Supermarket retail chains including Marks and Spencer, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose signed a letter addressed to the UK government’s Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) calling for food waste reporting last month.
The open letter, addressed to secretary of state of the department, Steve Barclay, requested “reconsideration of mandatory public food waste reporting,” stating that it was needed to help “measure and judge if meaningful impact is being achieved, and to encourage more action to be taken across the whole industry.”
The UK government’s current position is that it is holding back on mandating waste measurement and reporting for food businesses until 2026.
Food waste costs the UK £20.8 billion annually, and worldwide, the issue contributes to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the United Nations, around 13% of food produced is lost between harvest and retail, and significant quantities are also wasted in retail and at consumption level. With this, an estimated 17% of total global food production is wasted in households, food service, and retail altogether.
Still, the letter confirms that retailers and supply chains want to improve not only their food waste efforts but carbon emissions, and they are using technology to do so, as the letter refers to the progress that is being made with “AI and innovative tools.”
In this context, we spoke with three firms using big data, AI, and sensor technology to help the food industry become more sustainable from the farm to the shop floor.
Sustainable fields – Varda
Varda, a corporate spinout established by big fertiliser firm Yara, is a Norwegian state-owned company looking to bring transparency and sustainability to farming worldwide.
The firm currently has two tools. The first, ‘Global FieldID’ (GFID), uses satellite imagery to identify field boundaries across the globe. This feature assigns a unique ID number to each agricultural land plot with the aim of hosting all farming data in one place and enable sharing and collaboration across the industry.
The other, SoilHive, compliments GFID by collecting and encouraging open access to soil data in order to allow stakeholders to compare and make informed decisions.
“SoilHive is a data repository and search engine starting with publicly available information,” explains Davide Ceper, Vada’s CEO. “But then ideally, venturing into the big, submerged part of the iceberg which is the enormous amounts of data that farmers produce because they run soil tests on a regular basis.”
Varda hopes that farmers will share the data, which Ceper believes to be “extremely valuable information for firms which source from farms and those that sell to farms to improve practices.”
“If you can assess the quality and health of the soil you can help with monitoring what’s going on in a massive system at the country level or regional level, then you have a proxy for food security in the long term,” explains Ceper.
If farmers can improve soil health it can also help them yield more product out of their land, limiting the need to expand, preventing deforestation in the long run, he adds.
The way that food is sourced and distributed comprises a complex supply chain but it’s important to trace origins argues Ceper: “If you want to reduce the environmental impact of that, you need to be able to boil it down to what’s happening in each individual field around the world,” he says.
As well as increasing yield, farms can use the platform to compare practices to become more sustainable and reduce emissions. Plus, it can help in other areas such as balancing competition.
“It’s a very complicated domain, but one that ultimately is one of the most important sectors in the world because without it we would hunting and gathering berries.”
Transit – Relex
Finnish firm Relex claims to use artificial intelligence to reduce the food waste that happens along the supply chain.
With data collected from the end user, during transport, and trend predictions, Relex’s AI claims to forecast the number of specific products stores will need down to the individual shopfront.
The firm has collaborated with retailers such as M&S Food, Waitrose, Morrisons, LIDL and Co-op.
“We calculate the demand forecasts for each product in that store for the coming days, weeks, months and then based on that we are able to optimise inventory levels,” explains head of sustainability Svante Gӧthe.
“We’re able to calculate how much should be ordered to that store of which product and then because we’ve ordered optimal levels, we’re able to balance shelf availability and waste and keep it on the right level,” he adds.
This can vary store to store across the world, or even by country, depending on the weather or even holidays. While it may be raining one end of the country, it might be clear skies on the other and the demand for BBQ food may have risen.
Gӧthe notes that 8 to 10 % of all global emissions come from food waste and by optimising and planning for food items they can cut the waste of supermarket customers.
“What we typically see is a range somewhere between 10 to 40% in food waste reduction when we have implemented the solution,” he adds.
Altogether, Relex software claims to have saved 280 million kilograms in food waste in 2022, which equates to approximately 950,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
Packaging – Senoptica
Finally, to the packaging. Irish-based firm Senoptica Technologies is combating food waste using an array of complimentary technologies.
The company’s packaging technology is a colour-coded sensor that uses food-safe ink that indicates in real-time the condition of the food inside.
About half of the world’s fresh food, including fish, meat, and cheese is secured in ‘modified atmosphere packaging’.
This means that packagers will change the ratio of gases humans breathe – oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide – inside, which allows the food to stay fresher for longer without adding chemicals.
According to Brendan Rice, CEO and co-founder of Senoptica, the problem with this type of packaging is that sometimes it fails, which the sensor is designed to detect through the amount of oxygen in a package.
“It fails because the atmosphere designed to keep the food fresh has escaped because either they haven’t sealed it properly or they haven’t put the right mix of gas there to start with, or there’s potentially a defect with the packaging,” he observes.
This may be one explanation as to why food that we have bought has gone off before it’s used-by date.
Senoptica is still in its initial stages, but in the tests it has carried out so far, the firm has found as many as 5% of the food packets that it has tested had already failed by the time they reached the supermarket shelves.
“It might sound like 5% is a relatively small number, but when you consider the scale of these categories globally, you’re talking billions of packs that have failed if that figure is applied across all categories,” says Rice
“So, in the first instance, we’re trying to stop failed packs getting out into the supply chain.”
With its machine vision system, as the packets head out of the factory, its sensor technology can indicate whether an item hasn’t been sealed properly and it can be repackaged before it has the chance to expire.
Supermarket assistants can also use handheld machines to read the condition of a product, saving them time manually checking.
With digital cameras scanning the products along the supply chain, this also allows for tracking where required, and to help with security and traceability.
While supply chain tracking is nothing new, Rice claims that Senoptica’s technology is unique in its ability to automatically detect faulty or expired packs along the supply chain before they hit the supermarket shelves.
In its test, Senoptica claims that it was able to improve the detection rate of faulty packs up by 11,000 times, and it also found that a significant proportion of the food was still good after the use by date.
“That finding should be useful information for both the food companies and the retailers because it may allow them to look at the possibility of extending the use by dates,” and help keep perfectly edible food from going to waste.
Share
