The Opportunity: Addressed one of the highest impacts on biodiversity loss and land conversion as well as greenhouse gas emissions by exploring how to reduce food waste and loss in the US across the entire supply chain from farm to consumer.

Our Partners: 37 key players across the entire supply chain including: World Wildlife Fund (WWF), World Resources Institute (WR)I, Kroger, Sprouts Farmers Market Raley’s and other Retailers, Snow Temp, Lineage Logistics, Carrier, Western Growers Association, JV Smith Farms, Duda Farms and other Growers, and Cornell, UC Davis and other University Researchers.

The Journey: A 6-month process of convening and engaging with actors throughout the food supply chain, through interviews, mapping of critical leverage points, deep-dialogue focused brainstorming sessions and a rapid cycle prototyping supply chain summit which focused on 5 core solution areas.

The Result: Identified high leverage opportunities to reduce food waste and loss with proposed experiments in five critical areas. Sparked new discussions and built relationships across the supply chain through the process to strengthen the commitment to seek funding together and to implement jointly developed initiatives by sub-groups of actors in the following five pilot areas:

1. Mapping of food loss and waste hotspots through the cold chain;
2. Alignment and consolidation of database for predictive analytics, forecasting and benchmarking;
3. Consumer awareness campaign to increase sales of surplus and imperfect produce through e-commerce platforms;
4. Pilot of improved and innovative contracting systems through whole-crop contracting; and
5. Grower-to-grower collaboration on data collection to measure loss across years to enhance efficiencies and raise awareness of food loss and waste opportunities.