Survey: How to reduce food waste through packaging

Dive Brief:

At least 1% of all food produced worldwide is wasted due to poor packaging or adequate production systems, according to a recent analysis by Packaging Digest.
A survey asking companies what they were doing to minimize food waste found that 62% were trying to minimize waste, 23% were not sure about their actions to minimize waste and 15% were not doing anything about it.
Reducing food waste does not necessarily mean reducing packaging, but rather packaging according to consumer needs or prolong the lifespan of food materials. The report also recommends packagers participate in a national conversation to revamp "sell by" and "use by" guidelines.

Dive Insight:

Much of the conversation about reducing food waste revolves around the consumer, pointing to grocery and hospitality practices that more often than not lead to significant portions of food unused.

However, reducing food waste requires the participation of agents throughout the supply chain, and a major actor in this field are companies responsible for packaging and labeling processed goods.

Proper packaging and labeling is essential to inform the end-consumer about how to store and manage food while at home.

The survey lists all the methods used by respondents to reduce waste, including increased use of forecasting technology, reselling waste to livestock producers as supplemental feed, using packaging designed to increase shelf life or control oxygen flow and communicating with employees and stakeholders about the process.

An increasingly popular solution, according to the report, is to reduce single-use containers. Tesco, for example, recently began selling chicken fillets in two separate, but attached containers. The strategy encourages end-users to only open what they will consume. To do so, the company states it had to work with both its poultry supplier and its packaging supplier to create an effective design.

As always, communication with suppliers and clients is key, but many of the respondents' changes were relatively simple changes in policy rather than investments in technology.