🗑️ Freaking out about Food Waste #020
let's do more with less
Growing up as the child of Chinese immigrants, finishing your plate was instilled in me from the moment I could use chopsticks. The notion of going to a restaurant (or grocery store), paying for food, and then throwing out some of it is incomprehensible to me. My upbringing shaped me to rarely have any leftovers and meticulously plan out meals so none of my produce goes bad. When I was younger, always finishing my food led to some pretty chubby cheeks. Nowadays, when I have a big meal coming up, I make sure to work out a little harder so I can leave no crumb behind while avoiding any extra weight gain. Like last Friday when I celebrated my twin friends’ birthday at Korean BBQ. Since I was taught at a young age to not waste food, I was quite surprised to learn from Project Drawdown that reducing food waste is the #1 solution to reduce global emissions.
The Problem
Ready? Here comes a flurry of figures.
Globally, food waste represents 8% of overall emissions.
In the US, 40% of food is wasted. When converted from calories into dollars, this nets out to costing a household of four an average of $1,800 annually. This makes even less sense considering 42 million Americans are food insecure. Reducing food waste by just a third (even though the goal is all of it) would be enough to solve food insecurity in the US.
This begs the question where are all these emissions coming from? Food production and consumption happens through a complex global web of farms, distributors, grocery stores, restaurants, and households. So where are the biggest opportunities to reduce food waste?
The answer is not so simple. Like many other pockets of climate, the problem becomes more complex the more layers you peel back. There’s a number of emissions pathways:
🚜 Emissions that result from food production (farming and animal agriculture)
🚛 Energy associated with transportation of food from production site to human mouth
🧊 Energy used to keep food fresh (cold chain)
🗑️ Methane which is released as food decomposes. Landfills and wastewater represent 20% of overall methane emissions. Methane is responsible for 30% of global warming.
The emissions breakdown varies from country to country depending on consumer behavior and food distribution systems. In the US, households are the biggest source of food waste:
We can further break it down by actual food category. Here, we see that seafood and fresh produce are the most commonly thrown out foods:
The US is not unique with this food waste problem. Around 40% of the food that’s produced in India is also wasted. There is a key distinction though. In the US, the problem lies primarily with households and restaurants. The final destinations in the farm-to-mouth journey. On the contrary, in countries like India, a high proportion of food waste occurs at the source. With limited storage, cold chain, and proper transportation, not all of the food that is grown makes it to the grocery store or restaurant. Given a finite amount of refrigeration, developing countries accordingly prioritize their cold chain systems for dairy, meat, and eggs which often results in an insufficient amount of infrastructure for fresh produce. For example, 60% of banana biomass is left to waste (India is the largest producer of bananas).
Diagnosing the problem correctly
As I’ve alluded to before, climate is a complex adaptive system. Therefore, looking at single-threaded metrics and trying to map direct 1:1 solutions can often result in missing the big picture. Taking the earlier pie chart as an example, 43% of US food waste comes from households. One might think that an appropriate solution would be to fund educational awareness programs or perhaps even shame people for throwing out food. This kind of straightforward thinking over-indexes on consumer willpower and undervalues the power of systems and incentives.
Policy (or lack of good ones) can sometimes leave us scratching our heads. Did you know that states have different definitions and regulations when it comes to date labeling?
City regulations sometimes conflict with state rules. For example, Baltimore forbids the sale of food past its labeled date. Even when a product is regulated, the specific rules vary across states. Take milk, for instance. Florida requires that all milk products “be legibly labeled with their shelf-life date,” though this date is never defined. In Montana, milk must have a sell-by date within 12 days of pasteurization, while Pennsylvania requires it within 17 days. In New Hampshire, a sell-by date is required for cream but not milk. On the other hand, New York, Texas, Wisconsin, and other states have no requirements for date labels on milk or dairy. - NRDC
The lack of consistency in food labeling regulation results in conservative consumer behavior. No one wants to drink spoiled milk. With terms like “Best Before”, “Best By”, “Use By”, and “Sell by” being used interchangeably, it’s impossible to know what to actually do. A study showed that 75% of participants felt unsafe to consume foods beyond the date indicated on the labels. Literal tons of edible food are being thrown away just from unclear and inconsistent food labeling!
In order to operate a successful restaurant, the staff must aim to have all the necessary ingredients in stock. It sucks when you excitedly order a dish that is no longer available. Some excess food is understandably a byproduct of being in the restaurant business. But that’s not the full story.
Up until the passing of the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, businesses were hesitant to donate excess food because they were afraid of getting sued. By legally protecting food donors who give to non-profits, the Good Samaritan Act unlocked the routing of excess food from grocery stores, restaurants, and manufacturers to shelters, food pantries, and food rescue programs. This not only helps reduce food waste, but also feeds those who need help the most.
While poor policy creates problems like labeling confusion and donation hesitancy, there are plenty of ways for climate tech to make a dent in the food waste problem. In the next section, I highlight four companies (Apeel, Afresh, Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, Mill) across four layers of the food waste sequence (farm, grocery, restaurant, household).
Starting at the source: Farm
Apeel is a late-stage startup that helps keep produce fresh for longer. The actual product is a plant-based protective coating that gets applied to avocados, cucumbers, citrus fruits, and more. According to their impact page, in 2022 they saved 44M pieces of fruit from waste which equates to 7K metric tons of CO₂-eq of greenhouse gas emissions avoided and 1.7B liters of water conserved. To dig in further, I got in touch with Apeel (emphasis is mine):
Matt: Fruits and veggies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. What type of produce performs best with Apeel?
Apeel: We’ve tested and seen the efficacy of Apeel’s plant-based protection on countless types of fruits and vegetables. From strawberries to peppers, every fruit and vegetable has a peel or skin that helps keep it fresh. Apeel is an extra “peel” of protection made by applying another layer of what already naturally exists on fruits and vegetables. Adding this microscopic, breathable layer to the surface of fresh produce slows down water loss and oxidation, the main causes of spoilage. The challenge we need to overcome when approaching different varieties of produce relates to how to apply our product at commercial scale. We’ve started with produce that typically goes through a post-harvest packing process, in which we can easily integrate into existing tools to apply Apeel. This includes fruits / vegetables with both inedible peels, like avocados or citrus, or edible peels like organic apples. We have also developed an application process that works for non-spherical produce categories such as our commercially available product for cucumbers, which replaces the plastic shrink wrap typically used on cucumbers.
Matt: I saw that cucumbers with Apeel no longer need to be wrapped in plastic, which of course cuts down on another type of waste. What other benefits does Apeel-coated produce have beyond prolonged shelf life?
Apeel: Many behaviors and solutions exist within the food system to help match the supply of fresh produce, with the demand, all while accounting for its inherent perishability. Apeel’s technologies give the supply chain more time and flexibility to explore sustainable alternatives to transportation (i.e., changing from trucks or air freight to sea freight), storage (i.e., reducing reliance on a continuous cold chain) and packaging methods (i.e., single-use plastic on English cucumbers), all while preventing food waste in the supply chain, at retail or even at the consumer's home.
Grocery
If you’re like me, whenever you need to grab a box of spring mix to chef up a salad, you inevitably turn it upside down and check the bottom to see if any of the leaves have already started to rot. Just last week at Costco, I had to pivot from broccoli to zucchini because literally all of the broccoli was already starting to go bad. We’ve experienced something like this.
Taking the data perspective, Afresh is arming grocery stores with a treasure trove of hidden insights. The operations of coordinating food around the world is an already difficult task that is further complicated when you add the additional requirement of freshness. As traditionally offline businesses like grocery stores come online, there’s always a gap in data quality. Data from the coordination of physical things can often be missing or in an unstructured format. Without the complete picture, grocery stores lack the insights to make dynamic, predictive decisions. By serving as the inventory management system and powered by ML recommendations, Afresh is able to smooth out unstructured data and surface insights that result in fresher produce, fuller shelves, and of course, less wasted product.
Restaurant
Robert Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC), is a food waste OG with over a decade of experience connecting food donors to those who need it the most:
Back in 2009, when I was doing food rescue as a club at NYU, people thought it was illegal. In 2013, people literally told me “Don't do this because it's illegal.”
In our conversation, Robert helped me understand the incentives behind donating food as well as just how many different stakeholders are entangled in this food frenzy.
The key is aligning the donations to financial incentives. There are incentives for businesses to donate their excess food that the IRS provides. Congress is also looking to enhance tax deductions for donating excess food. This is the primary piece that needs to be more well known, but also less complicated. Right now, the calculation for the enhanced tax deductions is either twice your basis cost or half the profit margin plus your basis cost. The reality is a lot of businesses don't even know what their basis cost is. Especially small mom and pops and restaurants; they don't really know how to calculate their basis cost. In a world where I can wave a magic wand, I would align the financial incentives so that people want to work with a food rescue by donating excess food instead of throwing it away. My thought is that we just need to make it easy and convenient and financially aligned. So the same convenience that has brought us here is kind of what allows us to get back to a more circular economy.
This section is called “Restaurant”, but it’s just a placeholder term. Robert reminded me of all the other institutions besides restaurants that end up with excess food.
There's so many culprits. Just in terms of the food supply chain by itself, there's farms, suppliers, and wholesalers. Then the retailers that include the supermarkets and restaurants. There's also catering companies, event venues, production companies, and offices that have cafeterias. There's hospitals that have food halls. Even in the military there are food systems. Public school systems, private school systems - they all have food.
It's all of these disparate stakeholders that can make a difference in this. There’s also government agencies that put on conferences which results in diffused responsibility because the clients who buy the food aren’t the same entity as the catering companies. Both of them end up pointing at each other in terms of who should be the one donating food and paying the fees.
In terms of distribution, the US is much more developed in the sense that there's a lot of homeless shelters, food pantries, and community centers that actually can distribute the food.
The way I see it, we are the bridge between those and we are a kind of transportation company (just in non-profit form) to transport that excess food to those in need.
Household
Our own homes - the smallest, most intimate level of the food waste system. More specifically, our trashcan is the final destination before food heads out to waste management. By designing an analog to the trashcan, Mill has created a tech-enabled bin that compresses and dries peels, bones, and stalks into compact cubes of food scraps that then get picked up and delivered to chicken farms to be used as animal feed. The way I interpret Mill’s philosophical approach to addressing the climate crisis is: collective change is just a lot of individual action combined. There’s already been a lot of press on Mill (like MCJ or TechCrunch) so I’ll stop here, but my first impressions are:
The price point seems prohibitive, but should come down naturally as they scale.
The psychological and quality of life benefits of products like these are underrated. Making trash more fun is not a bad strategy.
It’ll be interesting to see how Mill positions itself for enterprises like offices and governments. (Mill announced a partnership with the City of Tacoma back in February).
Conclusion
The food waste problem is significant and can already be solved today without any new moonshot technologies. We don’t need synthetic biology, direct air capture, or nuclear energy to prevent food from being wasted. Although there’s many players across farms, grocery stores, restaurants, and households, the seeds of progress can be sown from any layer. Eat your leftovers before cooking new food or eating out again. If your bananas are at peak ripeness, make banana bread or freeze them for smoothies instead of throwing them away. And don’t buy a sack of 20 pounds of potatoes from Costco if you live alone and don’t even like potatoes that much.
Further Reading
Food Waste: Fixing the World’s Dumbest Issue by Javier Gascón
What do you want for dinner three days from now by Nitin Iyer
Support Me by Supporting Others
I’m running the NYC Marathon! Since securing a spot and committing to raise $3,000 for Organization for Autism Research, I’ve obviously been running a lot, but I’ve also been spending time to understand what it means to live with autism. From talking to the founder of an autism care startup and my neurodivergent friends, I’ve learned about the various misconceptions around autism and how OAR’s mission of funding research can help.
In addition to the $300 marathon registration fee, I’ve also donated $250 to OAR. We’re 2/3 of the way there! I hope join me and contribute to the fundraiser! I truly appreciate every donation 🙏.
