Friday 16 October 2015

Global Food Majors Join Forces to Tackle Food Waste at Supply Chain Level

In another step toward curbing the much-discussed problem of food waste, a bunch of food manufacturing giants have now joined forces. Leading names from the food and beverages industry—Unilever, PepsiCo, McCain Foods, Sodexo, and Ardo—have collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to form an organization called the International Food Waste Coalition (IFWC) this week. The IFWC will essentially work on methods and policies to help reduce food waste.

The core agenda of the IFWC is to first focus on the food services supply chain in the European region and then go on to widen its reach. According to the Joint Research Centre that works under the aegis of the European Commission, people in Europe waste an estimated 123 kilograms of food every year. Collectively, this amounts to 47 million tons of food being wasted annually.

As part of its outreach program, the IFWC will gradually bring other companies under its folds and encourage them to create their own programs to reduce food waste. However, IFWC isn’t the first organization of this kind to have been formed for tackling the burgeoning food waste problem at the industry level. Those at the helm of affairs at the IFWC state that their approach is unique because it focuses on the value chain of the food industry.

Officials from the newly formed organization said that the total population in the world will triple over the next few years, and pointed to latest forecasts that expect the global population to cross 9.6 bn by 2050. The IFWC said that with a growing number of people to feed, there is now an even greater need to prevent food from being wasted and instead channel it to areas where severe hunger and malnutrition prevail.

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