Achieving sustainability – Evolve 4 Solutions Ltd’s Ernie Dewhirst shares his view.

Achieving sustainability

Sustainability is a buzzword that we can’t seem to shake o , 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 de ning sustainability, speci cally in the food and beverage sector. This is a topic that is covered by the European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy rst 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 su cient, safe, nutritious, sustainable food and preserve a ordability of food while generating fairer economic returns, fostering competitiveness of the EU supply sector and promoting fair trade.

Blockchain journey tracking

Achieving sustainability not only requires the food sector to take the steps de ned in this strategy but also to 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 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 sh, for example, will have an identi cation 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 shing. 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 signi cant 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

a compromise has to be made on the quality of the product or prices increase.

The industry is working hard to nd solutions for better packaging.

Water

Our usage of greywater is a concern. In some parts of the world access to water is a challenge, but in the UK the challenge for us is the amount used from production facilities that ows down the drains. This water rst has to be reprocessed as it contains contaminants and fats and there’s a cost to making sure nothing that gets back into the environment does so without being treated. Naturally, if this water goes into our rivers untreated it can harm the environment.

Fruit and veg

A lot of food can be wasted because it’s not considered aesthetically pleasing enough for the consumer. Supermarkets can be selective in what they sell because they believe the consumer wants the perfect shaped banana or potato, but there has been a push to educate and show consumers that not all fruit and veg is perfectly shaped. Once upon a time we used to be able to send this kind of food to our local pig farmer, but because of new legislations that has been stopped. Which is only a positive thing.

Some supermarkets do wonky veg boxes where the customer gets a selection of fruit and vegetables that are near the end of life or look a certain way. I’d argue why should these be sold cheaper because they don’t look perfect? One of the problems we face is that we aren’t programmed to only use what is available to us. This becomes an even bigger issue given that we are facing food shortages due to the Ukraine and Russian con ict and growing populations around the world. We have to make better use of what we have available. We can’t a ord to keep generating the waste we are producing at every stage of the process. In fact, in the UK alone, 4.8 million tonnes of food is wasted in the supply chain every year. That’s enough to feed approximately 2,646,000,000 people each day.

Growing crops

It’s interesting to note that the amount of arable land in the UK and across the world is actually relatively small and this has decreased over the last 20 years. The issue is we have a nite capacity to grow food in the world and climate change is making this even harder if it’s not sustainable, which creates further pressure on supply of food.

In the UK we need to nd more ways to grow food ourselves, or we have to make sure what we use is used to the fullest potential, which then goes back to making sure we don’t have as much waste in the food chain. For example, in 50 years’ time, we may not be able to buy a bag of carrots, but have to buy them individually as they will be more di cult to source. Food subscription services like Hello Fresh where you only receive what you need to cook a meal may become more of the norm, rather than a lifestyle choice, as this is more sustainable.

Power and electricity

We can all probably agree on the need for green energy but the need to reduce energy consumption must remain a high priority. Investment in lower energy forms of production through insulation, equipment that reduces consumption or reducing the generation of waste production must be our goal combined with the investment in green energy production. This means we must be open to all forms of green energy production whether it comes from solar, wind farms, nuclear or even tidal.

To conclude, I think we have a lot of work to do to make the food and drink industry more sustainable. I believe a major driver in achieving this is in making available to the consumer as much information as possible so that they can make more informed choices on how sustainable our food is in all aspects of its journey. The danger of this is of course it could be information overload! Food companies need to be more open and visible and while they want to be sustainable, they may lack the knowledge in how to improve this.

Of course, increasing sustainability through software could be costly to them. Overall, we need to see an improvement in the food industries’ IT systems, intervention at government level and the public’s push to get more information on what’s on their plate in order to make real change happen. I believe the industry is up to the challenge, to ensure both sustainable and secure food supplies are available to the consumer but it will take time and this is also another one of our precious resources that needs not to be squandered.