Food Waste in the US

What’s this about?

Most individuals inherently understand that “wasting food” is bad and has a negative impact. I liken the way we treat the concept of food waste to the concept of global warming. We know what’s happening is bad but we let our future selfs deal with it.

The idea of food waste is simple but starts becoming complex when you start looking at the whole supply chain:

• Agriculture
• Manufacturing
• Wholesale/Retail
• Restaurant
• Consumers

For the sake of this post, I’ll stick mostly to the retail/restaurant/consumer market.

Over 400 million pounds of food are served by restaurants and grocery stores every year according to NPR. Nearly 1/3 of that figure is never eaten and thrown out. Education of consumers seems to be a large barrier for reducing food waste at the retail/restaurant/consumer level that is socially solvable.

Why does this happen? I decided to do some research of my own on this matter and found some top-level reasons for food waste. Disclaimer, this is a mix of anecdotal and survey data found from my market research:

• Different interpretations of expiration dates.
• “Ugly” looking produce that doesn’t meet supermarket standards is thrown out.
• “Ugly” looking produce that doesn’t meet customer standards is thrown out.
• Restaurant food doesn’t have an expiration so may sit in the fridge for a week but you don’t really know if it’s still edible.
• Produce or prepared food is left in the fridge and forgotten.

I’ve made some assumptions about what type of solutions these users would be open to using and paying for that I’m testing and validating. I’ll post some of that when I’ve successfully tested some of those hypothesis.

I believe there is a very important problem to be solved here that not many people are paying attention to: food waste.