How the Industry Is Tackling Food Waste

Also in 2017, the Consumer Goods Forum, a network of more than 400 major international retailers, manufacturers, and service providers, adopted a “call to action” urging food retailers and producers to standardize and simplify product date labels by 2020, with the overall goal of halving food waste by 2025. The Consumer Goods Forum suggested that producers and retailers display only one label at a time and choose between either a safety or expiration date for perishable items (such as “Use By”), or a quality date indicator for nonperishable items (such as “Best If Used By”). A number of large companies have agreed to these guidelines, including Kellogg’s, Walmart, Campbell Soup, Nestle, Tesco, and Unilever.

FDA “strongly supports” the food industry’s voluntary efforts to use “Best If Used By” for quality-based information, Yiannas said in his letter. But the agency is not addressing the proposed “Use By” product date label “for safety reasons at this time,” he wrote, without further explanation.

Regulated Food Labeling

Except for infant formula, food label dates are not federally regulated. According to the USDA, “it is important that consumers understand that the dates applied to food are for quality and not for safety.” Some lawmakers say this unregulated date labeling needs to be changed to clear up consumer confusion and reduce food waste. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, for example, has introduced federal legislation that would end the “arbitrary” dating of food and require uniform, standardized labeling using only two terms: “Use By” or “Best If Used By.” Her Food Date Labeling Act of 2019 (HR 3981) and a companion bill introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. (S 2337), would effectively eliminate the “Sell By” date, which is intended for stores, not consumers, and doesn’t specify when the item goes bad. Instead, the “Use By” date would signify when the product has reached the end of its shelf life and should be discarded. The “Best If Used By” date would signify when quality may begin to deteriorate but the product remains wholesome and can be consumed.

“This bill is an opportunity for the federal government to reduce confusion across the food supply chain and make sure no one is going hungry or inadvertently hurting our environment,” Rep. Pingree said in a statement. “With this piece of legislation, we can help ensure food is being used and eaten, rather than thrown out due to confusion.” As of this writing, legislators have not acted on either of the House or Senate bills.

Technology to the Rescue

IBM recently concluded its Food Waste Developer Challenge, or “virtual hackathon,” in which more than 100 software development teams in the U.S. competed to create solutions using open source technology. Because data lies at the heart of the food waste problem, “coders can come in to help create a more transparent and real-time supply chain tracking how food is sold and fulfilled with waste reduction in mind,” IBM’s Walicki says.

IBM announced the winners in September, but has no plans to own or control any potential solutions. “As foundational partners in the open technology community, we feel that innovation can come from many areas and we want to encourage others to build upon the technologies IBM has pioneered to create new breakthroughs to our society’s biggest challenges, including food waste,” Walicki explains.

Other off-the-shelf traceability software can be applied to the food supply chain. ABB’s Manufacturing Operations Management suite could allow consumers to digitally trace the life cycle of a food product. A livestock farmer, for example, could upload into a database an animal’s identification number, its age, the date it was slaughtered or milked, the date of packaging, and where it has been distributed. A QR or barcode linking to this information could be printed on the packaging. Once on supermarket shelves, consumers could scan the code to view the product data.