Canadians get creative in solving food waste problem

it's gonna take a while to heat up chef Jagger Gordon hates the thought of people going hungry smells delicious with a thriving catering business he's almost always surrounded by food so he was shocked years ago when his young daughter came home from a sleepover and told him there had been no breakfast for anyone I always thought there's enough food for everyone why would you why would someone not have food in their fridge in the morning the realization that poverty and hunger were so close to home while also seeing the incredible amount of food that goes to waste in his industry turned this caterer into a crusader we are feeding thousands of people a week and diverting tens of thousands of pounds a week of perfectly edible food that's Desna lentils his mission is to feed it forward with a number of projects like this grocery store the food here is practically free and people just pay what they can yeah it's more like donate what you can the workers are volunteers the food donated by retailers looks perfect but it didn't sell fast enough and is no longer considered fresh enough for fussy consumers this would have been sold somewhere else most of this stuff so this was for sale everywhere this is rescued all this food and everything that I deal with his rescue food rescued from the garbage heap 31 billion dollars worth a year just in Canada food goes to waste on the farm in transit in processing plants in restaurants and in our homes now that's changing last 20 years a team has been focused on extracting waste from the supply chain efficiency expert Martin Gooch did the research that came up with that 31 billion dollar figure and this project is the first of its type in the world today he's telling a group of farmers about his newest project that will highlight where exactly waste occurs and how much it costs business we have this perception of affluence and abundance we can afford most of us can afford to waste some food whether we're an individual consumer or whether we're a business his project is being funded by Second Harvest a social agency that distributed over 10 million pounds of surplus food last year we know that there is so much more food that we are not accessing and that's one of the reasons we're doing this research is to find out ok where is this food every morning a team delivers truckloads of unsold food donated by big grocers but what we found was there was a lot of places that were smaller in scale that we weren't going to pick up from because we wouldn't send a truck there just wasn't efficient so we created something called food rescue CA it's a web-based platform I kind of call it the eHarmony of food the site matches smaller donors and those in need a great idea but still as a society we toss far too much food and that contributes to global warming rotting food creates methane a pollutant even worse than carbon dioxide that's what inspired this young company so this is the regular box that gets delivered weekly in Toronto in London it has basically produce that farmers can't sell to grocery stores and they usually end up throwing away in the garbage cédric Samaha is with flash foods a startup that offers home delivery of less than perfect vegetables rejected by grocers for example this potato its disfigured I feel like I bought potatoes that's not that radical yeah most of them don't have a lot of issues like the cucumber the size sometimes is an issue so they won't send it through that looks perfect to flash food is growing thanks to demand from customers like John Griffis and Michelle Clark having a box delivered which is food that would normally go to waste because it doesn't look perfect is is great the service doesn't save them any money but the home delivery is convenient and they believe less waste will slow climate change this summits been so hot that it's gonna get worse back with Chef Jagger Gordon he's taking his feet at forward idea to a new level he's come up with an app that will allow anyone to share their extra food you just take a picture of the product that you want to donate any food item that's still edible in good standing so a piece of pizza or even a truckload of tomatoes you just take a picture of it it uploads to a map so that whoever wants it can come get it but the great thing is is every city can now be in competition of how who is saving how much food from the landfills and how much was actually being in back to people in need so you're gonna try and start that competition it's starting the app launches into the marketplace next month and many would say none too soon it's time to get on board what's being called a global food waste revolution Diane Buckner CBC News Toronto Europe has been ahead of the game when it comes to legislation around food waste in 2016 France became the first country in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food the big retailers now have to donate those goods to food banks and charities or else face heavy fines Italy followed suit offering incentives to businesses who donate food to charities it's also cleared some of the hurdles around donating food that's just past its expiry date that was a big concern for health and liability reasons

Channel: CBC News: The National

Views: 4,227,763

Rating: 4.8896542 out of 5

Keywords: food, waste, food waste, landfills, problem, solution, Canadian entrepreneurs, food rescue, flash food, CBC, The National, Diane Buckner

Id: fRovHP4eXyM

Length: 5min 38sec (338 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Chef Jagger Gordon is doing wonderful things! It’s great to see food waste and “ugly” produce put in the spotlight. He’s also the man behind Toronto’s first pay what you can grocery store.

[u/WiseBaxter]

A relative of mine has a company doing something related, called Loop. They gather food waste from grocery stores and distribute it to local area farmers to feed their livestock, and since many grocery stores are looking locally for their sources more often now, it becomes a full cycle.

[u/Technobob420]

There is a lot of waste caused by dates on food. Most people believe that when the date is up its time toss it and yet many foods are good for days, weeks, even months and in some cases years past the date. What we need is to have 2 dates a best before date and a use by date.

[u/Jumping_turdlets]

I work for a grocery store and donate as much of our food waste as we can but I've noticed some interesting things that have made me think about how we shop for food.

One example is bread. We shrink between 25 to 50 percent of our bread. It's pretty bad, but if we order bread to match our sales, people buy less and we shrink a greater percentage. There is this perception that the last loaf is somehow always lesser quality of the ones that already sold. So in order to increase our sales, we increase our shrink.

These days I really inspect the food I buy rather than just assume when the displays aren't full that it's just 'leftovers' on the shelf.

[u/Bewaretheicespiders]

Feels like beating a dead horse, but sooo much milk and eggs gets thrown away at the source because of supply management...