Published November 18, 2021
Hosted by Urban Green Council CEO John Mandyck, Urban Green Live features international industry experts to answer your questions about a low carbon future.
On November 18, 2021, we welcomed Dana Gunders, Executive Director of ReFED. In this episode, Dana and John discussed food waste in the United States and its impacts on food security, the environment and the economy.
Key Takeaways
ReFED is a nonprofit focusing on reducing food waste through three main pillars:
-> Providing data and insights.
-> Catalyzing investment.
-> Engaging stakeholders.
Food waste has significant environmental impacts, affecting various aspects of the ecosystem and contributing to several global issues.
-> Food waste contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions.
-> Food production often leads to the loss of biodiversity; when food is wasted, the negative impacts on biodiversity are exacerbated.
A significant portion of food waste occurs at the household level.
-> This household waste is driven by factors such as low food costs in the US, lack of awareness, and misinterpretation of date labels.
-> Educating consumers on meal planning, proper food storage, and understanding food freshness can help reduce waste.
Speakers
John Mandyck
Chief Executive Officer
Dana Gunders
Executive Director ReFED
Q&A
John Mandyck: What is the latest research on food meal kits (HelloFresh, Blue Apron) and their impact on food waste?
Dana Gunders: As part of our initial report, we analyzed 42 different solutions for how much food they can save and how much they cost or save in dollars. Meal kits are one of our top solutions when it comes to just how much food can be saved. That is because they do a lot of the behaviors that we want to see consumers doing for them. They plan, they resist buying extra stuff when they’re shopping, they portion things in a way that you don’t have to buy extra stuff, and people don’t tend to buy them unless they’re going to use them.
Between all of that, we find that meal kits are a great solution when it comes to having less food waste in households.
John Mandyck: Why is the American mindset so difficult to change? The question here is tapping into a relevant aspect of this issue, which is that in the United States and Europe, food is wasted at the household level because frankly we can afford it. How do we start to reconcile that?
Dana Gunders: I think social pressure is a key part to this. Littering is an interesting parallel to learn from because to the extent that we consume food in public, we’re very numb to wasting food. It’s actually very socially acceptable. If I have people over for dinner, we scrape our plates into the garbage and then we keep going. If I’m at a restaurant and we don’t finish things, we just get up and leave. That is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
I think if we can increase the social pressure around this, it may become a little bit more taboo to not waste food. Now, how do we do that? That is where I think these old school, big, long-term social change campaigns like littering are something to look at with a new age twist of influencers and social media.
John Mandyck: Is veganism saving the world?
Dana Gunders: A vegan diet has a much lower food footprint, there’s no question about it. I live in Northern California, in the Lake Tahoe area, and this has been the most intense year on the climate change front here. The one thing that I looked around and felt like I could do was to become a vegetarian. I don’t think everyone has to be vegan, I think that’s a really tall ask. I do think that we all can take steps to eat less meat and dairy. Eating a more plant-forward diet is one of the top things we can do in our own lives.
John Mandyck: What are some food waste careers we can tap?
Dana Gunders: There’s not a ton of career openings in this field yet. What I’ve seen to be most successful is creating them. I think the biggest champions in this space are people that are working within the supply chain who start to care about this issue and really look at ways that they can tweak the buying of food at some large company. There are a lot of people who are innovators, that are startups, that are creating solutions and are becoming really successful. If you are in merchandising or finance, there are tons of roles.
John Mandyck: Any suggestions for the best way to shop for food to avoid waste?
Dana Gunders: My best tips for shopping are planning your meals and using a shopping list. It is very old school. It does not have to be sitting there with a cookbook for two hours on Sunday night, it can be really quick.
One other thing to add is that we think we want more variety than we do. Most of us are creatures of habit and eat the same meal a lot of times. Therefore I actually think shopping online can really help you because it tells you what you bought last time.
John Mandyck: Can you talk more about food insecurity in the United States?
Dana Gunders: I think it is one of the most shameful things about our very successful country. About one in eight people in this country faces food insecurity. It’s a challenge on multiple levels. Rescuing food and donating it is not a solution to food insecurity, it’s a band-aid.
The root is poverty, it’s inequality, it’s how food is being distributed. Those are not issues we take on at ReFED, and they’re not even issues that most food banks take on. But food banks are a really important band-aid right now.
John Mandyck: At ReFED do you look at issues like how do you expand capability for food banks?
Dana Gunders: We do, yeah. We look at the policy changes that need to be made to encourage more donation. What is the amount of funding that we think is needed? Where should it come from? I think cold storage refrigeration is a really key piece because the whole food bank system was actually built on non-perishables. The whole system was initially created to deal with stuff that was not refrigerated. Now there is much more of a push to deal with that product, mostly because it’s healthier and we want to see healthier food going to that system.
John Mandyck: Are there tools that design professionals can use to help reduce food waste in homes? For example, smaller fridges, fewer kitchen cabinets, and/or smaller kitchens. What’s the trend in this area?
Dana Gunders: There was an architecture firm that once contacted me because they were going to reinvent the kitchen and had some really great ideas on this front. I love thinking about this. It’s super challenging because the kitchen dimensions are very standardized.
I think New York in some cases is the best practice because I’ve never seen as many adults have small fridges as those in New York. So yes, I would make refrigerators smaller. That would be the number one thing I would do. I think it’s interesting to consider interim temperature options. Refrigerators typically have two temperatures, like cold and frozen, but there’s actually a number of products that do pretty well in that interim.
John Mandyck: What are best practices to avoid food waste in the workplace?
Dana Gunders: The workplace is an interesting environment. You have shared refrigerators, you have events where other people are ordering food, and then you have everyone going down to buy lunch in the middle of the day. I think those are three separate workplace instances.
I think the best thing that you can do for workplace events, especially the 20 person meeting, is to get individual orders. A lot of times, there’s one person ordering for a bunch of people and they just order too much, bottom line. Also being really clear about shared food areas; about what is not to be taken and what actually can be taken.
John Mandyck: What’s ReFED’s view of sink waste disposals as a means to divert food waste?
Dana Gunders: I would say we are evolving on that, to be honest. We have seen some recent greenhouse gas analyses that actually say that sewer, compared with landfill, actually has a much higher greenhouse gas footprint. That’s new information for me, so I’m still trying to vet it and see if we really agree with that. I’m in an interim moment of trying to really decide what I think about in-sink garbage disposal.
John Mandyck: Could you expand on the waste at supermarkets?
Dana Gunders: I think fundamentally what is driving waste in supermarkets is that they are trying to keep an inventory of a lot of items. The average grocery store carries about 50,000 different items, and they are trying to have that in stock for you from 8am to 10pm. They don’t want their shelves to be empty, so they tend to lean towards overbuying. I’d say that is the root cause.
Also, the date labels cause a problem because some consumers are confused and think food is bad on those dates. Grocery stores don’t want to sell anything on or certainly not after those dates, so they tend to actually remove products two to three days before the dates. Fixing the confusion is one opportunity to improve upon food waste.
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