At this week’s National Food Waste Summit, some of the brightest minds on the subject from around the world discussed an issue that plagues the planet. It appears Australia may get pretty close to its target to halve food waste by 2030, it could even make it, but the efforts are monumental from farmer to consumer. And it’s not like there are no other pressing issues on every part of our food system. So, what is it going to take?
The Australia statistics are starting to roll a little too easily off the tongue: 7.6 million tonnes a year, costs the country $36.6 billion or $2500 per family annually, and is equivalent to 29 million meals going to waste every year. If that’s hard to visualise, our annual food waste pile is the size of Queensland.
To get a global picture, this year’s UN Food Waste Index Report found one fifth of food produced for human consumption – around one billion meals a day – is lost or waste globally. It costs the global economy US$1 trillion, generates up to 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions (five times the aviation sector), and 60 per cent happens at a household level.
The Australian goal is the same as the UN, which has it as one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
As former New South Wales chief data scientist and now co-founder of ServiceGen, Dr Ian Oppermann, said on day one of the summit, “What other $36.6 billion problem do we have that we are not adequately able to address? What problem do we have that big that it doesn’t get the highest level of attention from government?”
He talked about the importance of standards – with a defined standard, it is easier to see and understand the different perspectives on something. In the case of food waste, the farmer, manufacturer, logistics provider, retailer, and consumer.
“It’s really worth putting time into outcomes frameworks (e.g. halve food waste by 2030) and then localising what you can do, what you can enable to better understand the issue or then move forward, and then build the framework to learn together,” he said.
One of the summit speakers, US on-farm food loss expert and consultant, Lisa Johnson, talked about the horticulture industry and that food waste is complex, even just at that first step, with two factors completely out of the hands of the farmer – weather and demand.
“What I can tell you is that what we have in hand, harvested horticultural crops by hand, which is a gold mine if we’re really interested in social impact, food and nutrition security. If you look at the framework of people, planet, and profit, most of the benefit from recovering farm loss is going to impact people, which is difficult to start a gold rush. Until it’s profitable to recover all this food that’s left on farms, it’s not going to happen. We need to figure out ways to benefit growers to use everything that they have,”
The work being done by End Food Waste Australia horticulture lead, Melissa Smith, and her team in finalising the Horticulture Sector Action Plan this year talks to exactly that.
And this is where End Food Waste Australia tends to come into its own. I guess when an organisation is set up by a researcher, Dr Steven Lapidge, there will be a lot of research. Lapidge launched the 2024-2040 Strategic Business Plan at the summit.
“This strategic plan is about how we are going to get there, as an organisation and as a country. Because none of us can do it alone,” Lapidge said.
“We are one of the only countries in the world to have a costed plan to halve food waste by 2030, and that is a bottom up, evidence-based plan. We have also become one of the world’s largest public private partnerships in food waste and I’m really proud of that. Australia started 10 years behind many of our countries, but we are now one of the largest, and we’re catching up quickly on the rest of the world. That’s something I think we should all be proud of,” he said.
Since EFWA began as a CRC, it set-up a structure three divisions - Reduce, Transform, and Engage – completing area specific research to inform action plans across Australia’s food system.
And this week’s summit, 18 months on from the last, shows that the dial has shifted. Research projects, PhD pipelines, trials, Sector Action Plans – 10 completed, 10 to go, and the voluntary Australian Food Pact now with 40 signatories are evidence of this.
And the launch of a food waste tax proposal at the 2022 summit has resulted in the Incentivising Food Donations to Charitable Organisations Bill being tabled in the parliament last month
As Lapidge said, still a lot to do and a long way to go, but also much to celebrate and be proud of.
The momentum needs to ratchet up now, research never ends, but action must begin, accelerate and be maintained.
Behavioural change was talked about a lot this week, with EFWA’s national consumer campaign set to launch before the end of the year.
It’s got more consumer research informing it than imaginable, with Monash Sustainable Development Institute, BehaviourWorks, senior research fellow, Dr Mark Boulet, explaining the project’s workshops found there were 25 behaviours consumers engaged in when it came to household food waste.
“But before we rushed into the design of an intervention, what we wanted to do was not bring our own assumptions to the issue, because we are not our target audience. We really want to understand the behaviours from the perspective of households, not food waste nerd like us. We tried to pull apart from our focus groups and interviews what could help people use up the food in their fridge and what prevents them from doing so.
“This is what I loved; our targets were willing to go there with us is. We put our assumptions about consumers to the side and let them direct us as to the shape and scope of the campaign,” Boulet said.
It turns out – those massive numbers I mentioned up front can hinder rather than prompt change. EFWA campaign director, Mandy Hall, summed it up, “Blame, shame, and burden are the enemy of behaviour change.”
The food and beverage sector is facing a lot of challenges at the moment – interest rates, inflation, energy prices, our very food system, and the heaping mound of opportunity and challenge that is food waste.
From the summit this week and being one of those “food waste nerds” like Boulet mentioned, willingly shut in a windowless conference room for more than 12 hours, it feels like EFWA has set a model, maybe even a standard others can learn from. It’s just got to keep going.
