Our latest episode is with Thoric Cederstrom, Director of Research and Learning for Food Enterprise Solutions, which implements the Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety (BD4FS) Project. BD4FS works with food businesses to adopt safer food handling practices to increase access to affordable, safe, and nutritious food. Thoric and Lourdes Martinez Romero, Senior Advisor in the USAID Center for Nutrition’s Food Safety Division, discuss the role of the private sector in reducing FLW and how improving food safety practices are a key part of this.
Our latest episode is with Thoric Cederstrom, Director of Research and Learning for Food Enterprise Solutions, which implements the Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety (BD4FS) Project. BD4FS works with food businesses to adopt safer food handling practices to increase access to affordable, safe, and nutritious food. Thoric and Lourdes Martinez Romero, Senior Advisor in the USAID Center for Nutrition’s Food Safety Division, discuss the role of the private sector in reducing FLW and how improving food safety practices are a key part of this.
(gentle music)- [Nika] Welcome to "USAID's Kitchen Sink" a food loss and waste podcast. I'm your producer, Nika Larian. 30 to 40% of the food that is produced is either lost or wasted, contributing to a global food crisis with over 800 million going to bed hungry. Listen on as USAID experts speak with researchers and development professionals to explore solutions to this critical issue that demands a kitchen sink approach. When it comes to climate, food security, and food system sustainability, we have no time to waste.- Thank you for joining us for the "Food Loss and Waste Podcast". This episode will explore partner solutions to reducing food loss and waste, engaging micro, small, and medium scale businesses with the Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety. This podcast is hosted by USAID Research Community of Practice Sub-Group on Food Loss and Waste, and will feature interviews with subject matter experts to explore the implications of and approaches to addressing food loss and waste. My name is Lourdes. I am a Senior Advisor in the Center for Nutrition Food Safety Division. Today, I'm leading this timely conversation with Dr. Thoric Cederstrom from Food Enterprise Solutions, our partner implementing the program Business Drivers for Food Safety. Welcome, Thoric. Before we begin, please tell us about you and your work.- Thank you, Lourdes. As you mentioned, my name is Thoric Cederstrom. I'm the Director for Research and Learning for Food Enterprise Solutions, which is implementing the Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety project, and it is focused on engaging with private sector businesses to help them, assist them to adopt safer food handling practices so that consumers, especially in local markets, have access to a greater access to affordable, nutritious, and safe food. So we're about the midway point of the project, and even though the focus is on food safety, food loss is a concomitant sort of result of our activities as well. So happy to speak to that today with you.- And thank you again for agreeing to speak with us, and let us dig into the topic right away. So let's talk about the role of the private sector in reducing food loss and waste, and tell us more about how FES concept of growing food businesses work.- Yes, happy to do that. The private sector is a big bucket, and it includes, you know, even global food businesses that are vertically integrated and have international scope, and that's not the focus of our intent at all. We're working with small to medium food enterprises that have, as part of their business model, a goal to grow, right, and to serve the customers in their markets, usually local, national, maybe even regional markets with better food, and so producing that food in safer ways and, also, understanding the cost to their business of food loss as well that could be mitigated through the adoption of of better food handling practices is a key focus of what we do, and so by helping businesses understand that they're losing revenue by not addressing food loss is a key activity of ours.- Perfect, thank you. What are the challenges for growing food businesses to adopt practices to reduce food loss waste and please tell us about the opportunities as well.- Yes, I think one of the biggest challenges is just the definition of the term, right? It's something that has become part of the global awareness, especially in relation to climate change, but as population grows, and we're seeing all the kinks in the global supply system because of COVID and post COVID, we're keenly aware of the issue of food loss, right? That food... And it signals inefficiencies in the supply chain, right, in the value chain, something's not working right, that food is not reaching the end consumer in an efficient and safe way. So one of the key constraints that we have found is that, first of all, a lot of businesses don't measure it. When you ask 'em, "Do you have food loss?" First of all, they don't understand the term, right? So it's a term that we need to define and operationalize with them and spend some time talking about with them because it's just not something that they deal with or they deal with it, but they don't necessarily measure it, right? And if you don't measure it, then how can you act upon it, right? They don't have a sense of how much revenue that they are potentially foregoing. So we found in Senegal when we started engaging with businesses on this topic, only one out of all the businesses that we were working with actually track it, right? And this was a dairy industry where the margins are very thin, and the volumes are very high, and so if they have significant loss in that value chain, it hits their bottom line quite severely, but other businesses, they redirect a lot of the food that's unfit for human conception to animal consumption. So they still get revenue, but it's suboptimal, right? It's not what they could get if they were to protect it and make sure it gets to human consumers, right? And then we also found a lot was going in to compost fertilizer, and that's sort of a third tier down where the food does go. So for them, it's not loss, right? It's still generating revenue but not as much as it could if it were preserved and protected and went into the market system. The other big loss is to consumers themselves, not just the business, because it does reduce the supply of affordable, nutritious, and safe food to consumers, and that's a big cost to the overall nutrition of a country, not necessarily a business cost, but it is a social cost.- No, that's excellent point, and I think this is really a good segue to talk more about the opportunities and why work with growing food businesses. What's the way forward for growing food businesses to reduce food loss and waste?- Yeah, no, that's a good question because what we have seen and what the literature seems to support, too, is that businesses incorporate food loss into their overall sort of budgetary calculations, right? It's just a cost of doing business, right? They expect to lose a certain percentage of their food as it moves to the supply chain, and we see this, especially in the highly perishable fruits and vegetable market. There's approximately 50% loss, right? From the farm to the end consumer, approximately half doesn't reach the market in a safe and edible way. So recognizing that and demonstrating to businesses that there are cost-effective food handling practices, right, that they could adopt and that the benefit of adopting them is greater than the cost, right, so this issue of benefit cost analysis in simple ways that they can understand. We're also exploring how can we digitize it. So the protocol, we've developed some measurement tools that businesses can adopt, and we've learned to simplify those because if you make it too onerous, then they're like,"Eh, don't wanna do it because I've got other things to do, right? I'd rather be generating new customers or finding new markets rather than tracking food loss," right? So there are opportunity costs to everything, and they're real costs, right? So if it requires refrigeration, if it requires things that are capital expenditures, for small, medium-sized enterprises, those could be real constraints, but if you can introduce some very practical, low-cost, and easy to implement practices that a business could do that could significantly reduce their food loss, then the probability of uptake is gonna be much greater, right? So what we're trying to do is document and learn and understand from businesses and listen to 'em carefully what are their realities and share with other practitioners and perhaps even create a community of practice of people working in this space, right, so that we can share information in our different theaters of operation where we're working around the world about what works, what doesn't work, what are the best practices, and how do we disseminate those to businesses, right? Make it easy for them to understand, to measure, and then act upon food loss within their businesses.- Thoric, you know, we can talk about this topic for hours, but, unfortunately, today, we need to end here. Thank you for your time and for your work with a segment of the private sector that is really key to reducing food loss and waste. We look forward to learning more about FES and Business Drivers for Food Safety, and good luck with your project.- Thanks so much, and thanks for inviting me, and I look forward to future discussions and learning more. This podcast series is very helpful, I think, to everybody that's working on this topic. Thank you very much.(upbeat music)- [Nika] Thank you for tuning in to "USAID's Kitchen Sink". This podcast was produced by Nika Larian and is organized by the USAID Food Loss and Waste Community of Practice co-chairs, Ahmed Kablan and Ann Vaughan. Additional thanks goes to Feed the Future, the US Government's Global Food Security Initiative, and the USAID Center for Nutrition.(upbeat music continues)(upbeat music fades)