine how much excess you”ll have, then put that up for sale. It could reduce waste, at least in theory.

Yet I would imagine many participants are cooking food just to sell, which would eliminate that ‘selling the excess’ factor. And I’m a bit concerned that the site’s premise is built on the idea that nobody wants to eat their own leftovers. Because, as we all know, leftovers rock.

Still–it could be a neat tool, and I’d love to see it hit the U.S. If nothing else, I’m sure Cookisto would be a boon for cook-ies.

September 25, 2013 | Posted in International, Leftovers, Technology | Comments closed

Visualizing Food Waste

I do love infographics…and this is a great one! Nice work, Sustainable America.

September 20, 2013 | Posted in Stats | Comments closed

“Best” Make Some Changes

The NRDC and Harvard Law School released an excellent, in-depth report on date labels today. The Dating Game is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the expiration dates.

The report details the current situation with date labels, and it’s a grim one. There’s no consistency in terminology; instead it’s a jumble of “best by,” “best before,” “use by,” “use or freeze by” and “sell by.”

image courtesy of Jellyfish in Armour

Meanwhile, there’s a lack of federal oversight–the only product required by federal law to have a date label is infant formula. In that void, there’s no consistency between states on what is required to have a date label and whether food can be sold past its “expiration date.”

Best of all, it suggests a few well-needed changes. Essentially: make “sell-by” dates invisible to consumers (because they’re meant for storekeepers), create uniform, reliable terms and add more safe-handling instructions on packaging.

This report could really shake things up in the food industry and Washington. There’s already plenty of buzz, from The Washington Post to Politico. Hopefully, that continues. Because, as is, far too much perfectly good food is wasted due to a generic date stamped on a package.

September 18, 2013 | Posted in General | Comments closed

Food Waste is World’s Third-Largest Carbon Emitter

Global food wastage accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than any country except the US and China. For those who speak climate change, that’s 3.3 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent.

That finding and many, many more are part of the long-anticipated UN FAO study Food Wastage Footprint (here’s the full study PDF). It’s particularly exciting for me because I helped the FAO frame the research questions and worked on a related information sheet more than a year ago.

A quick semantic note: “Wastage” = Food Loss + Food Waste.*

The study is the first to quantify food wastage’s eco-impact. For example, the study found that the embedded water in global food waste was three times the volume of Lake Geneva, or about two Lake Tahoes. And food wastage represents 22 percent of the total global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. (1.3 Gtonnes/6 Gtonnes).

Equally important, the study identifies the sources of our abundant food wastage. Determining exactly what foods are being squandered where is a real key, as it will help us target those areas.

To wit, Asian rice, North American and Latin American meat are two major “world food wastage hot spots.” Meanwhile, 54 percent of global food wastage happens upstream (production, post-harvest handling and storage) while 46 percent occurs downstream (in processing, distribution and consumption).

The study’s suggested solutions are neither surprising nor groundbreaking, but they are worth repeating: reduce waste, re-use excess to feed people and compost or convert the rest into energy.

Let’s give the last word to the study’s authors:

This food wastage represents a missed opportunity to improve global food security, but also to mitigate environmental impacts and resources use from food chains.

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*From the FAO:

Food loss is the unintended reduction in food available for human consumption, resulting from inefficiencies in supply chains: poor infrastructure and logistics or lack of technology, insufficient skills or poor management capacity. It mainly occurs during production or postharvest processing, e.g. when crops go unharvested or produce is thrown out during processing, storage or transport.

Food waste refers to intentional discards of edible items, mainly by retailers and consumers, and is due to the behavior of businesses and individuals.

September 12, 2013 | Posted in Environment, International, Stats | Comments closed

Tuesday Roundup

Food Shift’s food waste awareness ads are now up on BART (public transit) in the Bay Area. Those of us elsewhere can still enjoy the message and art below, and then pledge to reduce food waste via Food Shift’s site.

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Speaking of pledges, Zero Waste Week is happening…[he double checks his calendar]…this week in the UK. They are asking folks to cut their landfill waste.

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The LeftoverSwap app has not launched, as originally intended. Apparently, it has more to do with testing and getting Apple’s approval than concerns about legality or ickiness.

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Last but not least: A $575 fine for wasting caribou meat? Now that’s my kind of hunting authority! (Canada’s Northwest Territories)

September 3, 2013 | Posted in Food Recovery, International, Waste Stream | Comments closed