Ryan Begin is its CEO and co-founder Divert, Inc.an impactful technology company on a mission to protect the value of food™.
How do you measure the environmental impact of a product? Is it just how long it exists before it decays, or how much energy it takes to produce it? Who is responsible for this impact: the one who made it or the one who sold it?
As the fight against climate change accelerates, these questions gain importance. When determining the impact of a product, it is not enough to simply look at the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions it creates. we need to see its entire life cycle.
However, the answer to these questions is not simple. Understanding the true environmental impact of the products we create requires a new set of tools. We need to be able to measure contributing factors such as energy use, resource consumption, labor and overall greenhouse gas emissions from the creation of the product itself as well as from its manufacture, distribution and disposal.
Today, every sector faces challenges in order to accurately measure impact. Food—a global industry with 8 billion customers—is one of the most complex. We know that about a third all anthropogenic GHG emissions are linked to food production. It is clear that we need to make a change in the way food is produced, distributed, consumed and disposed of.
The first step is to understand that you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
The complexity of the food industry
While measurement has been a challenge across industries, the scale and complexity of the food industry has limited our ability to gather information. They are around 2 million farms in the US alone, producing food for more than 60,000 grocery stores and almost 750,000 restaurants across the country. With so many different players in and across the supply chain, no one company or organization is responsible for tracking the life cycle of food from farm to fridge.
The last leg of the life cycle is the most complex: the consumers. There are 124 million households in the US, which bring home and drop off food. Once food reaches consumers’ homes, the only way to gain insight into this final leg of the journey is to track wasted food once it’s thrown away.
Both private and public companies have increased investment to improve the food supply chain. Even again, the fragmentation of the supply chain makes it difficult to gather an industry-wide picture. For example, while we know how much food is wasted, it is more difficult to understand why the food was lost and where it happened in the supply chain. Was the product kept at the wrong temperature during transport? Was it slightly off and therefore not bought? Was it still edible and accidentally thrown away due to employee error?
The importance of measurement
How can we answer these questions? How can we ensure that measurement is managed? There are various solutions that have emerged.
For example, researchers at the National Center for Appropriate Technology were found that life cycle assessments (LCAs) can analyze factors and environmental burdens associated with a product throughout production, processing, packaging, transport and retirement – resulting in a holistic picture of food’s impact on the environment. According to the report, LCAs found that “current patterns of food production and consumption are unsustainable” and that areas where the supply chain is most taxing include “resource depletion, air and water pollution, impacts on human health and production waste”.
In addition, there are a variety of tools that have been developed to help measure and track the food journey. Internet of Things (IoT) solutions can enable real-time monitoring of food and beverage shipments throughout the supply chain. However, there are still gaps. Other larger players have launched solutions but failed to gain traction due to fragmentation within the supply chain.
Gathering this information is the first step to an improved supply chain. For example, knowing the most lettuce travels from California and Arizona can mean developing new cultivation technologies. Seeing how a shell of strawberries expires earlier than average due to a shortage in cold storage means grocers can improve their storage processes to extend freshness and minimize future waste.
In my own experience, we have found that supply chain fragmentation is one of the biggest challenges to holistic measurement. My teams have worked to build, pilot and scale solutions that can track food on its journey to our store shelves, as well as the infrastructure to properly recycle waste. By connecting the supply chain from the point of development to the point of termination, we can begin to create a circular food system that eliminates waste and better values the resources used in food production.
A better future for our food supply chain
Food has a fragile and finite life cycle. Today, around 40% of all food produced she is lost. Simply managing waste does not fully address the impacts of food, nor does it protect the resources used to produce it.
While steps have been taken to reduce the impact of food waste, we must continue to tackle the problem upstream. Adopting a ‘life cycle thinking’ approach to food consumption and accurately measuring impact is the first step, enabling players across the supply chain to make improvements and the consumer to better assess the value of our food.
Ultimately, food is produced to sustain humans. By accurately measuring impact and tracking food’s journey, we can keep more of it in the system, improve the supply chain and get on a better path to saving our planet.
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