How Companies Are Innovating Food Waste Solutions

Food waste is an enormous problem in countries around the globe. In the United States alone, it is estimated that between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply goes to waste. Much of this food is  perfectly fresh and edible but discarded because it doesn’t look ideal. How can companies innovate with regard to food waste solutions?

Solutions in the Home

Many tech start-ups use mass marketing techniques to help reduce food waste in the home and on the supply chain. As food moves from fields to manufacturing plants, to grocery stores and finally your fridge, a significant portion goes to waste. How many times have you bought meat or produce, only to have it go bad within a day or two of purchase? The sheer amount of time that food spends in transit plays a large part of that. Tech and transportation startups have started to fight back.

BluWrap, for example, uses cells to monitor the oxygen content in shipping containers. By keeping the O2 level low, they can increase the food’s freshness window, enabling it to stay fresher while in transit. BT9 XSENSE is using IoT sensors and real-time cold-chain management to identify problems before the food ever reaches the grocery store. There is even a device on the market that absorbs ethelyne gas in your refridgerator. Ethelyne gas makes fruits and vegetables ripen — reducing it prevents your produce from spoiling in the fridge.

Solutions in the Neighborhood

Good food is wasted every day, even though there are families whose kids rely on free breakfast and lunch at school to get a hot meal every day. Programs like Copia are hoping to change that. They work with facilities that cook a lot of food on a daily basis — like hospitals, restaurants, and cafeterias — to take their excess food to families that need it.

Seasonal produce is often a problem, especially in food deserts that might not have anything but a convenience store to do grocery shopping. Startups like Leafy Green Machine, in conjunction with the Farmhand Connect smartphone app, create closed-loop self-sustaining hydroponics that is set up in a shipping container. This container can be moved anywhere and even monitored remotely to ensure a healthy and bountiful harvest.

Many smaller companies realize what a big problem food waste is in our country. They recognize that nothing is going to change until they take steps to change it. They’ve made inroads into the industry on a small scale that is growing larger by the year.

Solutions on a Larger Scale

What about all the food that goes to waste that isn’t fit for consumption? Produce that has spoiled in the fields or meat that has been contaminated by listeria or e.coli? It might not be edible, but it doesn’t have to be wasted. Some innovative companies take this spoiled food that would otherwise end up in landfills or incinerators and turn it into fuel.

The food waste is put through an accelerated composting process, which turns it into a semi-liquid state that the folks at Waste Management call engineered bioslurry. It is then put into an anaerobic digester filled with bacteria. The anaerobic digester replicates the kind of decomposition that happens when food is dumped in the landfill. This process produces methane, which can then be used to power a generator. One example of such a generator exists in Freetown, Massachusetts. At full capacity, this single generator can power roughly 40 percent of the local grid.

This is just an example of what the technology is capabvle of on a small scale. Imagine what it could do if one or more of these generators were placed in every major city. They plan to incorporate technology to allow customers on the local grid to use the methane gas produced to heat their homes. This reduces local dependence on electricity or natural gas.

Doing Your Part

There is no one perfect solution for food waste. It is something that we need to approach from multiple angles, which is precisely what these innovative companies are doing. We will all have to make an effort to reduce food waste. Invest in a startup.  Shop at local farmer’s markets to minimize the distance that your food travels before it reaches your table. It is entirely up to you.

There are steps that we can all take to reduce our food waste, but everyone needs to work together. Start small, compost, recycle or look into green solutions in your area.