One person impacts a whole country

In honor of the international women’s day, I want to introduce you to Selina Juul. Selina Juul is an impressive woman, who helped the Danish government to reduce their food waste by 25% in the last 5 years. She moved from Russia to Denmark at the age of 13 and was shocked by the amount of food available and wasted at supermarkets.

She founded an organization called Stop Spild Af Mad- translated stop wasting food, which focuses on supporting change to less food waste. One of her biggest achievements was convincing Rema (biggest low-cost supermarket chain in Denmark), to replace all its quantity discounts with single item discounts. This measurement led to a reduction of 90% of banana waste for the discounter (before one store wasted 80-100 bananas daily). Although Denmark became one of the leading countries battling food waste, the biggest waste producer is still the consumer.

Unfortunately Canada is not as advanced as Denmark. According to report of food waste in Canada published by the value chain management centre, Canadians trash food valued at $31 Billion. Imaging you could save 25% of it, it would account to $7,75 B
illion. The graphic billow illustrated who the main “wasters” of food are in Canada- CONSUMERS.

According to CBC News, Canada won’t implement food saving guidelines in the near future. Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay said to CBC News: “Food waste is part of the food policy that we’re going to deal with in the next year (2017) or two”. The minister didn’t comment, if reducing waste would be on the agenda though. Additional evidence of previous efforts to promote food waste as a topic for the governmental discussion failed, which diminishes the real chance of change.

As a result we as customers need to change our way of looking at food as disposable good, and start to see the value in it again. That’s why I encourage every one to take a second or two before you through away food the next time or to put more thought into your grocery-shopping list.