During a summit hosted by ReFED, food waste experts, policymakers, and innovators convened to explore promising solutions to food waste.
The Food Waste Solutions Summit asserts that “food waste is a problem that can be solved.” The event unites business stakeholders and solutions to reduce food loss and waste.
Dana Gunders, Executive Director at ReFED, encourages attendees to “think bigger” in imagining solutions to the problem of food waste. “I say this as matter-of-factly as I can, we’re not making enough progress…we’re not moving the needle as much as we need to be moving it.”
Gunders identifies five action steps for furthering solutions to food waste. These include scaling pilot programs, seeking brainpower, strengthening measurement and industry benchmarking, radical collaboration, and facing the reality of barriers. She invites attendees to “be a serious answer to the giant problem that food loss and waste is.”
Summit topics range from technological innovations interrupting food waste to pathways for financing solutions. The event also highlighted ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund, Capital Tracker, and Insights Engine. Collectively, these tools help to monitor food loss and waste in the U.S. and highlight solutions to address the problem.
Alexandria Coari, Vice President of Capital, Innovation, and Engagement at ReFED, believes important observations that have been made through the Capital Tracker. “Since 2016, for instance, philanthropic funding has more than doubled in our space, and on the private investment side, it has increased more than seven-fold in that same period of time.”
Recent investment from ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund is helping organizations including Transparent Path and Wisely—both featured at the Summit—drive progress around food loss and waste. Focused on consumer waste, Transparent Path utilizes software to make supply chains of perishable goods more visible. And Wisely is preparing to introduce smart food storage to consumers to help cut down on waste in households.
But Coari also reminds listeners that funding still has a long way to go to match food waste’s magnitude of impact. “We know that food loss and waste accounts for about eight percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally and we are nowhere near getting that same share of funding in our space yet.”
Ida Posner, a Strategic Advisor at the Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, argues that philanthropy must play a bigger role in funding food waste solutions that are less attractive to traditional funding pathways. She encourages funders to view risk as an opportunity.
“Philanthropy is an opportunity to have that catalytic capital that can do something that otherwise wouldn’t happen,” says Posner. “I think the opportunity here is really storytelling, we have to get better at talking about the opportunity in a way that connects with people.”
The power of storytelling also echoes throughout the rest of the Food Waste Solutions Summit. Storytelling is a crucial tool for connecting food loss and waste and justice topics, speakers argue.
Stephen Satterfield, Founder and CEO of Whetstone Media believes narrative is key to helping others understand the causes of food loss and waste. Using stories, Stephen Satterfield offers specific insight into the intersections between justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) and food waste.
“If we were to explore the origins of food waste, what would we find?” Satterfield asks. “We would find plantations. We would find out that the things that were created in excess were based on food being created for marketplaces. Plantations are not for feeding people, they are for marketplaces.”
Satterfield urges attendees to critically investigate the food system they have inherited. “I would leave you with a consideration around the power of narrative from the perspective of origin—which is to say, there is nothing more powerful in the world than stories,” he says.
And as storytelling inspires action, the Summit identifies shifts in the field of waste reduction.
“At ReFED we believe that investing in food waste solutions is at an inflection point,” says Coari. “In spite of some of the geopolitical and economic realities that we are facing right now, there are some pretty clear tailwinds that really show that investing in this sector right now has never been more important, more needed, and frankly…more exciting.”
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Photo Courtesy of Joshua Hoehne, Unsplash
