Food Waste Interlace
Food waste has always been a topic of importance. How many times did your parents tell you to finish your food for the sake of the starving children in Africa? While people are certainly conscious of food waste it continues to be a problem. Furthermore when people think of food waste they usually think of the end user that actively throws out food. What may be surprising to some is 40% of food is lost throughout the supply chain. Additionally the amount of some food lost is greater than the actual amount consumed! There are significant loses found at every level of food production. Farmers either grow too much or can’t sell all their product, processing trims out many edible portions, inefficiencies in distribution leading to spoilage, the entire principle of how food is retailed leads to spoilage, food services inefficiency leading to spoilage, and poor planning of households leading to spoilage. Simply put we are all guilty in contributing towards food waste.
There are a variety of potential solutions but the economics stand as a important barrier. Food is just too assessable and inexpensive in the developed world. Consumers use a largely subjective criteria when selecting their food. If view holistically there is no difference between good looking food products and the ugly looking ones. Yet consumers demand the products to be looking its best so much so that stores have specialized in designing stores that optimize the look of every product. To think being picked last in gym was bad, ugly foods don’t even get picked and are just left to spoil. Another important aspect of consumers is how frugal we are when it comes to food. Food is cheap but we continually to seek value. If consumers know the same products costs the same but one offers more than the other chances are the consumers would pick the better value every time. At face value the more the better but consider a person can only eat so much leaving that extra value to spoil. Consumers just undervalue future consequences.
It would be easy to suggest that the supply chain strives to be more efficient or have the government should make new policies to address the problem, which is what businesses and governments are trying to do. But this problem may be more psychological than industrial. Then is the solution to gather everyone up like lab rats in a psychological experiment and be reconditioned? That would be silly, although the solution might be based on those principles. The industry has been so good at meeting demands that we have been spoiled.
Hey Sid,
What a great analysis! It is true that we always look for the best looking products in the grocery, and discard the not-so-good-looking ones. As rational people, we always look for goods that have the highest perceived value. In this case, it’s always what we see. The problem is we tend to judge the nutritional value based on looks alone. Perhaps, there might be ways that can educate the average shopper to be more informed about purchasing perishable goods.
About a year ago, one of the European countries had strict regulations when importing cucumber. One of the requirements was that the cucumbers cannot bend up to a certain angle. Otherwise, it would be considered as bad quality. Something as ridiculous as this further adds on the amount of food waste we create. In fact, that country also imposed similar regulations to other vegetables. There may be political reasons behind this (limiting import), nevertheless, it further adds on the inefficiency problem that we currently experience. Fortunately, they got rid of this regulation.
Ultimately, we, as consumers, need to be more informed when judging fresh products, so we can reduce the amount of spoilage one step at a time.
You make a good point about the barriers of reducing food waste from a consumer’s point of view. This is particularly an issue in North America where people tend to shop less often and buy in bulk. I think the responsibility lies partially with consumers to be educated about food planning and what “best before” and “expiry” dates really mean. However, there are definitely opportunities for retailers, especially the large ones, to work with the distributors and farmers in their supply chain to make it more streamlined and reduce waste. It’s a “green” strategy, but also a cost-saving one that benefits all players. Some grocery chains in the UK, ie. Tesco, are already embracing this concept. It’ll be interesting to see if more retailers follow suit.