Reducing food loss

Efforts to cut the waste of edible food, and the products that come out of them.

Where loss happens

Food loss occurs at every stage. In the field, vegetables outside specification on size or shape; in processing, offcuts; in retail, stock approaching its date; at home, ingredients that never got used. The causes differ, so the solutions do too.

What reaches the market as a product mostly addresses the first two: turning out-of-spec vegetables into processed goods, or converting pomace, husks and peel from a production line into something else.

Choosing a “food loss” product

This is a category where language runs ahead of substance. Whether a product genuinely reduces loss usually shows in how specifically it explains where its raw material came from. A product that says not only “made with out-of-spec vegetables” but which region, and why they were rejected, is more likely to be a working system rather than a story.

Whether the source of the raw material is described specifically
Whether that material really was headed for disposal
If it costs more than the conventional product, whether the reason is explained
Discounted short-dated stock is also, unglamorously, food loss reduction