Upcycled food and food waste

How much food is wasted in the world?

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The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) alerts that 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted worldwide every year. This represents nearly one-third of all food produced globally, which is enough to feed about 2 billion people every year.
Meanwhile, according to the 'State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World' report, nearly 690 million people worldwide were suffering from hunger in 2019. Through the pandemic, it is likely that this number has increased by an additional 130 million.
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This means that if we produced and used food sensibly - during harvesting, production, transport, sale, in our homes - we would eliminate the problem of world hunger.

Food Loss and Waste Index

This ⅓ of food, or 30% can be divided into two parts:

• FLI (Food Loss Index) - food that is wasted during production, even before it is sold (14% of the food produced in the world)
• FWI (Food Waste Index) - food that is wasted at distributors (wholesalers, shops, restaurants) and consumers.

Countries in the Global North have higher FWI and countries in the Global South have higher FLI. What is the reason for this?

Developing countries find it more difficult to ensure adequate conditions during food storage, transport and handling. Such inadequately protected food is prone to rot, mould and insect growth. In Africa, as much as 10%-20% of the harvest is wasted in this way.

In developed countries, on the other hand, food can be provided with sterile conditions and therefore spoils much more slowly. Food is wasted for other, more trivial reasons. One example would be oversized portions in restaurants, or short expiry dates on ingredients and ready meals that are thrown away every day after the establishment closes. In households, it's simply doing the shopping without a list and checking that we really need these products, or failing to read expiry dates and throwing them away ahead of time.

Too crooked, too ripe

Consumers have their fair share of food waste. It is estimated that they are responsible for wasting as much as 60% of the total amount of food wasted.
When we go shopping, we always choose fruit and vegetables that have no blemishes, bruises or spots and, of course, those that look the freshest. You shouldn't throw stones if you don't subconsciously rummage through the whole basket of tangerines in December to choose the ones that aren't too soft or too hard!

And it is important to realise that we are selecting the best specimens from already heavily sorted food. Shops have strict standards when accepting produce as to maturity, size, colour etc. For farmers, this means that they will not be able to sell their undersized or unripe vegetables or fruit. What happens to such a commodity? Sometimes it is bought for juices or preserves, sometimes it is simply thrown away.

Shop restrictions do not, unfortunately, stop at accepting the goods, but extend to how much of the goods can be on the shop shelves. Under these rules, sometimes whole pallets of perfectly edible products end up in a container for disposal. Hence the movement known as freeganism, which includes sourcing food from such bins, most often from containers underneath supermarkets. To solve the problem of out-of-date products, some shops have decided to mark products that are about to expire with a special promotion.

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It is also worth noting here that the labels 'best before' and 'use by' are not clear to the consumer. Contrary to appearances, they do not mean the same thing. When the first phrase appears before the best-before date, it only indicates the moment when the product may change some of its properties, e.g. colour or texture. However, it will still be fit for consumption for some time. And this begs the question, can't food that cannot be sold simply be donated to those in need? In July 2019, the government introduced the Food Waste Prevention Act, which mandates large grocery shops to donate unsold food to NGOs and charities free of charge, but under contract. However, the penalties for doing so without contract are so low that many distributors choose to pay them and throw away the food they failed to sell.

Wasted food and the environment

According to a 2013 FAO study, almost ⅓ (28%) of agricultural land is used to produce food that will never be consumed. In doing so, an unimaginable amount of energy and drinking water resources are wasted, additionally at the expense of, for example, the precious forests that could grow on this land.

The situation in the seas and oceans is no better. It is estimated that 35% of fish and seafood caught is wasted. Some of the losses already occur at the fishing stage. Excessive fishing leads to the disappearance of fish from given areas of the ocean, resulting in dead zones.

And with this aspect, there is no getting around the problem of rubbish, especially plastics. Food for sale is additionally packaged in separate packaging. Often, in line with consumer demands, producers even put plastic film on products that have their own natural packaging, such as bananas or cucumbers. Unfortunately, food is thrown away in containers without being separated first, so that the food ends up in the landfill along with its polystyrene tray, foil and plastic stickers.

According to estimates, uneaten food is responsible for the production of as much as 8% of all global warming gases. This is as much as the world's production of steel and concrete together generates! The water that is used to produce uneaten food could be used by 9 billion people, and that's about 200 litres per person per day.

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Prevention first

In line with one of the goals of the 2030 Agenda for the World Development Strategy, we have committed to halve the global amount of food wasted in production and distribution, including losses occurring during harvest.
The best way to combat food waste is prevention. Production adapted to actual consumption, buying food adapted to how much is actually eaten. Proper storage, maximising the use of all parts of the vegetable, animal carcass or other raw materials consumed. Producing, transporting, processing and consuming so as not to produce waste.

Recovering food, or upcycled food

But what if, at various stages, there is food that has not been used?

The idea of transforming surplus food or unused parts of it into new, wholesome food products has been developed to meet this problem. Through this process, not only is the amount of food thrown away reduced, new jobs are created and the food sector gains innovation. The process of converting food into new food is called upcycling food.

According to Upcycled Food Association, “upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment”.

Another definition states that this process, as opposed to recycling (recovering raw materials in general) or downcycling (recovering raw materials to create new products, but of lower quality than those from which they were created), makes food more valuable and that the products produced in this way are intended primarily for human rather than animal consumption. Examples include juice pulp as the base of carrot cake, chutney made from banana peels, pesto made from radish leaves, or French toast made from yesterday's challah. These and similar ideas are based on the important idea of #ZeroWaste.

‍However, thanks to technology, upcycling can be used on a much larger scale and thus save even more food. Examples of upcycling products produced by companies are, for example, energy bars made from coffee fruit, distillate made from bread or dried fruit made from unsold fruit with an unformed shape.

Food recovery hierarchy

The US federal agency working to protect human health and the environment, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), has developed a food recovery hierarchy. This is an ordered sequence of actions that should be taken in the fight against non-waste of food. The list opens with prevention and reducing the amount of food produced as much as possible.
This is followed by various ways of processing food. As the most important of these directions is the processing of food into further food products for humans, including beverages. Next is the direction of animal feed. Only when food is unfit for human and animal consumption should it be processed into usable products, in other non-food industries, i.e. e.g. biodegradable packaging, etc. Then there are fertilisers, fuels and finally composting.

At REBREAD, when working on products that can be created from unsold bread, we follow the principles of this hierarchy.
Read more about the products that can be produced from rescued bread.

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Conscious consumers appreciate upcycled food

Upcycling is becoming increasingly important because it allows us to fight food waste from the bottom up - ordinary people and companies. Even small changes in our kitchens can contribute to saving a few or several kilos of food a year.

In addition, upcycling food can contain more nutritional value, which will have a positive impact on our health.

‍Upcycling helps conserve resources, the environment and counteracts global warming. This is because it makes more efficient use of ingredients already produced and reduces the amount of food waste in landfills, and the emissions it generates.

When encountering the concept of upcycling food for the first time, it seems that it will not appeal to most consumers. It is made from unsold products, so it may be associated with food of inferior quality, detrimental to health. However, it turns out that the opposite is true.

In 2017, Drexel University conducted a study on consumer perceptions of upcycled products. They were presented with examples from three food categories:

• conventional
• organic
• upcycling

It turned out that the participants in the study considered organic as the best product group for the environment, followed closely by upcycling food. The latter was also recognised as one that has a positive impact on society. It was also discovered that proper advertising of upcycling food could make consumers put it on a par with organic and be willing to pay much more for it.
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The responsibility for the world lies with both large corporations and manufacturers, smaller companies, governments, administrations, the public and private sectors, but consumers who should take informed, responsible action.

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