Battling Food Waste across our entire value chain

Every year, about a third of all the food produced in the world is either lost or wasted. One billion tons of food is lost before it even reaches consumers. That’s enough to feed 2,000 million people (FAO estimates), when close to 1 billion suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

Food Loss and Waste affects the economic and environmental sustainability of food systems. It is a waste of natural resources, soil and water, reduces food security, and raises prices for consumers. As the world’s biggest food and beverage company, Nestlé is uniquely poised to lead a change by contributing that more food gets from field to table.

This, of course, makes sense. But I would suggest that in a world where more than 10% of the population is starving or malnourished, it is also a moral obligation.

Tackling Food Loss and Waste requires an end-to-end global response that engages every link of the food value chain: from production, to transportation, to handling and storage, to processing, to distribution, and finally in the consumer’s home.

Reducing Food Loss and Waste has remained an important aim for Nestlé during the pandemic. For far too many people, access to food became a crisis, so we acted quickly to redistribute surplus food to food banks, charities, and distribution centers to meet critical needs.

But beyond this, keeping an eye on the big picture, there is a need for a systemic change and a systematic approach end to end, from farming practices to quality of transportation infrastructures, to food processes, to portion sizes and pack formats, to shelf-life management and responsible consumption habits. Ideally, we should never ever waste and throw food away; it is such an essential resource to human life. This is obvious in countries where scarcity prevails. But we have to apply the same principles in countries where abondance for most is the reality. Food is life and has to be treated with the highest degree of care and respect. I remember my father who had lived periods of scarcity during WWII and the years following he never threw away any food. By the way, reducing food waste can make people creative. It is how the use of dry bread has led to exciting food creations, like the Catalans invented the “pan con tomate” or the French the “pain perdu.”

At Nestlé, recognizing the need for collective engagement, we continue our drive to partner with suppliers to halve food loss and waste, while educating consumers so that they too can cut down on waste within their own homes.

No one can solve the problem of food waste alone, and I am particularly motivated by our ongoing partnership with the #SinDesperdicio (Without Waste) program, created by the Inter-American Development Bank in 2018 to reduce food loss and waste across Latin America and the Caribbean.

To drive change, #SinDesperdicio focuses on innovative projects, national and local public policies, awareness building and responsible consumption habits. This is vital, given that 6% of global food losses occur in Latin America and 15% of available food is wasted, even as close to 47 million people suffer hunger or undernutrition.

Nestlé believes we must work together to turn the tide for people and the planet. All our commitments, to people, communities and the environment, are integrated. Tackling food loss and waste is closely tied to environmental initiatives like our Regeneration Promise.

Why? The facts speak for themselves: By some estimates 18% of all productive land and 19% of fertilizers are used to produce food that never gets consumed, and 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are tied to Food Loss and Waste.

We have a golden opportunity to meet the sustainable development goal number 2 of the UN: Zero hunger! Acting together, we have the power to feed 40% more people than we do today. We can shape a future where food security is a reality and where hunger is a thing of the past. And at the same time, we can preserve and sustain our planet. We must seize this opportunity.