THE FOOD WASTE ZEITGEIST Bernd Jablonowski, global portfolio director, processing & packaging at Messe Düsseldorf, and director of the Save Food initiative shares with Packaging Europe how it has gained a huge trajectory of growth over the past few years. Save Food is a joint initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United Nations Environment Programme, Messe Düsseldorf, and interpack.
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hen we launched Save Food together with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at interpack 2011, the topic of food loss and waste was not that present in the public. In the following years, many activists and initiatives committed themselves to improve the situation. Politicians became more aware of the issue too and therefore campaigns and laws with the aim of reducing food waste followed – such as the law in France that larger supermarkets are not allowed to throw away good food easily anymore. Don’t get me wrong here: I am not saying that it was us who triggered all this, but we hit the zeitgeist in 2011. With the changed awareness in the public, the initiative grew up to more than 1,000 members from industry, associations, NGOs and research institutes. We used the membership fees of the industry members to finance studies on food loss in Kenya and India to evaluate where there might be a leverage point for measures. Members of the initiative started the Mango Project in Kenya, where a local producer of dried mangoes was supported and equipped to preserve
otherwise spoiled fruit by drying and packaging them properly. We also held several conferences tackling the problem and its facets at interpack 2014 and 2017 as well as in Switzerland and Spain in the years in-between.
Biggest challenges in the battle against food waste Despite the increased public awareness, engagement from companies, politicians and NGOs, the problem persists at a very high level. There are no new figures to quantify the problem globally and the existing numbers are also estimates, but the one third of food lost and wasted stated by the FAO at the start of Save Food is probably still not very far away from the truth. The reasons vary. Generally, it has to be distinguished between food waste, which more often occurs in western societies due to poor meal planning, oversupply and comparatively cheap food and food loss on the other hand. The latter is a pressing problem in developing countries which lack modern harvesting methods and proper infrastructure for transportation, cooling and storage. In both cases, packaging can contribute to a reduction in food loss and waste. Packaging Europe | 23 |
