Food waste is one of the biggest tragedies of our time. We use the natural environment and human effort to produce food and nearly 30% of what we produce goes to the trash bin. Food leftovers that go to the landfill emit significant amounts of methane and carbon dioxide which contribute to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. It also affects the landscape that we live in. Each of us has an impact on the amount of food wasted, But municipalities hold the power to change the way we handle the waste.
Let’s have a look on what your municipality can do about food waste:
Recycling systems
Providing proper recycling for a municipality is a necessity, but what specifically can one do with leftovers? Food leftovers can be turned into bioenergy during the decomposition process. Cooperation with food waste management companies is an efficient method to ensure that all of the organic leftovers will be turned into bioenergy.
Educational campaigns
Providing educational campaigns amongst society and especially at schools is crucial. Increased awareness will turn into less food waste generated by households. This is a long-term plan, but it’s totally worth investing in it!
Cooperation between Government and Food Industry
The Food Industry is responsible for 46% of food loss. Therefore, cooperation between the industry and the authorities is extremely important. The government should be the leading force in executing change, by setting goals and introducing laws and regulations. An important aspect is financing support in the introduction of sustainable technologies and supporting initiatives undertaken by industry.
Food banks
Food banks collect food from entrepreneurs and supermarkets. They store it in warehouses or hand it over immediately if it is food with a short use-by date. Food banks donate food to aid organizations that run shelters or deliver food packages to the people in need.
Introducing food inventory management Systems in public institutions
The biggest contributors to food waste in the public sector are elderly care centers with as much as 71% of the waste and 12% of both schools and kindergartens. Those amounts can be significantly reduced by implementing suitable inventory software.
With TotalCtrl Inventory, you can reach the goal of reducing food waste and have a real impact on the future of our planet!
Would you like to live more sustainably, but you don’t know how to start? Wasting food is one of the biggest environmental problems. According to statistics, food waste produces 6% of global CO2 emissions and the food industry emits 26% of global CO2 emissions.
In this article, you will find 6 tips on how to reduce food waste in your daily life.
1. Plan your grocery shopping and avoid overbuying
Most of us have a habit of buying more products than we actually need. Let’s change it! Reorganize your grocery shopping and start by creating a list of products that you are using and like the most. Before you go shopping, try to do an inventory of what you already have in your pantry, fridge, and freezer.
Check the “best before” dates when you buy the products and make sure you will use them before they expire
It might be difficult, but try to avoid buying more products than you need. It’s better to go to the grocery store frequently than once a week. Another way to keep track of groceries is by using grocery inventory apps.
If you cook frequently and have small amounts of leftovers, put them in the glass container. Too much potion for dinner? You can eat it the next day. Did you cook too much rice? You can add it to the next lunch.
3. Keep tops, stalks, peels, and do the Vegetable Broth
Do you peel vegetables? Then don’t throw the skin. These leftovers have power! Many nutrients and minerals are located just under the skin. From these leftovers, you can prepare amazing Vegetable Broth and then use it as a base for soup
Do you know that the size of your plate can change your perspective on how much you eat?
You can fill up your big plate and don’t even realize you overeating. Change your plate and bowl for a smaller one and check if you still need more food after eating your portion.
Researchproves this step help reducing food waste by 25%.
5. Say Hello to your freezer
Freezing is the best way of preserving food.
If you have cooked too much and don’t want to eat the same meal for a week, just freeze it! Divide the meal into portions, put in bags or containers, and leave it in the freezer.
What else can you save before spoiling by freezing? Fruits, veggies, bread, meat, greens, and herbs
6. Blend it!
Too many fruits in your pantry?
You can save them from spoiling by making a smoothie! You don’t need any recipe, you can mix whatever you have and whatever you want.
There are many simple methods on how to save food, those were only a few examples. Remember that small changes to your daily habits can make a big impact not only on our planet but also on your pocket. Try pantry inventory software.
Matsentralen Oslo is the Oslo branch of Matsentralen, a Norwegian food bank network that aims to fight food waste. Matsentralen Oslo receives food from 50 suppliers. It then distributes this food to more than 120 hunger relief charities in Oslo. In 2017, they redistributed 1270 tonnes of food, which is equal to 2.5 million meals.
A large quantity of food inventory, however, came with challenges in recording inventory accurately and quickly. All their processes were manual and required excessive paperwork.
We saw this as an opportunity for joint value-creation. TotalCtrl created two applications specifically for Matsentralen Oslo. They served as our pilot customer for our inventory solution for food banks.
For Matsentralen Oslo, this reduced time spent on inventory management. Further, it led to significant food waste savings.
Moving From Pen & Paper to Digital
Before using TotalCtrl’s solution, Matsentralen Oslo recorded food donations on paper without details. They didn’t specify the exact amount, weight, and brand of food they received.
Charities determined the number of designated products during checkout by weighing each pallet and recording its weight. They disregarded the contents of the pallet.
All transactions were manually recorded in Microsoft Excel by one employee. Thus, inventory management had many inaccuracies across its entire process.
The food waste management system was also faulty. Matsentralen Oslo had to keep many food products in their inventory to satisfy demand. However, most foods have a limited shelf life.
Thus, they had to get rid of their inventory before food expired to avoid food waste. Sometimes, the fluctuating nature of demand did not accommodate this.
The main challenges at Matsentralen Oslo can be boiled down to:
Inaccuracies in recording inventory
Manual distribution and record-keeping processes
Wasted time
Unpredictable supply and demand
By collaborating with TotalCtrl, Matsentralen Oslo was able to digitize its inventory management system, saving time and money.
TotalCtrl’s Food Bank Solution For Matsentralen Oslo
To address inventory management challenges across the entire supply chain, we created two digital applications, one for Matsentralen Oslo and one for the charities.
The Matsentralen app helped add products to inventory through scanning or manually. This gave Matsentralen an accurate and holistic view of their inventory. Matsentralen also had access to a web dashboard, where they could edit information on charities and suppliers and download data in the form of a spreadsheet.
The charity app allowed charities to view Matsentralen’s full inventory before visiting the warehouse. Charity employees and volunteers added items placed in inventory by Matsentralen Oslo into the charity’s own shopping cart when they picked them up. Thus, the products were automatically deducted from Matsentralen’s inventory, thus digitizing the entire process.
Matsentralen Oslo Saved Time and Money
Digitizing their entire inventory benefited Matsentralen in several ways. Thanks to TotalCtrl, they could:
Record their inventory with precision
Save €1,781 (NOK 17,700) each year in manual time
Allow charities to browse their inventory and select products digitally
Identify trends of supply and demand based on collected data
Insert expiration dates for the products in inventory
Save 1,428 tonnes of food, which is equivalent to 2,856,000 more meals, and 4,284 tonnes of CO2 each year
Save €1,317 (NOK 13,100) in paper expenditure each year.
The solution had an initial set up fee of €3999 and a monthly fee of €39. Thus, the investment pays for itself in less than a two-year time.
TotalCtrl Can Help Make Food Banks Waste-Free
“As a result of the high number of products and a great deal of manual handling of the inventory, we contacted TotalCtrl for assistance with the automation of processes.”
Cristiano Aubert. CEO, Matsentralen Oslo
The food banks’ solution can easily be implemented in other Matsentralens in Norway. The challenges food banks face are similar and the TotalCtrl solution can help digitize their inventories. By moving from manual handling of goods to digital control and automation, all food banks can save time, money, and help with the fight against food waste.
Your chicken or vegetables go bad in the fridge. Or maybe you’ve cooked a bigger portion than you intended, and you know it won’t taste good again the next day.
There is a quick solution. Just throw it away.
Now imagine that happening with billions of people around the world.
And just like that, through a mindless everyday task, you have all contributed to one of the biggest problems in the world: food waste.
But how big of a problem is it? Is it as simple as people throwing food in the garbage?
We’ll cover all things related to food waste in this article. Read on to learn more about:
What is Food Waste and Food Loss (With Examples)
Why Food Waste is a Problem (15+ Food Waste Statistics)
What Are the Causes of Food Waste?
How You Can Help to Reduce Food Waste
What is Food Waste and Food Loss (With Examples)
Food waste is essentially food that was produced or harvested for consumption but is instead thrown away.
When food spoils or expires, it’s not suitable for consumption anymore and gets thrown away. That’s food loss.
So, when you go to a restaurant and don’t finish your plate, the cook will throw your food away. And that’s food waste. Whereas if your broccoli start smelling in the fridge, that’s food loss.
Although food waste management experts use two different terms, both food waste and food loss contribute to food waste.
All the inedible parts of your food, however, like leaves or shells, are not counted. This is because they don’t fit the definition of food waste as “intended for consumption”.
We should note here that both waste and loss happen throughout the entire supply chain. So, there can be waste from the farmer, the restaurant that’s cooking your food, or the grocery store.
The waste that comes from supply chains was put in the spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since restaurants, canteens, and cafes were closed, all their food inventory went to waste. Thus, they contributed to the creation of already huge mountains of wasted food.
A food waste mountain in Singapore. Source: Grand Cornett
Why Food Waste is a Problem (10+ Food Waste Statistics)
Now that we’ve touched base on what food waste is, let’s discuss how it is harmful.
You may be aware of some of the negative effects of food landfills in terms of space use, but the issues run deeper than you think.
Two of the biggest concerns associated with food waste are CO2 emissions and water waste.
Food Waste Causes Carbon Emissions
Each kilogram of waste contributes to the release of 2.5 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. And globally, we throw away around 1.3 billion tons of food every year. That’s one-third of the world’s entire food production.
If you’re numerically-savvy, you’ve probably done the math: that’s 3.25 billion tones of CO2 emissions per year. By comparison, the CO2 released from all air conditioning devices around the world amounts to 2 billion tons per year.
Food Waste Leads to Water Waste and Ethical Concerns
As for water waste, 1.3 billion tons of wasted food leads to 45 trillion gallons of water being lost every year. Water is used throughout the entirety of the food production cycle, and when we throw food away, we also waste the water used to produce it.
Food Waste is a Priority for Sustainable Development Goals
Here are some other mind-blowing statistics:
The water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted is equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
28% of the world’s agricultural land produces food that is wasted or lost.
The economic impact of food waste is calculated at about 750 billion USD per year.
As we’ve already mentioned, some of the food is wasted before it ever reaches you.
Food waste across the supply chain is more prominent in underdeveloped countries. Whereas in developed countries, most of the waste happens at the retailer and consumer level.
Let’s look more in-depth at some of these different causes.
#1 – Never being harvested
25% of a farmer’s produce is left to rot in the field. This is mainly due to imperfections in the production process.
Consumers and retailers have become increasingly picky about the quality and look of their fruits and vegetables. So, if the product has some imperfections, farmers tend to disregard it completely and let it rot in the fields.
Source: The Asian Age
A decrease in demand can also lead to food never leaving the farm. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, led to a huge drop in demand for fresh fruits and vegetables, both by consumers and grocery stores and restaurants.
So farmers had to let their produce go and not harvest it, leading to tons of wasted food.
#2 – Damaged on the road
Transporting food is harder and more difficult to do than you think. Refrigeration units and big freezers are put in place. But sometimes taking food from point A to point B can damage it in various ways:
Refrigeration units can break or deregulate temperature on the way. With no one to check on their status, they can quickly spoil.
Food can smash into each other or when transported through a bumpy road. This can lead to the packaging of packed foods to break, fruit and vegetables to be damaged, and lots of food to fall out of their containers.
Blame the weather! If it ends up being too hot or too cold that day, food that’s not in temperature-controlled containers can end up being spoiled.
#3 – Thrown out by inspection
Most food never goes directly to grocery stores or restaurants. It usually stops at a distribution facility. There, designated inspectors look at its quality and look for any imperfections.
Even if the food has been lucky enough to survive the long road to their destination, it is now up to facility inspectors to determine its fate if it has suffered a bit of damage.
Once the food inspectors have removed all the unlucky foods, they’ll now be put in another truck to be transported to their next destination.
#4 – Discarded by grocery stores and restaurants
During transportation from the distribution facility to the retailers or restaurants, a heap of damage can happen, which we’ve already discussed.
So, once food reaches its (almost) final destination, it’s also inspected by the grocery stores and restaurants. They throw out any potentially damaged food, which might have been unhealthy to eat, spoiled, or overripen.
Once they’re up for sale in grocery stores, some of them might end up not being purchased by customers before their expiration dates, which leads to food loss.
The food bought by restaurants suffers a similar fate. Restaurants throw away some of the food that expires before serving to customers. And all of the customers’ unfinished meals go in the trashcan too.
#5 – Thrown away by end customers
And now we get to you. As a food purchaser and consumer, you are the end of the chain. However, don’t underestimate your impact.
Imagine that only a portion of the food makes it to your table, once it’s been filtered through the supply chain. And then you end up wasting some of that food as well.
By wasting food, you’re contributing to a large problem, which is threatening our water resources and the quality of air in our environment.
How You Can Help
By now, you should be aware of what food waste is, the scope of the problem, and who is causing it. Luckily, some companies are addressing this issue at all levels, and TotalCtrl is at the forefront of that initiative.
We have created food waste solutions for municipalities, restaurants, and for you, the consumer.
By downloading TotalCtrl Home, you can dramatically reduce the amount of waste you produce. You get control over your food inventory, get expiration date alerts, and customized recipes based on the food you have on your fridge and your pantry.
If you want to be part of the change, head on over to the App Store or Google Play and download TotalCtrl Home for free!
