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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

ReFed

Home Are Still the Biggest Source of Food Waste (44M Tons), and It’s Only Getting Worse

Last week, ReFED released its latest edition of the Food Waste Monitor, which is part of the ReFED Insights Engine, an interactive tool that tracks food waste sources, solutions, capital, and impact.

The organization monitors food waste through the lens of excess food production, which means how much excess food is produced that ultimately doesn’t get consumed. According to ReFED, there were 91 million tons of excess food in the US in 2021 (the latest year for which they have data), of which almost 36%, or 32.7 million pounds, ended up in landfills.

Other destinations for the excess food included sewer (6.91 million tons, 7.6%), composting (16.6 million tons, 18.3%), food that is not harvested at the farm (12.7 million tons, 14%), and animal feed (7.81 million tons, 8.6%) among others.

The Food Waste Monitor also breaks down where in the system food waste is happening. Consumers have long been known as being the biggest culprits when it comes to food waste, and we’ve only gotten worse over the last five years, going from 45.6% (39.6M tons) of excess food in 2016 to 48.4% (44.1M tons), which means the home now accounts for almost half of the total excess food in the US.

In addition to quantifying the total size of excess food in our system and how much is wasted, the ReFED Insights engine also has a solutions database that examines and quantifies the different solutions for reducing food waste. As can be seen in the graphic below, the database breaks solutions down by where they touch the food along the value chain (each category is called an ‘action area’), from harvest to consumer environments and beyond, and quantifies the net collective financial benefit the various solutions targeted at each stop along the way could potentially have.

According to ReFED, reshaping consumer environments has the biggest potential to reduce excess food, with an annual net financial impact of over $30 billion in total food value. Within that category, ReFED estimates that the biggest potential lever for reshaping environments is consumer education campaigns, which would help consumers better understand the problem of food waste and how to address it in their meal planning, how they store their food, etc.

A breakdown of the financial and environmental benefits of consumer education campaigns is below. It breaks down not only the direct dollar impact, but shows the total amount of food diverted (3.22M tons), emissions reduction (18.7M metric tons of CO2e), and water saved (795B gallons).

While the ReFED solutions database touches on ways in which consumers can reduce food by employing technology (smart home or food life extension technology) it doesn’t show the economic impact these types of solutions could have. That’s not really ReFED’s fault, because the reality is there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation in this space.

One category I didn’t see in the consumer solutions that could be added is consumer food tracking and meal planning apps, which have been active areas in terms of new products and consumer adoption (though it’s unclear how impactful they have been).

There is a lot more data and insights in the ReFED Insights engine, so you should definitely check it out for yourself.

Watch: Food Waste Innovation Demo Day

Last week, The Spoon teamed up with the team from ReFED to showcase innovators building food waste reduction solutions to help food retailers and manufacturers to better manage their inventory, find secondary outlets for surplus and create systems and processes for optimal on-site handling.

ReFED Food Waste Action Network | Innovation Demo Day: Refine Product Management

Featured startups that presented during this one-hour session included Too Good to Go, Galley Solutions, and KITRO.

Watch the video above to hear more about their companies and see a panel moderated by The Spoon to hear how these companies are tackling challenges to accelerate adoption and working towards creating more equitable and sustainable environments both internally and for their customers.

Food Waste Innovators Wanted

If we could pick one thing in the entire food space that technology could truly solve, it would be food *waste.* It has always been an issue that has a ripple effect up and down the food chain, and the statistics have only gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.

The team at the food waste non-profit ReFED works daily to provide data-driven solutions to reduce waste and loss in the food system — and that work is the topic at the 2022 Food Waste Solutions Summit held this year on May 10-12 in Minneapolis, MN.

Food waste doesn’t just happen at the consumer level, though about one-third of the 1.4 billion tons of waste happens after the food has been placed on retail shelves or taken home to consumer kitchens. But food waste – or food loss, as some experts note – also happens earlier in the supply chain, either during manufacturing, transportation and at the very beginning at the agricultural level.

Part of the Food Waste Solutions Summit is to discover and discuss innovations designed to tackle food waste at all levels of the food chain. The Spoon has partnered with ReFED to host a session showcasing innovative technology solutions to reduce food waste, specifically in agriculture, supply chain, and consumer categories — and we’re on the hunt for the creators, entrepreneurs and problem-solvers innovating in those categories to come and tell us their story.

Applications to speak during this innovation showcase are open through Friday, March 4. If you lead any organization innovating in the above-named categories, fill out the quick application. If selected, speakers will be included in a brief “fireside chat”-style conversation with the session moderator and audience Q&A. 

We’re looking forward to meeting and hearing from food businesses, funders, policymakers, entrepreneurs and non-profits all working to solve this complex, global issue. For more info on the 2022 Food Waste Solutions Summit hosted by ReFED, visit their site.

*Note: The Spoon is a media partner for this event; this post is not part of any paid campaign.*

There’s More to Food Waste Innovation Than Tech, According to ReFED’s Dana Gunders

This being The Spoon, a lot of our discussions around food waste concern the innovative technologies that could help us eventually curb the multi-billion-dollar problem and meet national and international targets to halve food waste by 2050. But as we learned today at our Food Waste Insights and Innovation Forum, done in partnership with nonprofit ReFED, tech is only one piece of the solution. When it comes to food waste, true innovation is as much about new business models, behaviors, and ways of thinking as it is about advances in, say, machine learning or computer vision.  

Dana Gunders, the Managing Director and a founder of ReFED, kicked off the event by asking two important questions related to food waste: What is innovation, and what is the problem we’re trying to solve with it?

The second question is the easier one to answer, and Gunders called on some well-known stats as a way of explaining how “radically inefficient” our food system actually is:

  • 35 percent of all food in the U.S. goes uneaten
  • $408 billion annually is spent in the U.S. on food that is never eaten
  • More than 40 million Americans are considered food insecure

Food waste also accounts for 4 percent of U.S. GHG emissions (that’s 58 million cars worth’ of greenhouse gases), 14 percent of all freshwater use, 18 percent of all cropland use, and 24 percent of landfill inputs.

Citing data from Project Drawdown, Gunders pointed out that reducing food waste ranked first of 76 solutions meant to reverse climate change — ahead of plant-based diets, utility-scale solar, wind turbines, and other well-known contenders.

New innovations will help us reach those targets and cut down overall food waste, but as we learned at today’s event, “innovation” means different things to different stakeholders when it comes to food waste. “People talk about food waste as if it were one problem. It’s not,” Gunders said at the event. “This is a complex set of inefficiencies and we need a whole suite of solutions to address that.” Gunders is, of course, referring to the wide variety of ways in which food is wasted along the supply chain. Post-harvest food loss looks different from food thrown out at the grocery store. Both of those in turn look different than food that we dump down our kitchen drains. In all of these scenarios, food waste looks different, so it follows that the solutions will vary greatly based on which part of the supply chain they are aimed at.

Tech is one obvious tool when it comes to innovation, and at this point, companies are working with everything from machine learning and image recognition to hyperspectral imaging and sensors to fight food waste. These and other technologies can track waste, help retailers forecast more precisely, and even tell us which pieces of fruit will ripen soonest in any given crop. 

But, as mentioned above, technology is only one piece of innovation. Equally important are new processes and business models as well as what Gunders calls “cultural evolution.”

New business models around food waste have been emerging steadily over the last few years, many of them around grocery and/or restaurant services selling surplus food. This is a model popularized by the likes of Imperfect Foods, Too Good to Go, Flashfood, and many others. Upcycled products are another example, as is offering financial incentives to managers, as Sodexo is doing. 

Cultural evolution, meanwhile, refers to what Gunders called “innovation on a much simpler level.” It’s smaller actions that work together to make the public more aware of food waste and encourage changes in behavior. Signage in dining halls about food waste or allowing customers to taste a product before they buy it are two examples.

In the wake a of the pandemic, a new administration, and an increased sense of urgency around climate change and food equity, the culture in the U.S. right now is open to change. As Gunders pointed out, now is the time for businesses with food waste solutions to consider where they fit into these changes and how they might test their customers accordingly.

Witness the Many Forms of Food Waste Innovation

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Since the start of 2021, we’ve seen numerous developments that showcase how vast and varied the efforts to fight food waste have become. Sachets that slow food spoilage. Hyperspectral imaging to analyze avocados. Vodka made from old crackers. A skincare line. 

All of these examples (and many others) underscore both the need for innovation and the fact that we’re getting more of it nowadays when it comes to food waste. Food waste, after all, is a global problem with environmental, monetary, and human consequences. To mitigate climate change and build a more resilient food system, the planet needs to meet food waste reduction targets set down by the United Nations, the USDA, the EPA, and others, including the UN Sustainable Development Goal of cutting food waste in half by 2050 (UN SDG Target 12.3.1).

Even just a few years ago, both the issues and the UN goal were mere abstraction to many outside the food industry. After all, it’s hard to visualize statistics like “one-third of the world’s food goes to waste” or “food waste’s global footprint is 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.”

Fortunately, groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ReFED, the World Wildlife Fund, and others have worked tirelessly over the last several years to bring the topic of food waste closer to center stage in the conversations about our food system. In fact, ReFED estimates that the total amount of food wasted in the U.S. has leveled off since 2016, while food waste per capita has decreased 2 percent over the last three years. Meanwhile, investment is slowly but surely trickling into the space, with companies like Apeel, Imperfect Foods, and Silo closing large rounds of funding in the last several months.

Still, there is a lot of work to be done, which is where innovation can play a big role. Food waste happens at every stage of the food supply chain, from items left in the field to rot to those dumped own the drain or sent to the landfill. To curb the waste, we need more investment in the kind of infrastructure that can measure, rescue, and recycle organic waste and prevent it from going to landfills and incinerators. We also need a huge collective effort from food producers, manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, capital providers, and others, with innovation at the center of those actions. 

Many are already bringing new technologies and processes to the food supply chain to try and make waste less possible. One need only glance briefly at the level of innovation currently happening around food waste to understand the breadth of entrepreneurs, companies, and agencies using their collective brainpower to build more food-waste-fighting solutions.

But rather than read a big ol’ list of companies, I instead encourage you to join us next week, on June 16, for the Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum. The Spoon has teamed up with ReFed for the all-virtual event, which will include chats with experts across the food supply chain as well as panels and innovator demos.

At this event, we want to highlight innovators in the food waste space, acknowledging the work of companies developing everything from biosensing technology for the supply chain to shelf-life extension tools for grocery retailers to those evolving and improving the date-labeling system in the U.S. Add grocery order automation, upcycling, solutions to at-home food waste, and many other areas to that list.

The event will also connect innovators — whether you’re onstage or in the audience — with investors and capital, and will even include a session dedicated to how companies can go about raising money for their company. An open networking/demo time will also allow investors to ask one-on-one questions to innovators and vice versa.

Got ideas you want to share about how to reduce food waste? Or maybe you’re looking for a new idea or partner to help supercharge your own company’s efforts in this area, or you just want to learn more about this growing movement. Whichever the case, register today for this half-day event.

More Food Tech Headlines

LIVEKINDLY Collective Acquires Seaweed Burger Maker, The Dutch Weed Burger – The Dutch Weed Burger makes a range of meat analogs using seaweed as the hero ingredient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Print a Drink 3D Prints Designs Inside a Cocktail, Develops Smaller Machine for Corporations – Print a Drink has created two working robots (one in the U.S. and one in Europe) that can print out custom designs inside drinks.

NPD: Shipments of Plant-Based Proteins to Restaurants Up 60 Percent Year Over Year – Shipments of plant-based proteins from foodservice distributors to commercial restaurants were up 60 percent year-over-year in April of 2021.

Join The Spoon and ReFED for the Food Waste Insights and Innovation Forum

By now, you know the stats: Each year, over one-third of our food produced is wasted.

That translates to about $285 billion (or 54 million tons) worth of food each year in the US alone. That’s more than a quarter trillion dollars worth of food, produced from or with scarce inputs like water, land and animals that are slaughtered — food that won’t end up on the plates of people who go hungry every day. Food that will be tossed aside and become trash.

It’s a big problem, but the good news is there’s a huge movement across the food system to find innovative ways to reduce the amount of food waste. One of the strongest voices at the center of this movement is ReFED, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to ending the food waste crisis. ReFED’s efforts to create awareness through a data-driven approach to catalyze change is something we’ve covered here at The Spoon and one of the reasons we’re big fans of what they do.

All of which is to say, when we decided to do an event focused on highlighting innovation in reducing food waste, ReFED was our first choice for a partnership.

Today we’re excited to announce the event and share details with the food tech community.

The Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum is a free-to-attend half-day virtual event on June 16th from 9 AM to 1 PM PT (12 PM to 4 PM ET) and will feature some of the leading companies and organizations. We’ll dive into their work and progress in building a less wasteful food system and hear about how they overcame barriers through leveraging innovation.

We’ll hear from leaders within companies like The Wonderful Company and Hellmann’s about innovative approaches they’ve taken to reducing food waste. We’ll talk to investors like S2G Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox about the ways in which capital can be deployed to scale impactful solutions. Finally, we’ll also hear from innovators like Spoiler Alert and Smoketown building new technologies and systems to reduce food waste.

We’ll also highlight emerging innovators chosen by ReFED and The Spoon who are creating technology-driven solutions to reduce waste across the food system, whether that’s at the farm, in the supply chain, at the restaurant or grocery store or in our own fridges.

If you have ideas you want to share about how to reduce food waste, are looking for a new partner to help supercharge your own company’s efforts in this area, or just want to learn more about this growing movement, register today for this half-day event on June 16th (it’s free!, thanks in part to our sponsors Google and FoodX Technologies).

We’ll be keeping you updated over the next several weeks as more speakers are added and the full agenda is released. In the meantime, reserve your ticket today, and get ready to help us further the conversation around how we can innovate to fight food waste.

ReFed and Others Introduce a New Policy Action Plan to Fight Food Waste

Several organizations banded together this week to release the US Food Loss & Waste Policy Action Plan, which calls on the Biden administration and Congress to take more action when it comes to fighting food waste. ReFed, the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) are founding supporters of the new plan.

Between 30 and 40 percent of all food produced is lost or wasted, with $408 billion spent in the U.S. alone to grow, process, transport, and store food that is never consumed, according to an email from ReFed sent to The Spoon. Food waste is also a major contributor to climate change, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimating its global footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.

“Addressing this challenge is essential to building a regenerative and resilient food system that helps to mitigate climate change, reverse nature loss, and delivery positive outcomes for both producers and consumers,” notes the new plan.

To do that, the above organizations have compiled a list of recommendations for Congress and the Biden administration that would aid in the goal of reducing food waste and loss by 50 percent by 2030 (in accordance with the UN SDG Target 12.3.1). 

The US Food Loss & Waste Policy Action plan makes five recommendations, as noted by ReFed’s email: 

  • Invest in the infrastructure to measure, rescue, recycle, and prevent organic waste from entering landfills and incinerators
  • Expand incentives to institutionalize surplus food donation and strengthen regional supply chains
  • Assert the US Government’s leadership on FLW globally and domestically
  • Educate and activate consumers via private and public food waste behavior change campaigns
  • Require a national date labeling standard

The plan, which you can download and read in full here, outlines each of these recommendations and delves into specifics as to what action steps might be taken by Congress and the Administration. 

ReFed earlier this year unveiled its new Insights Engine, an online hub for both data and insights around the global food waste problem. It also includes an extensive database of companies innovating up and down the food supply chain to combat the country’s food waste issues.

Meanwhile, other notable supporters of the new Action Plan include Kroger, Unilever, Hellmann’s, and many other food companies.

ReFED: Food Waste has ‘Leveled Off’ Since 2016, But More Must Be Done

The total amount of food wasted in the U.S. has leveled off since 2016, while food waste per capita has decreased 2 percent over the last three years, according to ReFED’s newly launched data hub, the Insights Engine. But more must be done to meet the country’s goal of cutting food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

First announced last year, the Insights Engine is an online hub for data and analysis related to the global food waste problem. Among the other findings ReFED released today:

  • In 2019, 35 percent of food went uneaten or unsold. That’s the equivalent of throwing away $408 billion or 1.9 percent of U.S. GDP.
  • More than 50 percent of waste at the farm level is from food that does not get harvested but is perfectly edible.
  • Seventy percent of food waste at restaurants and foodservice businesses comes from customers not finishing their meals.
  • At-home food waste remains the largest generator of food waste in the U.S.

ReFED estimates that an annual investment of $14 billion will be needed to implement the kinds of solutions that will reduce food waste by 45 million tons annually. The Insights Engine reviews over 40 of these solutions, analyzing them based on things like net economic benefit, greenhouse gas emissions reduced, jobs created, and meals recovered. The Engine also provides a directory of organizations helping fight food waste, a tool that tracks current and upcoming food waste policies, and an “impact calculator” that puts into numbers the impact of food waste on the climate, economy, and population.

Roughly 1.3 billion tons of edible food worldwide goes to waste each year, and experts predict this number will jump to 2.1 billion by 2030. Solutions to this problem span everything from food rescue companies to technologies for preservation, cold storage, harvest and post harvest, and many other ideas, tools, and processes.

As a companion to the Insights Engine, ReFED also released its “Roadmap to 2030” framework today, which will help the organization implement the solutions found in the Insights Engine. It outlines seven “key action areas” for fighting food waste over the next 10 years, and also includes a financial analysis of where investments (public, private, philanthropic, and capital) should be directed.

ReFed Launches a $10M Campaign to Reduce Food Waste, Announces New Insights Engine

ReFed today made two big announcements around its continued fight against food loss and waste. The U.S.-based nonprofit has launched a $10 million fundraising campaign to support projects and initiatives that reduce waste in the supply chain. Additionally, ReFed will release an online hub for food waste data and insights next year, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The campaign is meant to support initiatives across the entire food supply chain that help to reduce food loss and waste. Crown Family Philanthropies, the Fink Family Foundation, The Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation, the Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, and Wiancko Charitable Foundation are already involved and have helped to raise $3 million so far. The Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust has made a matching grant.

Additionally, the campaign is part of an ongoing effort to aid in the goal of the United Nations, the USDA, and the U.S. EPA to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030. As we discussed in a recent Spoon Plus report on food waste innovation, many companies and solutions exist in the space, but a great many more are needed in order to “make food waste less possible” for producers, retailers, and consumers alike.

Also supporting the 2030 goal is ReFed’s forthcoming Insights Engine, an online hub for both data and insights around the global food waste problem. Some features will include in-depth analyses on existing food waste solutions, a directory of these existing solutions and companies, a calculator that shows food waste’s impact on both the environment and food insecurity, and financial analysis that will help direct the private and philanthropic capital needed to fund new solutions.

Alongside the Insights Engine, ReFed will release its Roadmap to 2030, which the organization says will serve as its guide for the next decade around the actions it and other players in the food system take to strengthen the fight against food waste.

The U.S. 2030 Food Loss and Waste Reduction Goal was launched back in 2015 by the USDA and the EPA as a companion to the UN’s Target 12.3. Over the five years since, we have seen the number of companies working to fight food waste grow, particularly around waste at consumer-facing levels (grocery, household, etc.). Even so, 40 percent of the world’s food continues to be wasted, resulting in 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases and economic losses of about $750 billion annually.

ReFed said today the $10 million campaign will help make a significant reduction in the amount of food being wasted each year. Meanwhile, Insights Engine is expected to be released in early 2021.

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.