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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Waste Reduction

SKS 2020: Why Singapore Is Fast-Becoming Food Tech’s New Superpower

That Singapore is a fast-rising superpower in food tech is something that’s become apparent over the last several months. And yesterday, during a SKS 2020 panel on the Asian food tech landscape, the city-state came up in conversation again as an enormously important location to watch when it comes to food innovation and investment.

“If I had to place my bet I would place it on Singapore,” said Michal Klar, an angel investor who also writes the Future Food Now newsletter. Joining him on the panel were Winnie Leung of Bits x Bites and Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf, and together, the group unpacked some of the reasons why so much food tech innovation is coming out of Singapore right now.

Arguably the biggest driver is that, at the moment, Singapore imports 90 percent of its food. That’s a precarious position to be in during the best of times, never mind during a pandemic that’s disrupted the global food supply chain. In response, the Singapore government launched a $21 million grant fund this year as part of its 30×30 initiative, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced locally by 2030. 

At the same time, that reliance on imports for the majority of its foods may actually help Singapore innovate on food tech faster for the short term. Since so much of the city-state’s food comes from outside its own borders, Singapore lacks some of the constraints other countries face when it comes to getting pushback by established players.

Alternative protein is a good example. Here in the U.S., both plant- and cell-based meat companies must go toe-to-toe with Big Meat producers and lobbyists over labeling of their products, shelf placement, and other issues. By contrast, Klar suggested that because Singapore’s meat supply is imported there’s nobody to push back on new developments and regulations happening in the city-state around alternative forms of meat. That, Klar reasoned, is one of the reasons Singapore is home to Asia’s best-funded cell-base meat startup, Shiok Meats, as well as a number of other up and coming players.  

Indoor agriculture/vertical farming is another area that could potentially thrive because of a lack of existing incumbents. Last year, local farms produced just 14 percent of leafy vegetables consumed by Singaporeans, so there’s little in the way of traditional agriculture to disrupt. At SKS, Leung noted that Singapore’s “highly urbanized” environment makes it an ideal setting for high-tech innovations in indoor farming. We’ve seen this in recent months with companies like SinGrow, which is growing a proprietary breed of strawberries in its vertical farm, and ag tech accelerators like GROW. Leung also flagged aquaculture as a sector to watch in Singapore.

Both Klar and Leung also pointed to Singapore’s regulatory environment as a reason for the city-states speedy growth in food tech innovation. There is only one agency in Singapore that regulates foods, said Klar. In other words, when companies prepare for the phase in which they must get government approval for their products, there’s no doubt or confusion as to who they must go to. This could speed up the process of regulatory approval, which in turn would mean a faster time to market for many companies. 

The above factors are just a smattering of reasons for Singapore food tech’s continued growth, and over the next several months we will continue to see new advances in ag tech, alt protein, packaging, and other areas of the food supply chain emerge.

‘Make Food Waste Less Possible’: How Businesses Can Help Consumers Fight Food Waste at Home

Tackling the food waste topic in a 30-minute panel is something of an impossible undertaking, given the size of the problem. That’s why at Day 2 of Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, myself, Apeel Sciences’ CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute, and Alexandria Coari of ReFED zeroed in on a few major causes and solutions around food waste.

One of those was the role of consumer behavior in the fight against food waste. Right now, according to ReFed, 80-plus percent of food waste in the U.S. happens at the consumer level, with more than 40 percent of that occurring in our own homes. But is it even realistic to expect consumers — for whom convenience and speed tend to be top priorities — to alter their behaviors around cooking, shopping, and eating in order to bring that number down?

Maybe. But as panelists explained during today’s talk, one of the keys to changing consumer behavior belongs not to the individual but to consumer-facing food businesses — the grocery stores, restaurants, and other retailers of the world.

Coari pointed out that these food businesses have a lot of influence up and down the value chain. Those businesses can enable consumer behavior change by making their environments, whether in the store or in the restaurant, less conducive to food waste to begin with. They can, as Coari said, “Make food waste less possible.”

Apeel, which makes a natural coating for produce to extend its shelf life, is one such example. Selling, say, avocados preserved in Apeel’s coating means consumers have more time between buying the product and eating it at home. Extending this lifespan, there’s a better chance the avocado will get eaten before it goes bad.

Neither the coating nor the extra several days of shelf-life happen because of anything a consumer does. They’re just buying the avocado. Instead, Apeel has used a technology and process that allow a consumer to get more mileage out of the food they buy.

Cecchini pointed out that educating consumers and helping them shift their perspective around certain foods is another important area of consumer behavior change. Take the so-called ugly produce: misshapen-yet-edible fruits and vegetables that are often sold at discounted prices. Cecchini suggests removing monikers like “ugly” or “imperfect” from the food waste vocabulary and trying to put a more positive spin on the concept to make it appeal to as many consumers as possible. In that way, grocery retailers, too, might not have to put as much effort into cosmetically perfect produce and wind up throwing out the rest.

There are tons of other examples of business innovation influencing food waste behavior at the consumer level. While we certainly didn’t cover all of them in the span of a half-hour, today’s talk certainly left me thinking about what food businesses can do to help us get more mileage out of the food we have and waste less of it in the process. As Rogers said at one point, “We can’t hope people [will] do the right thing. We have to make the right thing the easiest, cheapest, best for the planet thing to do.”

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. 

LARQ Raises $10M for its UV-Light, Germ-Killing Re-Useabale Water Vessels

LARQ, which makes germ-killing, reuseable hydration products, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Seventure with participation from DCM.

Launched in 2018, LARQ’s first product was a reusable water bottle. What makes LARQ different from other reusable water bottles on the market is the built in UV-C light inside the container. Push a button and the light turns on for 60 seconds, which according to the company is enough to neutralize up to 99.9999 percent of harmful bacteria and viruses. The interior surface of the LARQ also has a special optical coating to reflect the light for maximum efficacy. The UV light used does not contain mercury.

With its new money, the California-based LARQ plans to expand internationally and into new product categories. Earlier this month, the company launched its new water pitcher on Kickstarter (where it blew past its $50,000 goal to raise more than $674,000 dollars). In addition to the UV light, the LARQ pitcher also features a plant-based carbon filter that the company says uses 75 percent less plastic than other water filter pitchers.

LARQ’s bottles and pitcher are certainly arriving at the right time for a number of reasons. Plastic waste remains a huge problem for our planet. More than 8 million metric tons of plastic waste wind up in our oceans each year, and that stat was prior to the COVID pandemic. Since the pandemic hit the problem has only gotten worse with the surge in single-use items like gloves, masks and food containers. Oh, and then there’s the recent reveal that we were misled about plastic’s ability to be recycled in the first place.

Speaking of COVID, given how the pandemic continues to run its course around the U.S. and internationally, people have a more heightened sense of the germs they are exposed to. Having a reusable water bottle that reduces plastic waste and cleans itself seems to the right idea at the right time (though it doesn’t appear that LARQ makes any specific claims about COVID-19).

According to the press release, LARQ sold more than 75,000 units in 2019. LARQ bottles sell for $78 a pop, and are available online and through a number of retail partners like Nordstrom and Bloomingdales.


Sept. 29 is International Day of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction

By United Nations resolution, tomorrow, Sept. 29, is officially recognized as an International Day of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction. The theme for this year’s observance is “Stop food loss and waste. For the people. For the planet.”

Given that between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s food supply goes to waste each year, the issue is a social, moral and even economic one. As the UN wrote:

Actions are required globally and locally to maximize the use of the food we produce. The introduction of technologies, innovative solutions (including e-commerce platforms for marketing, retractable mobile food processing systems), new ways of working and good practices to manage food quality and reduce food loss and waste are key to implementing this transformative change.

Reducing food loss and waste requires the attention and actions of all, from food producers, to food supply chain stakeholders, to food industries, retailers and consumers.

Avid Spoon readers know that food waste and loss is an important area of coverage for us. The more awareness we can create, the better off we all are. To that end, here’s a collection of stories we have written over the past few months about the food waste issue and the companies actively tackling the problem:

Reducing food waste and bringing more equity to our food system is going to take a concerted effort across the public and private sectors. But most of all, it will take effort from all of us individually to change our wasteful ways.

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.

Zero Grocery Raises $3M Seed Round for Plastic-Free Grocery

Zero Grocery Founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner announced today via Medium that Zero has raised $3 million in Seed funding for its plastic-free grocery delivery service. According to Strasner, “the largest check” came from 1984, with other investors such as Arlan Hamilton, AVG Basecamp Fun, Bluestein Ventures and more participating. This brings the total amount raised by Zero Grocery to $4.7 million.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zero Grocery doesn’t use any plastic in its grocery delivery service. According to the company FAQ, food is bought wholesale and packed into glass jars, tiffins, boxes and other containers.

Zero has a membership option for $25 a month, which gives offers free deliveries and also collects empty containers from previous deliveries (which then get sanitized and re-used). You don’t have to have a membership to shop at Zero, though non-members pay a $7.99 delivery fee.

The timing is certainly ripe for Zero’s fundraise. First, the pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping over the past six months. And while the numbers have fallen, the online grocery sector is projected to keep growing and hit $250 billion by 2025.

In the Medium post, Strasner even mentioned that the pandemic drove 20x new business for Zero, but it was it was able to adjust on the fly and survive:

As other grocery stores faced out-of-stocks due to a mutual reliance on the same distributors and sources for their products, we were able to avoid out-of-stocks and maintain a consistent customer experience. We had put our model to the test and succeeded, and it allowed us to serve customers in the best way we possibly could.

But the plastic-free nature of Zero’s service is also compelling. People are more acutely aware than ever, especially in light of a recent NPR and Frontline’s recent headline “How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.”

Thankfully, there is a new wave of waste-free grocery stores coming up to help tackle the problem. In addition to Zero Grocery, there’s Zero Market in Denver, CO, and Nada Grocery in Vancouver, Canada. Even big brands like Unilever and Pepsi are getting in on the reusable container train through the Loop store.

All of this combined, along with $3 million means that there are a lot more zeros in Zero’s warchest to help it scale its plastic-free mission.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post misstated that there was a jar deposit for non-members.

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.

Produce Grower Houweling’s Group Partners With Apeel to Ditch Plastic-Wrapped Cucumbers

Greenhouse vegetable grower Houweling’s Group announced this week it has partnered with Apeel to launch its plastic-free cucumbers at select Walmart locations, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Cucumbers very often land on grocery store shelves shrink-wrapped in plastic. This is done to protect the skin, which on a variety like an English cucumber, is especially thin. The plastic wrapping also extends the shelf life of the cucumber once it’s in your fridge.

Apeel, which raised $250 million in May of this year, is in the business of extending produce shelf life without the need for extra packaging materials. The company makes an edible “peel” that can provide the protection and shelf-life extension of plastic. It does this with a foodsafe powder derived from plant oils. When applied to produce, it creates a barrier that keeps water and oxygen out. Apeel has developed different proprietary coatings for different produce types, including apples, avocados, and, now, cucumbers. 

Apeel is one of several companies working to make produce last longer. It’s most notable counterparts right now are Stix Fresh, which makes a sticker that can extend produce shelf life by two weeks when placed on the fruit or vegetable, and Hazel Technologies, whose packaging inserts for bulk fruit and vegetable boxes slow ripening. Apeel’s most obviously parallel competitor is Sufresca, a company that also makes an edible coating for produce.

The partnership with Houweling’s Group marks the first time Apeel has used its coating technology to not just extend the life of produce but also do away with extra packaging. Houweling’s said in this week’s press release that every 500,000 cases of English cucumbers shipped with Apeel’s coating eliminates the equivalent of 820,000 single-use plastic water bottles from the supply chain. 

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.

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.