Cue the eyeroll.
But we have all been there: sitting at the dinner table pushing around soggy peas and potatoes while feebly negotiating an end to the meal so that everyone can get on with the real dinner-time draw, which is to say dessert!
That’s when those guilt-inducing words hit you.
“Eat your veg! There are starving kids in Africa who would be more than happy to clean that plate for you!”
Perhaps the continent or country was different in your household, but the message was clear: waste not, want not.
Fast forward to present day, and despite the best efforts of moms and dads everywhere, food waste continues to be an outstandingly troublesome problem for the developed and developing worlds.
What’s more, it is not only economically harmful for producers and consumers, but also taking a huge toll on the environment.
Consider that some one-third of all the food produced in the world rots in the field, in transit, or is simply thrown out. This results in an uptick in methane gases being released into the ozone and, in so doing, disrupts natural soil regeneration with the knock-on effect being poor crop yields, increased use of agricultural chemicals, and more processed dinner and dessert items entering the food chain, making us sick, and driving up the cost of healthcare.
All of these ill (sorry for the pun!) consequences are avoidable, of course, and are capable of being contained, slowed, and reversed through legislation with one country in the European Union (EU) leading the way: France.
Though they rely on tax subsidies as well as laws to reduce food waste, the results are difficult to dismiss with some 30,000 sandwiches going to charities around the country each month and food retailers being fined $4,500 for any infraction.
This redistribution and recycling, while laudable, could be rendered obsolete if producers, processors, and distributors invested in smart technology and tracking tools to ensure that the food that gets sent to restaurants and retailers (who are the least wasteful of all those held to account at 14 percent each) is in proper condition.
This is precisely where ParceLive, with its proven track record in monitoring cold chains and alerting drivers to deviations in temperature at the pallet-level can make a difference throughout the delivery process.
Read on to learn more about how you and your team can reduce food waste by adopting simple, smart, affordable, and recyclable trackers from farm to fork!
Making it the law:
As mentioned, and while France is leading the EU with Britain following suit by enacting laws to prevent waste in the middle of the cold chain and logistics delivery supply lines, there are still some eight million people in the United Kingdom that are food insecure.
ParceLive can help leading distributors prevent this waste from ever occurring by providing more than one stream of mission-critical data (here, read: temperature) as their hardware and software solutions also capture location bottlenecks due to customs, deviations in humidity, exposure to light, drops, shocks, theft, and more.
What’s more, all of this data is made readily available, in real time, to cold chain coordinators who can alert drivers to issues with refrigeration on board their lorry or semi so as to prevent spoilage on board and to mitigate the spread of any food-borne diseases.
Human and health impacts:
This is a perfect segue into another issue that drives food waste in the EU and North America, or: fear of litigation from consumers who fall ill from pathogens that were able to manifest during the transport process when cooling mechanisms failed.
In order to prevent outbreaks, many retailers and restauranteurs err on the side of caution and waste food immediately, which results in some $218B in annual losses (yes, with a ‘B’).
For those companies that do accidently introduce contaminated food product into the consumer stream, however, ParceLive can provide an additional layer of security in helping to resolve disputes and to more effectively root out the cause of the breach so that it never happens again.
Shaming and reputation recovery:
Again, and in continuing where the above left off, preventing contamination and sickness should be at the fore for all personnel transacting business with other businesses (B2B) as well as consumers (B2C).
This is why Hanhaa, the parent company of ParceLive, believes in building relations between producers, distributors, retailers, and consumers by offering channel partnerships wherein data gets shared so that all concerned understand how to most efficiently and effectively move food from the farm to dinner tables around the world (including Africa!).
This means increasing education around food waste and by taking time to setup tracking software with distributors willing to take this next step in advancing how we all think about food waste and the prevention thereof.
Of course ParceLive, coupled with the rest of Hanhaa’s B2B and B2C suite of software solutions, is no long-term panacea for those starving kids in Asia or Africa (or Europe, for that matter), but when deployed along an entire cold chain with increasing amounts of responsibility demanded of the producer (who wastes the most food per annum at 32 percent) the results can mean fewer laws and regulations.
What’s more, and in adopting reusable trackers, distributors and processors (with the latter being accountable to some 21 percent of total food waste) can become channel partners and share the good news story with other companies.
Adopting this best practice, then, not only makes good economic sense, but also environmental sense.
Oh, and with any amount of luck, might make mum proud!
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