Clara Cicatiello is an assistant professor of agricultural economics at the University of Tuscia, Italy. Her research covers the sustainability of food systems and the prevention of food loss and waste in food supply chains.
You are the coordinator of the EU-funded LOWINFOOD project, which aims to reduce food waste. How will the project achieve this?
Clara Cicatiello: The project is focused on the supply chains that are most affected by food waste: the fruits and vegetable sector, the bakery sector, fish. Then we have another activity focusing on reducing food waste at the consumption stage of products, so food service and household consumption.
For all these settings, we have innovations that are being implemented in reality, so in real food supply chains, and we measure the extent to which they are able to reduce food waste and what kind of environmental benefits and economic impacts they can achieve. Many of these innovations already existed, at the prototype level, and so the project focus is to test them in real companies and supply chains.
What kind of innovations has the project been testing?
Clara Cicatiello: This is done by applying the ‘waste hierarchy’: so, first of all, preventing food waste at source, then, if you cannot achieve this, try to allocate the food differently but still for human consumption, then, other solutions are reusing food, such as for composting or animal feed.
We have a set of technological innovations that mostly focus on prevention and redistribution. For example, forecasting software that can help businesses better predict the demand of products to avoid surplus issues or facilitate the redistribution of food for charitable purposes.
We also have non-technological and more social or organisational innovations, such as developing dialogue in fish and bakery sectors. This involves getting businesses together and exchanging on ideas and joint actions to reduce food waste in their specific sectors.
Why is this holistic and multi-sectoral approach important?
Clara Cicatiello: These sectors are very complex, so no one innovation can impact all supply chains across all sectors. The LOWINFOOD project is looking at not only how these innovations can achieve the overall objective of reducing food waste, but also what conditions are needed for them to work.
No one solution can solve the problem, but every solution can do its part in reducing food waste.
Much of food waste occurs at the household level, which is one target area of the project. However, retailers often push responsibility for reducing food waste onto consumers and producers, why is it important to correct this?
Clara Cicatiello: Retailers are usually very efficient, wasting a tiny percentage of food, between 1-5%, of the food they handle, because for them this is a huge cost. Meanwhile, more than half of food waste overall is from households. This is why working to reduce household food waste gives us a wide margin.
There is a small number of sales points at the retailer level where fractions of food waste are summed up and even though it’s a small part of the food they handle, it’s a lot of food in absolute terms. It could be efficient to do an intervention at the retailer level, because they have a lot of food waste concentrated there, even if in the whole picture they don’t waste that much compared to other stages of the supply chain.
It’s important to recognise that retailers are putting in a lot of effort to reduce food waste, as they have a great motivation in the form of profit. It is also true that they do use commercial strategies to push food waste outside of their operations, for example, they use quality standards to reject products that don’t look very good and might end up costing them as waste, and that puts the cost on producers.
At the same time, they might reduce the prices of soon to expire products so that the possible cost of waste is on the consumer.
Retailers have great impacts on producer and consumer behaviours through their commercial strategies, and so the retail sector is a key point in the supply chain to work with to reduce food waste, even if as a matter of fact they technically waste less.
So behavioural changes across all levels are important?
Clara Cicatiello: At the level of producers and retailers, the big lever to push behavioural shifts is essentially making money.
For consumers, it’s much more complicated. So this is the key question: how can we push this shift? The issue is that even though consumers are increasingly aware of the problem, this does not necessarily translate into less wasteful behaviours.
This is valid for household waste, but also for the behaviours of consumers of food services like restaurants. While the amount of food waste from food services is not very big at the moment, it is increasing as quickly as our lifestyles change, with people eating outside of the home much more frequently than 10 years ago.
What is your outlook for the future on tackling food waste in Europe?
Clara Cicatiello: The quantity of food waste overall in the supply chain is unfortunately increasing, so we are not proceeding towards the objective of decreasing it. But I’m still optimistic, because I see especially in the European Union a great policy push towards food waste prevention.
This entails not only calls for projects and research, but also key scientific advancements that are endorsed by policies.
On top of that, the EU established a common methodology for food waste measurement in 2019, and this really was a game changer: now scientists can focus on measuring and reducing food waste. This means that Member States have a compulsory measurement of food waste every two years. This is the first step for reduction, because if we know what is happening, we can find better solutions and interventions.