Author: Charlotte Aschim

417 000 tonnes of food is thrown away yearly in Norway, corresponding to NOK 20.7 billion and 1.26 million tonnes of gas emissions. We use the earth’s resources to produce food and up to ⅓ of this goes to waste. Food waste emits large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide, leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Each of us can make an impact on the amount of food that is thrown away as well as the authorities and municipalities having the power to change how we handle food waste.

The European Waste Framework includes major goals to improve food waste for consumers and businesses. UN’s sustainability goal 12.3 also states that we will half the world’s food waste by 2030.

What can we do today to get one step closer to achieving these goals and following the guidelines?

Recycle Waste

First, it is crucial that we ensure that food waste gets reused properly.. Food waste and leftovers can be converted into bioenergy during decomposition processes. It is therefore important to build effective partnerships between municipalities and companies that handle food waste. Such cooperations can help ensure that organic residues are converted into bioenergy.

We Need to Learn More and Spread the Word

There are several players out there who have a vast amount of knowledge on food waste and sustainability. It is therefore critical that institutions such as schools reach out to such players by helping to create awareness about this.

Cooperation Between Authorities and the Food Industry

The food industry accounts for 46% of all food waste. Therefore, industries and the authorities must work together to reduce this measure. The government can implement change by setting goals and introducing laws and regulations. For example, financially supported initiatives for the introduction of sustainable technology and support initiatives from the business community.

Food Banks

Food Banks collect food from places such as grocery stores. The food is then either stored in a warehouse or given away as soon as possible given expiration dates. Food Banks donate food to aid organizations or deliver food packages to people who need it.

Introduce Inventory Systems

The largest contributor to food waste is the public sector. For example, schools and kindergartens account for 12% of food waste in the public sector. This can be greatly reduced by implementing softwares that is suitable for inventory management given the relevant business. 

With TotalCtrl, we can take a big step together towards the goal of halving food waste by 2030.

Restaurants do inventory counts several times a month as they receive orders at least once a week. The manual work is time consuming and most restaurants spend more time than they think when it comes to inventory management.

The restaurant managers we have worked with would much rather spend their time on other tasks (e.g. counting cash, dishwashing) than constantly having to make time to count their inventory.

Why do most people want to avoid counting their inventory manually in restaurants? We see that there are several reasons for this.

Lack of Organization and Control

One of the reasons that keeping track of inventory is so time consuming is that prior to getting to the stage of counting inventory, time needs to be spent on organizing, cleaning and sorting products. 

You have to get rid of items that have gone out of date, clean the shelves, sort and group different types of items – all this before you can even start counting each item.

No System for Expired Products

Most restaurants know that FIFO is an important rule when it comes to inventory management – First In, First Out. In a time-pressured industry such as the restaurant industry, one will often just grab the first thing one finds and therefore often easily forget this. Waiters may  feel that it is not their job to oversee this or do not see the value of FIFO. Furthermore, the management team does not have time for this.

Whatever the reason is for not being able to follow the FIFO-method, a significant part of restaurant inventory ends up being thrown away, making it much harder to keep count.

Read more about how restaurants can reduce food waste here.

Lack of Knowledge Among Employees

Let’s say that you as a restaurant manager have control over an organized inventory and follow the FIFO method. But, you know you can not do this alone. Many new waiters and employees come in and out of the restaurant industry, this means that more time and effort needs to be spent on teaching staff how to manage inventory. 

Price Lookup

After you have counted as well as organized stock and written everything you have down on paper, you have to look up all the prices. You probably have several hundred items in your stock and need to look over the price you paid for each of these, another time consuming task. 

Manual spreadsheets

After organizing, counting and researching prices on inventory – all this is then manually entered into a spreadsheet on the computer. This can often lead to several errors, underlining why counting items manually  is  hard and time consuming.

Time-consuming Calculations and  Analysis

Furthermore, you also need to analyze numbers for your restaurant and understand what those numbers mean. Have any items disappeared? Are you ordering too much of something that leads to food waste?

Furthermore, the whole process needs to be repeated again….

Inventory counting is a time consuming and endless process that can be improved with the help of inventory management software. Read more here about how the HORECA industry can digitize their inventory system.

There are several reasons to be smarter when it comes to fully utilizing the food we buy ? We all need to get better at using leftovers. With this, we give you 10 tips on how to use all your leftovers and avoid food waste:

1. Have a plan

When planning meals, think about what your potential leftovers can be. This can save you time, money and avoid food waste. For example, when cooking vegetables, you can cook enough to not only last you for the day’s meal but use the vegetables as a soup or a pasta dish later in the week.

2. Portion and store smart

Many food products come in large packages, it is thus important that you learn how to store this in the best possible way. It can be smart to freeze items such as bread, tortillas and pita. When it comes to your leftovers, you can store this in glass containers, (both reusable and sustainable), allowing you to see what’s inside. To freeze your leftovers, you can use zip-loc bags, labelling it with the date and what it contains.

3. “Kitchen sink” meals

Well-cooked vegetables, pieces of cheese, beef, shrimp or chicken can be mixed with salad and your favorite dressing for a fresh salad.

4. Alternative to composting

As an alternative to composting, you can store vegetable scraps in a zip-top bag in the freezer to make stock. This can be thawed and placed in a pot of water. Leave it for 2 hours, strain – and you will have a great veggie stock.

5. Turn dinner into a lunch

This saves both time and money in a busy everyday life. Place a portion from your dinner in a lunch box and use it for lunch the next day.

6. Leftovers are ingredients

Your leftovers can be used in many different dishes. If you blend cooked vegetables with a can of tomatoes you can make a delicious veggie sauce for pasta.

7. Old bread?

Mix together remnants of herbs and bread in your food processor to make bread crumbs, and freeze these. Use as a topping for fried or baked cheese, or you could add cheese and make a spread for baked mushrooms.

8. Leftover day

Do you have a lot of leftovers that accumulate in the fridge during the week? Dedicate a day where you commit to “eating down your fridge”. 

9. Soup

You can make soup out of the extra vegetables you have from a previous meal. Put it in a blender with 3 cups of vegetable/chicken broth, and heat the soup. Add a little spice and top with pesto or croutons.

10. Don’t buy in bulks

Buying in bulk may be convenient, but this shopping method leads to more food waste. Try to avoid buying more food than you need. Instead of big hauls at the grocery store, have frequent trips every few days. Remember to use up all the food you purchased during the last trip before buying more groceries. Also, make a list of items that you need to buy and stick to that list. This will help you reduce leftovers, save food and money.

And not to say at least, you can make a pizza out of almost anything?

Monday 31 May, we held our first “TotalCtrl webinar” on digitization and green technology. Here we wanted to go deeper into how the technological landscape in municipal Norway looks like today and why digitization is important for sustainable development in the public sector. During the webinar, Charlotte Aschim (CEO, TotalCtrl) and Nam Vo (Project Manager, TotalCtrl) shared their experiences with green technology and their work in the fight against food waste.

The technological landscape in municipalities today
We have noticed that Norway is behind our neighboring countries Denmark, Sweden and Finland when it comes to digitization and technological development in municipalities. A lot of people might associate new technology with something that is time- and resource consuming, and are skeptical of new things they do not know. This makes the implementation of new technology even more difficult. We see that it is especially the smaller municipalities that is behind when it comes to new technology and digitization. A survey conducted by SINTEF with 340 municipalities shows that it is easier to implement new technology in the large municipalities than in the small and medium-sized ones. Much of this may be due to lack of resources and expertise.

Challenges in kindergartens, and nursing homes
We see that the older generation work at nursing homes, where one can imagine that these do not absorb new technology as well as the younger generation, and rather want the old routines that have worked in all years. The kindergartens we have worked with, on the other hand, have a greater knowledge of environment and sustainability. Several kindergartens are green flag certified, environmental lighthouse certified, health-promoting kindergartens, environmental kindergartens and / or BREEAM certified. One of the reasons for this may be because there are more young people working in the daycare sector who often stay up to date with what is going on in the technology world. But even in kindergartens, we see that they have challenges when it comes to manual routines, and that the use of pen and paper is still common practice. An example of this is seen when ordering food in kindergartens. Each department must check what they have in stock and write down what they will need so that the general manager can collect these notes to be able to order. This often leads to a lack of control, which in turn leads to food being thrown away … This could have been avoided if the kindergartens had better communication and control over what is in them at the various departments.

Ensure good integration of technological solutions in municipal Norway
Based on our experience from both private and public actors undergoing a digital shift, we see some clear similarities in what makes it work:
1. It is important to ally with a so-called “Champion”, ie. a person who is committed and has anchoring authority.
2. One must ensure that both time and money are allocated to the digital shift.
3. Planning, mapping and communication are extremely important factors!

Kommunenorge’s job ahead
The UN’s sustainability goals are becoming more important with each passing day, and aim to secure a future for our future children and grandchildren. Norway has imposed a number of goals on the municipalities that will be tried to be achieved by 2030, including halving food waste. Here we see that there is a great opportunity for municipal Norway to use digitization and green technology. It is important that the municipalities take the initiative, and use the knowledgeable companies out there who want to help.

After a great success with this webinar, our next webinar will have the theme “The digital kindergarten” which will be held in June.

Working in grocery stores during our studies, we became worried for the future. We witnessed tremendous amounts of food being wasted every day.

Together we started our company, TotalCtrl, with the goal of developing a digital tool that would help fight food waste while saving our customers time and money. It all started with the intention of helping grocery stores, as that was where we had first-hand experience with food waste, but after learning more about food waste we found that most of the food waste happened at the consumer level. According to research, you and I were to blame for enormous amounts of fully edible food being wasted every year. 40-50% of all food that is wasted is wasted by households, you, and me. And the reason for this is that we lack control over our inventory, we forget to use the food before it expires, we buy double, and it is a hazel using time to get better control and to be creative in regard to how to utilize existing items in recipes.

After extensive market research we found that the consumer was extremely interested in having a solution that would notify them prior to expiry dates, give them recipes based on inventory and digitize their kitchen. They were interested in this if it helped them save time and money. If it also helped reduce food waste, that would be a bonus, but not something the consumer was so concerned about – in late 2017. Charlotte learned how to code via YouTube and created a prototype of the solution and had it tested by over a 100 people. They loved it.

For us, TotalCtrl, it did not make sense to build such a solution for consumers as it would not make financial sense. So we sent out cold emails to all the online retailers in Norway. I think, at that time, it was about 12 players in the market. The second biggest online retailer in Norway, Handleriet.no, said: yes, this is something we would like to be part of. Together we formed the requirement of the Handleriet.no app.

It was a success. Handleriet.no was happy and TotalCtrl had proven that the technology worked. The solution got a lot of attention and was also ranked as one of the most innovative digital retail solutions, alongside Amazon and Walmart by Retail Insider, but despite increased revenue, Handleriet.no had to close shop in August 2019. Running an online retailer in Norway is hard, and the costs to big to handle. This meant the end of the Handleriet.no app, but not the end of TotalCtrl.

The goal moving forward is to scale the TotalCtrl Home solution globally, ensuring that all consumers plan better, use and purchase food smarter.