Nearly 200 food suppliers, including some of the world’s largest producers, have pledged to halve their food waste by 2030.
The companies, which make products like Rice Krispies cereal, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and spam, have joined the 10x20x30 initiative, a global effort to reduce the staggering amount of food thrown away each year, the World Resources Institute said, who supports the program. Wednesday. Major food manufacturers – a list that includes giants Unilever, PepsiCo and Nestle Global – are joining some of the world’s largest food retailers, which signed on to the campaign last year.
Companies will prepare annual reports on their food loss and waste and will be encouraged to share information on the Food Waste Atlas, a searchable website. But how they achieve their goals will vary, says a representative from the institute.
Deanna Bratter, sustainability manager at Danone North America, whose portfolio includes Silk Dannon and Activia yogurts and creams, says her company is looking for options. At the low-sugar Two Good line, she says, the effort could be to use the surplus product in special “limited batch” flavors. Elsewhere, she says, the company is looking for ways to turn what would have been waste into animal feed or compost.
“Food waste has always been a problem for the industry,” she says.
The idea behind 10x20x30 was to get 10 big retailers – a group that ended up including Walmart, Kroger and the parent company of Giant Foods – to commit in the same way, and then each hire 20 of their suppliers to also engage in the hopes to achieve a goal set at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to halve global food waste.
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According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, about 30 percent of the world’s food is not harvested or thrown away at various points in the supply chain. And all of these losses contribute greatly to climate change, accounting for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. An oft-cited analogy posits that if food waste were its own country, it would only follow the United States and China in its contributions to global warming.
Food manufacturers are only part of the equation. According to a report by the nonprofit ReFED, the vast majority of food waste – around 80% – occurs in homes and in businesses that have contact with consumers, such as grocery stores and restaurants. Food manufacturers account for just 2 percent of the problem, while consumers are responsible for 43 percent, according to the report.
Brian Roe, a professor in the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Development Economics at Ohio State University, says producers can do more – not only to eliminate food waste in their own operations, but also to prevent consumers from making so many throws. “There may besystems that help the consumer waste less food, so it’s not just about bad consumer behavior, ”he says. These can include the right packaging and labeling, better instructions, or smaller portions, he notes.
Roe says the willingness of major manufacturers to sign such an initiative is encouraging, but he hopes the collaborations will lead to more transparency and data sharing. This way, businesses will know what is working and what is not. Now, he says, it may not be clear that an action taken at one point in the supply chain is actually preventing more food from coming out of landfills at the end of it.
For example, if a farmer has a bumper crop of tomatoes a year, it might seem like a good thing to save them. But, says Roe, it might not be such a good idea for tomatoes to move further up the supply chain – where they may have been transported and used other resources along the way – and always end up being thrown away. “All the data that connects the dots can help develop a system-level view of the problem, ”he says.
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