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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Waste

Food Waste App Too Good to Go Makes Its U.S. Debut in NYC

Food redistribution app Too Good to Go made its U.S. debut today in New York City. With it, restaurants, cafes, and markets in the Big Apple can redistribute to consumers their surplus goods that would otherwise go to the landfill.

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Too Good to Go already has a presence in several markets around Europe, including the U.K., Spain, France, and Italy. The app acts as a marketplace for surplus food, where businesses can post their leftover food at a discount. Users then search among the local restaurants and grocery stores listed on the app, place and order, and retrieve their food from the merchant.

The NYC launch coincides with the UN’s first-ever International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, which is today. New York, meanwhile, makes for an appropriate place for a food-waste-fighting app. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that average NYC households waste 8.4 pounds of food per week. Too Good to Go’s own recent survey found that while 86 percent of the city-area residents want to waste less food, 88 percent don’t realize the connection between food waste and climate change. And as we outlined in a recent food waste report on Spoon Plus, food waste’s global carbon footprint right now is about 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.

So far, food redistribution apps that directly connect the consumer and the retailer are few and far between in the U.S. Canada-based Flashfood app teamed up with Meijer grocery stores in last year to sell the chain’s surplus food in the Midwest U.S. So far, however, the market in this country is ripe for new entrants. 

Too Good to Go says it already has “nearly 200” merchant partners signed up, including Stumptown Coffee, Prince St Pizza, and Brooklyn Fare. 

The Wonderful Company Wants New Innovations for Its 50,000 Tons of Pomegranate Husks

The Wonderful Company, best known for its pomegranate juices, is ready to infuse some cash into creative reuses of its pomegranate biomass.  

Today, the company launched its Wonderful Innovation Challenge. The competition will offer “up to $1 million” in funding and development resources to those with “pilot ready solutions for the 50,000 tons of pomegranate husks generated each year by juicing POM Wonderful pomegranates,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Food waste nonprofit ReFed will serve as a strategic advisor and managing partner for the competition. 

The pomegranate husk, also known as pomace, consists of the fruit’s pulpy remains after it has been crushed and its juice extracted. On the competition’s website, The Wonderful Company says the pomace is usually sold as dairy feed but “recent shifts in the market have prompted the exploration of new, alternative outlets.”

To find those alternative outlets, Wonderful’s new competition is looking for companies with ideas that are ready to pilot and backed by “a data-driven business model.” The tools, technologies, and processes companies can use is fairly open-ended: the competition only notes that concepts should demonstrate potential for positive environmental or social impact. 

Chosen winners get funding from a $1 million reward pool, as well as assistance in developing their concepts. Applicants should request the amount they will need to develop their pilots when they submit their ideas.

Wonderful is the latest company to join the movement for upcycling the inedible parts of food items, and in the last several months, we’ve seen many creative ideas come out of this movement. It joins companies like Renewal Mill, who is currently making cookies from upcycled okara flour and Harmless Harvest, a company turning leftover salmon skin into snacks. Major corporations are also getting involved. For example, researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough turning McDonald’s deep-fryer oil into 3D-printing resin.

Innovations in upcycling increase as the conversation around the world’s food waste problem gets louder. As we discussed in a recent Spoon Plus report, solutions for fighting food waste now come in all different shapes and sizes. While Wonderful’s new competition specifically focuses on food scraps that can’t be eaten, it joins other companies and organizations in the urgent fight to keep food out of landfills.

Tech has a potentially big role to play in the process of upcycling inedible food scraps, and we’ll doubtless see some of it surface in Wonderful’s competition. 

The application process is open now and runs to Dec. 7, 2020.

Agtech Platform Silo Raises $9M to Fight Food Waste in the Supply Chain

San Francisco-based Silo Technologies announced today it has raised $9 million for its cloud-based platform aimed at cutting down on food waste in the U.S. food supply chain. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors Capital and Haystack Ventures.

Silo (not to be confused with smart-storage maker Silo) wants to minimize food waste in the supply chain by automating operations within it, including buying and selling food, forecasting supply and demand, and managing relationships between the different players in the chain. The software, which is available to food growers, buyers, distributors, and sellers, also digitizes tasks like accounting, inventory management, and reporting, making them quicker and more accurate tasks.

The company said in today’s press release that while food waste happens across the food system, it’s “particularly heavy in production and distribution.” Examples of this include products that spoil in production process because of inadequate storage and transport and projects that are rejected by buyers. While food loss of this kind is less widespread in the U.S. compared to developing nations, it nonetheless happens with plenty of regularity. 

Given that it’s a global, multibillion problem, food waste in general has seen plenty of new investments and developments of late as the issue becomes more urgent for companies, governments, and consumers alike. Clean Crop Technologies nabbed $2.75 million in June of this year, while major CPGs including Walmart and Tesco recently joined the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition. And as we outline in a recent Spoon Plus report, a sizable number of companies are coming to market with products and appliances that fight food waste in the consumer home. 

Silo says it will use the new funds to expand nationwide, opening offices in both Los Angeles and New York City. It will also build out its engineering staff and develop tools to better streamline logistics and financial tasks in the food supply chain. 

What’s the Difference Between Food Waste and Food Loss?

With food waste now an important dialogue in the food industry, and a growing area for tech innovation, it’s a good time to lay out the differences between “food waste” and “food loss.”

One third of the world’s food — roughly 1.3 billion tons — goes to waste each year, but across the globe, it is lost or wasted in different ways, at at different points across the food supply chain. That’s where it’s useful to know the difference between “loss” and “waste.”

According to Think.Eat.Save, a partnership between the United Nation’s Environment Program (UNEP) and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), food loss refers to food that spoils early on in the supply chain, before it ever lands in on grocery store shelves. Think post-harvest, processing, and distribution stages.

Reasons for this food loss can include poor crop harvest, animal deaths, spillage, transportation issues, and insufficient storage. For example, access to reliable and consistent refrigeration is a major issue for many developing countries, and a huge contributor to lost food.

Food waste, on the other hand, refers to food that is ready and edible for consumption but gets discarded before that happens. It usually, though not exclusively, happens further down the supply chain, at consumer-facing stages like restaurants, grocery stores, and in consumers’ homes.

At these consumer-facing levels, food waste can be anything from grocery stores chucking unsold inventory to restaurants throwing out unused inventory and the average person losing items in the back of their home fridge. The bulk of the world’s food waste happens in Europe and North America right now. The good news, as we outlined in a recent Spoon Plus report, is that curbing consumer food waste is a much higher priority topic in 2020 than it was even a few years ago, and tech companies, food businesses, and many others are working to educate more consumers on their food waste habits.

Both food waste and food loss have economic, environmental, and human consequences. And while there is some overlap between the two, food waste and food loss have to be curbed with different solutions — hence the importance of understanding the difference between the two.

For example, introducing smarter fridge appliances or storage systems might help a family in the U.S. curb their food waste and save money, but doing so won’t suddenly improve the disorganized and fragmented food production system in, say, parts of Central Asia. That has to be dealt with by providing more up-to-date equipment and storage techniques and processes, and while the private sector can help, at least some government involvement is needed in order to enact widespread change.

Even so, there is plenty of activity in the private sector from companies fighting both food loss and food waste. In Nigeria, for instance, a company called ColdHubs makes solar-powered “walk-in” cold rooms food producers can use to store their food. Golden Harvest, a business group in Bangladesh, has partnered with USAID to develop the country’s first cold chain network and keep meat, fish, and produce from going bad in the earlier stages of the supply chain.

Over on the food waste side, a number of startups and major corporations in the food industry are working to help North American and European businesses and consumers curb food waste. That includes everything from Samsung and LG’s smart fridges that track food inventory to Winnow’s smart scales that track food waste in commercial kitchens.

Neither food loss nor food waste are simple problems to fix. Technology could — and already does areas — play a central role here in creating more efficient supply chains, equipping stakeholders with better tools, and educating consumers on better ways to manage the way they eat.

Surplus Food Startup Hungry Harvest Closes Series A Round at $13.7M

Food rescue startup Hungry Harvest has closed its Series A round at $13.7 million, according to a company press release. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Danone Manifesto Ventures, Quadia, and Maywic Select Investments.

Hungry Harvest is one of several companies out there rescuing “ugly” produce and other staples from groceries in an effort to curb food waste and redistribute food to those in need. The company collects fruits, vegetables, and other items deemed cosmetically unfit for mainstream retailers and packs them into variety boxes customers can order and have delivered to their doorsteps. Users can customize their boxes based on how often they cook, how many people they are feeding, and whether they prefer organic produce or will eat anything. Boxes range in price from $15 for a “Mini Harvest” all the way up to $42 for a “Super Organic Harvest.”

The company also donates to local organizations fighting food insecurity in the U.S. Hungry Harvest says it plans to use the new funds to improve the customer experience for its products and scale its social mission of getting affordable food to those in need. 

The concept of rescuing ugly produce from landfills has steadily grown in popularity over the last couple years as the world’s multibillion-dollar food waste problem becomes more top of mind for more consumers. Those consumers now have ample options when it comes to purchasing cheaper produce that would get tossed at a grocery store, including Karma, Imperfect Produce, and Misfits Market. Some of these companies are actually partnering with grocery stores, as Flashfood is doing with Meijer stores in Detroit. 

For it’s part, Hungry Harvest currently delivers to Baltimore, D.C., Philadelphia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Miami and Detroit.

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

Delivery Hero Partners With World Food Programme to Integrate Donations Into Its Apps

Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero announced today it has partnered with the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) to integrate the latter’s ShareTheMeal program into its own delivery platforms.

WFP launched ShareTheMeal, also based in Berlin, in 2015. Anyone who downloads the app can use it to donate money that will go towards ShareTheMeal’s goal of getting 800 million meals to those in need over the next five years.

But since a growing number of folks nowadays already use delivery apps, ShareTheMeal and Delivery Hero decided to bake the donation functionality right into the delivery platform. Via an API, ShareTheMeal will be integrated into Delivery Hero’s apps. After placing an order, Delivery Hero customers will see a button that says “Donate a Meal.” Upon pressing it, they can choose from three different meal options based on how much they want to donate. The donation is tacked onto the total price at the checkout stage of the transaction.

The idea is to make the process of donating meals as easy and “seamless” as ordering delivery for oneself.

And it’s not the first time a third-party delivery services has tried donations. Uber Eats, for example, launched an in-app donation feature for restaurants early on in the pandemic. DoorDash, meanwhile, has partnerships with Copia, Replate, and other companies to divert food from landfills and redistribute it to those in need.

Delivery Hero is one of the world’s largest third-party delivery platforms outside of China, and a high-profile partnership with a UN subsidiary will hopefully translate to more meals donated around the world. To start, the ShareTheFood integration will be in Delivery Hero’s delivery platforms in Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Malaysia, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. The company says more markets will follow soon.

Spoon Plus: The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report

Nowadays, governments, grocery retailers, industries like agriculture and grocery, tech companies, and many others are working to fight food waste at both the local and international level. In the developed world, at least, much of that focus over the last 12 months has been on the consumer kitchen, which is responsible for by far the most food waste in those regions.

This report will examine why so much food is wasted in the consumer kitchen, what new technologies and processes can be leveraged to fight that waste, and the companies working to change consumers’ relationship to both food and waste.

Report highlights include:

  • One-third of the world’s food goes to waste annually. In the U.S. and Europe, the majority of that waste happens downstream, at consumer-facing businesses and in the home.

  • Food waste at home is a three-part problem that stems from a lack of awareness about waste, inadequate information and skill sets around home cooking, and the convenience economy driving consumer behavior.

  • Grocery store shopping, current recipe formats, inconsistent date labels, and a lack of smart storage solutions for grocery purchases and restaurant leftovers are the main drivers of at-home food waste.

  • The refrigerator itself may be one of the single biggest contributors to food waste. Moving forward, appliance-makers will need to consider overhauling the appliance’s entire design to help consumers fight food waste.

  • Solutions for fighting food waste will come from a range of different players. For tech companies, areas of focus will include more smart appliances and more tech-enabled storage systems as well as meal-planning and meal-sharing apps.

Companies profiled in this report include LG, Samsung, Vitamix, Smarter, Ovie, Bluapple, Mimica, Blakbear, Silo, Mealhero, MealBoard, Kitche, No Waste, Ends & Stems, and Olio.

Introduction: The Size of the World’s Food Waste Problem

In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the first edition of its now-famous report, “Wasted, How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill.” That report proved to be a groundbreaking look at the inefficiencies in the U.S. food system that lead to massive amounts of food waste from the farm all the way into the average person’s kitchen. 

The report also proved to one of the biggest catalysts for change in recent years. Since its publication, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030 — the first goal of its kind in the U.S. Similarly, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 seeks to “halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food loss during production and supply.” As NRDC noted in the second edition of “Wasted,” published in 2017, food businesses have made commitments to reduce waste, and 74 percent of consumers polled say fighting food waste is important to them. Most recently, the Consumer Goods Forum launched its Food Waste Coalition that aims, in part, to support SDG 12.3 by focusing on consumer-facing areas of food waste like home and retail. And these are just as sampling of the countless efforts happening on both international and local levels in the war on food waste.

Even so, the oft-cited figure, that one-third of the world’s food supply goes to waste, is as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago when NRDC first published its report.

In 2020, food waste is a multibillion-dollar problem with environmental, economic, and human costs that grow more urgent as the world advances towards a 10-billion-person population. The United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates food waste’s global carbon footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases, and that economic losses of this food waste total $750 billion annually. The United Kingdom’s Food Waste Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) notes that keeping food scraps out of landfills would be the equivalent of removing 20 percent of cars in Britain from the roads. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., rescuing just 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans each year, or well over half of the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.  

Worldwide, different regions waste food in different ways. UN estimates show that per capita waste by consumers in Europe and North America totals to 95-115 kg/year. That number drops significantly, to 6-11 kg/year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeastern Asia. Overall, 40 percent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels in developing countries. Not so in developed nations, where over 40 percent of food waste occurs at retail and consumer levels.

Given the enormous amounts of waste occurring at the consumer level in Europe and North America, it makes sense that recent efforts towards fighting food waste now go towards understanding how and why food gets wasted downstream, at grocery stores, restaurants, and, most importantly, within consumers’ own homes.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. To find out more about Spoon Plus, click here. Use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual or monthly subscription. 

McDonald’s Partners With Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

With the restaurant industry currently being reinvented with to-go-first experiences in mind, there’s cause to worry that the shift will add even more single-use cups, straws, and boxes to our already bulging landfills. So it makes for a small silver lining that McDonald’s today announced a partnership with Terracycle’s zero-waste platform Loop to pilot a reusable cup model.

The program will first be trialed at select McDonald’s in the UK in 2021. For a small deposit, customers will get a reusable Loop cup for their hot beverages. The deposit can be redeemed by returning the cup to any participating McDonald’s location, according to today’s press release. Loop will retrieve the used cups, wash them, and return them to the cycle.

As to whether this reusable cup program will make its way to the States, a McDonald’s spokesperson said, “The feedback collected through these packaging trials will help inform which options are scaled up or adopted in other countries around the world.”

Loop’s main business lets customers shop online for grocery, household, and beauty products from well-known brands, then get them delivered in packaging. Living up to the platform’s name, Loop  retrieves and cleans the empty containers once a customer is finished, and the cycle starts again. The company currently has partnerships with Häagen-Dazs, Tropicana, Nature’s Path Organic, and several well-known personal care brands. The service is available in select U.S. cities and is in the process of expanding to more places, including international locations.

The McDonald’s partnership comes at a time when the fight for a more sustainable restaurant has to co-exist alongside the fight against COVID-19. Some chains, notably Starbucks, have banned reusable cups for the time being, (understandably) citing safety concerns. But the sustainability issue can’t be put on hold for long, particularly since the increase in to-go orders could eventually equal an alarming increase in trash, too.

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers. For its part, McDonald’s has already piloted other circular solutions for cups, including the Recup system in Germany and the chain’s participation in the NextGen Cup Challenge in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the company also completed construction on its first “net zero energy-designed restaurant” in Florida. At the time of that news, I wrote that billion-plus-dollar restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Chipotle, etc. are the ones that need to take the lead in writing the playbook for sustainability in the restaurant. Smaller restaurants — the ones that have managed to survive the fallout — still struggle to remain open, so it seems unreasonable right now to ask them to also reinvent the paper cup. 

McDonald’s, on the other hand, has a $4 billion off-premises business and a recent track record that’s heavy on the innovation front. Using some of those dollars and resources to create a more sustainable restaurant experience seem the next logical step. 

Renewal Mill Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign to Raise $1M

Renewal Mill, a startup that makes baking products out of upcycled ingredients, launched an equity crowdfunding campaign today in an effort to raise $1 million.

Founded in 2016, Renewal Mill takes manufacturing byproducts that typically go to waste and turns them into upcycled ingredients that can be used for baking. For instance it turns the soybean pulp leftover from a company making tofu into gluten-free, high-fiber okara flour.

Renewal Mill has previously raised $1.7 million in Seed funding, and has been a participant in the Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator as well as Barilla’s Good Food Makers program and the Systems 6 accelerator. Renewal Mill products have been used by companies like Pulp Pantry, Humphry Slocombe and Tia Lupita Foods, and the company sells its own product line directly through its website and retailers like Good Eggs and Whole Foods.

Through this crowdfunding effort, Renewal Mill is looking to commercialize its second ingredient product, “oat oakara,” which is made from the oat pulp leftover when oatmilk is made. The company also wants to expand its upcycled baking mixes.

Today’s news puts Renewal Mill at the center of a couple trends happening in food tech. First, the company is one of a handful of companies upcycling everything from salmon skins to banana peels to imperfect apples and pears into new products. Not only does this upcycling result in new and unique foods, it also helps eliminate food waste.

But Renewal Mill is also joining in the trend of food tech startups turning to equity crowdfunding to raise fresh capital. Kiwibot, Piestro, and Winc have all launched equity crowdfunding campaigns this year. Equity crowdfunding is a way for startups to grow without the pressure to scale that comes with traditional VC backing. But it also comes without the valuable institutional knowledge and relationships that a traditional VC can bring.

In an email sent to The Spoon, Renewal Mill Co-Founder and COO Caroline Cotto said that the company had the option of getting additional money as part of its initial Seed round, but decided against it to retain ownership of the company. Cotto said that they went the equity crowdfunding route to diversify the cap table and use it as a marketing opportunity as they work to expand their retail presence nationally.

The Spoon does not provide any investment advice and, as with any investing, there is always risk. Those interested in investing in Renewal Mill can do so for as little as $50 at Republic.co through November 30, 2020.

Walmart, Tesco, and Other Food Brands Join the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition

As the world’s food waste issue becomes more urgent, food companies up and down the supply chain are under pressure to deliver solutions that address the problem and help consumers change their behaviors in their grocery stores and homes. One such effort that surfaced this week is the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition, which has a goal of “halving per capita global food loss at the retailer and consumer levels,” according to an announcement from CGF.

The Coalition, as it’s being called, includes 14 initial members, many of them major food retailers, including Walmart, Ahold Delhaize, Sainsbury, and Tesco. (See the full list of companies below.)

Through their participation in the Coalition, these companies are currently addressing three commitments:

  • To measure and report food loss data by 2021
  • To help scale up Champions 12.3’s “10x20x30” initiative, which supports UN SDG 12.3 that aims to halve global food waste by 2030
  • To address post-harvest food waste and develop new strategies to curb it

Worldwide, the food waste problem has been steadily gaining attention over the last couple years in the form of food producers and tech startups bringing potential solutions to market. There’s a good reason for this uptick in activity: Roughly 1.3 billon tons of food is wasted globally each year, totaling about $990 billion in economic losses. There are also profoundly disturbing environmental and human costs to food waste: food waste’s global carbon footprint is estimated to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases. That’s to say nothing of food insecurity. In the U.S. alone, rescuing even 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans. In developed countries, the majority of food waste happens at the consumer levels, in retail or in the home.

The new Coalition is a pick of international companies that will also create regional groups to drive change at a local level. “Given the magnitude of the problem of food waste, CGF members are committed to reducing food loss in their own supply chains,” the Coalition states on its website.

The full list of initial companies includes Ahold Delhaize, Barilla, Bel Group, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Majid Al Futtaim, McCain Foods, Merck Animal Health, Metro AG, Migros Ticaret, Nestlé, Sainsbury, Tesco, and Walmart.

This isn’t CGF’s first foray into the food waste category. It has worked in the past with Champions 12.3, publishing a report in 2017 about the potential return on investment from food waste and calling for more standardized date labels on food items.

The Coalition hasn’t yet named any specific strategies around how it will tackle the food waste problem.

The good news is that there are an increasing number of innovative options for the Coalition to choose from as there are many startups are tackling food waste throughout the supply chain. Apeel’s produce-coating technology helps extend the shelf life of produce. AI-based technology like that of Afresh helps stores better manage fresh inventory, so less goes to waste. And food rescue apps like Karma help keep extra food from restaurants out of landfills.

Hopefully, this new Coalition can use some of its resources to join that effort and develop new solutions and processes that get people to not just think about but also act on their behaviors around food waste. 

Connected Compost: Vitamix Launches an At-Home Device to Turn Food Scraps Into Soil Nutrients

Vitamix is the latest appliance-maker to address the issue of food waste in the consumer kitchen. The company today announced the launch of its Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50, a device that turns food scraps into additives for soil consumers can then use in their gardens. 

The device itself is compact enough to fit on a kitchen countertop. As the explainer video below shows, food scraps go into a portable bucket, which, when full, goes into the FoodCycler device. The user then simply attached the lid and hits the power button, and the device agitates the scraps into a compound that can be used as soil additive:  

Introducing the Vitamix® FoodCycler® FC-50!

Vitamix says the entire process can be done in four to eight hours, and works on not just produce but also meat and dairy items. A carbon filter built into the device gets rid of methane gases and odors.

The device is available now for $399.95, including a three-year warranty. 

Vitamix is positioning the device as an alternative to composting, which remains challenging to a lot of consumers. At-home compost piles require quite a bit of time and maintenance. They can also attract rodents, and most guides tell you to avoid putting meat and fatty foods in your pile (see: rodents). Some cities provide bins for compost scraps that are picked up on a weekly basis just like trash or recycling, but that’s not yet a widespread practice outside major cities.

U.S. households waste roughly 76 billion pounds of food per year. And with more people now staying home to cook and eat, it wouldn’t be surprising if that number went up in the future.

The key is to help consumer break longstanding behaviors and habits around simply throwing scraps in the garbage bin or down the drain, and the painstaking nature of traditional composting is not likely to do that on a widespread basis. The seeming ease-of-use of Vitamix’s latest device could be instrumental in helping consumers change some of those behaviors.