OPINION
Achieving sustainability Sustainability is a buzzword that we can’t seem to shake off, and rightly so, says Ernie Dewhirst (pictured, managing director of enterprise resource planning specialists, Evolve 4 Solutions Ltd), who has been installing operations centric management systems within the food industry for over 20 years. Here, he shares his thoughts on achieving sustainability in the food and beverage industry by exploring the need for more transparency in the industry through the use of blockchain, allowing for more informed choices, as well as addressing waste through the supply chain. What is sustainability? Let’s start by defining sustainability, specifically in the food and beverage sector. This is a topic that is covered by the European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy first published in 2019 which is at the heart of the European Green Deal. This aims to make food systems fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly. The Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy states its aims as accelerating our transition to a sustainable food system that should have neutral or positive environmental impacts, help to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts, reverse the loss of biodiversity, ensure food security, nutrition and public health - thereby making sure that everyone has access to sufficient, safe, nutritious, sustainable food and preserve affordability of food while generating fairer economic returns, fostering competitiveness of the EU supply sector and promoting fair trade.
recognise and identify the journey that food takes. We need to collect information on the journey and use this to educate the consumers in their buying and eating habits and drive sustainability in all its forms. One approach to collecting and making visible the information is the application of blockchain technology. Although challenging to implement, it would allow everybody in the chain, including the consumer, to see the journey of the product: from farm to fork. Blockchain will allow a consumer to track the food’s journey from the point of source, a farmer for example, through which they could record all the information about the food, for example the condition of the crop, to the batch number. Each organisation in the chain from Farm to Fork would
Blockchain journey tracking Achieving sustainability not only requires the food sector to take the steps defined in this strategy but also to 30 I www.sandwichandfoodtogonews.co.uk
then do the same, all the way through to the stage of a consumer purchasing and consuming that food product. Currently, we tend to only look at the last stage of a food product’s journey, when the product goes into consumer packaging and that tends to be what we focus on from a sustainability point of view. Meat and fish, for example, will have an identification code on the packaging which tells the consumer where it was processed but that doesn’t tell you much – not where it was caught or how sustainable was the method of fishing. There is a need for us now to think about that whole journey. This kind of traceability allows the consumer to make a more informed decision on what they are eating while also helping with the prevention of food fraud.
Product packaging Packaging is one of the more obvious ways in which companies and consumers recognise the sustainability of a product. We all know that there’s a need to reduce plastics and the sandwich industry has made significant steps in moving away from plastic in packaging. The next stage will be to ensure packing sources are sustainable and fully recyclable. Whether we like it or not, packaging is there to allow us to transport product around without damage or deterioration. How we get to sustainable packaging is a tricky one, particularly for wet products. As an active diver, I’m all too aware of microplastics and plastic waste being a real problem in our oceans now and I am passionate about seeing a reduction in this. A survey found that a 100g serving of sardines could potentially have 30mg of microplastics. Another point on packaging is the cost. Not many people realise that, for example, when buying a tin of something, the tin could account for around 70-80% of the cost to the consumer. Rising costs of steel and aluminium means that either
