How to Reduce Food Waste Throughout Your Supply Chain

Preventing food waste being created in the first place is always the best possible option. Once there is surplus or waste to be handled, the available options for repurposing (such as donating food or using waste for anaerobic digestion) are clearly worthwhile – but the best those options can be is ‘less bad’.  

In contrast, prevention is a step towards ‘net good’. It addresses the issue at source and means the system is improved, not just responsibly or better managed. Another way of saying that is that prevention is the only way to truly tackle the problem itself; everything else is simply putting a plaster on top. 

(As a caveat, it’s important to say that – while there’s no danger of not enough food waste being generated to meet or even exceed current charitable donations – hunger is also an issue that ultimately needs addressing at source with long-term, stable solutions.) 

As for why we need to prevent food waste in the first place: it is roughly responsible for 8% of global emissions, making its prevention one of the highest-ranking solutions to our climate crisis in Project Drawdown’s table of solutions. When food is wasted, so are all the energy and resources that went into producing, processing, packaging and transporting that food. By minimising loss and waste, we can reduce our requirements for the land and resources used to produce food, as well as the greenhouse gases released in the process.  

By asking farmers and suppliers what is being wasted and why, you might learn that your specifications are causing waste – for example, perhaps your carrots are being topped, or you’ve specified a certain length, but last year's crop produced smaller carrots than usual. Specifications are often unnecessarily stringent, and you may be able to make quick changes that instantly reduce waste and save you money in the process; suppliers will often be able to offer better prices where there’s less prep and/or waste involved. 

Crop residues are another area of huge (and less talked about) waste on the farm. This term refers to the remains of crops either left behind in the field after the primary harvest or produced during the processing of crops – think peanut shells, wheat bran, corn stalks and husks. As with all organic material, crop residues are an abundant source of carbon, energy and essential nutrients that could be put to use as feedstock, natural fertiliser, bioenergy, bagasse packaging and even sugar. 

Increasingly, we also need to work with farmers to ensure we are planting – and by default creating a market for – crops that are climate resilient and/or well adapted to the specific climatic conditions in a region. Otherwise, we risk both huge losses and supply chain instability.  

Feeding animals the plants that we could eat ourselves is also fundamentally inefficient. For every 100 calories of feed, we get just three calories’ worth of beef. In my opinion, this is the greatest ‘waste’ of all. 

Finally, food waste is also a topic of which consumers are increasingly aware. Making progress in this space and communicating your efforts and results with transparency will help to build your brand’s reputation and appeal to a growing base of ethically conscious consumers.