I came across a radio show from my colleagues at Farm Journal Media. We publish a program on My Farm Radio called Consumer Ag Connection, where we talk about the ways everyday consumers can understand how ag world intersects with their everyday lives.
The October 31 episode, hosted by Darrell Anderson, revolved around food waste.
Anderson spoke with Ted Monk, vice president of sustainability and corporate responsibility for Sodexo North America, about the foodservice company's efforts to reduce food waste.
Monk echoed concerns about the estimated 40% of food that is picked, packed and shipped that doesn't get consumed annually, and the industry's role.
“Most of the waste doesn't happen at the front end,” he said. “Most of the waste happens at the consumer end.”
In the U.S., Sodexo is working on projects like quantifying the numbers to help its customers get a better idea of what is wasted, and how that affects them.
“We're working on finding the right metric because some of the numbers are too big to understand,” he said.
Reinforcing that smaller portion sizes, with the option to get a second plate rather than serving too much and seeing excess thrown away, with facts like “preventing X amount of waste can save X amount of gallons of gas or feed X amount of people” can “energize and excite people” about reducing waste, Monk said.
But what about menu options?
Sodexo is a proponent of the Blended Burger Project, which blends finely diced mushrooms into burgers and found that kids ate more and threw away less.
“We did blind taste testing with kids and they absolutely love those blended burgers, and now across the 500 school districts – 4,500 schools that we serve – that's the product we serve,” he said. “That's now moving across other sectors. It's just one change that can have such a big impact.”
Sodexo currently has a team working on recipe development for more plant based eating, with plant based diets growing at about 10% per year.
"We're working on plant based diets because that's what the consumer wants," he said. "If that's good for the consumer, that's food we're not going to be wasting."