Biggest Culprits of Global Food Waste

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

One of the biggest pain points in the current global food system is the amount of food that is wasted, much of which never even leaves the farm. Christine Moseley, founder and CEO of Full Harvest says there are two reasons this is happening, and one of those is far from being solved.

Moseley… “In developed countries, it's mostly about demand and being in abundance and affluence and people being pickier and pickier creating, you know, this demand for perfection that causes the imperfect to go to waste. And then there's a lot of surplus that goes to waste because across any situation because we're up to 96 percent offline for a trillion-dollar produce market. And so because of that, there's not any transparency on what's going on, what's really available. And so because of that, people don't know how to demand or purchase or forecast, and plant properly, right. So there's a lot of surplus. And the second bucket is supply chain issues. That's more in developing countries where they don't have the right infrastructure and because of that, there's a cold chain storage problem and there's waste that way. And that's not a problem we're solving.”

Moseley believes the source of food waste goes back to being an incentive problem and a lack of transparency problem, both of which can be solved with technology and innovation.