Translator: Riaki Poništ Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Thank you.
Like all of you, I share a love for food.
For me, it began with my parents and grandparents,
at the age of six or seven, when they brought me into the kitchen,
taught me the family recipes,
and taught me the creative aspects around cooking.
But also to respect the food that made it to the table.
It's these values that I carried in my life
as I began a career in food; first starting in distribution,
then working with large manufacturers and retailers,
and now in the technology startup that I'm involved in today.
And yet, I have a confession to make.
After 15 years of experience in the food business,
only recently did I realize just how much food is being wasted.
Would you believe that a third of all food is wasted from farm to fork?
And if food waste was a country, it would be the third largest emitter
of greenhouse gasses in the world behind the US and China.
With 800 million people going hungry,
it's a scandal that we can no longer afford to let continue.
Today, what I want to talk to you about are three things:
I first want to help you understand the issue of food waste,
but i want to talk about the opportunity to go and address it.
Then to understand where you can make a change,
I think you need to dig deeper into where food waste happens,
to identify where change can be made, and where we can make an impact.
And then finally, I want to tell you a little bit about my experience
building a company called Winnow
that works with restaurants, schools, and hotels to help them understand
what they're wasting and help them to cut it in half.
So, for me, my journey began
while working for McKinsey, in the McKinsey Global Institute.
We were doing one of the most ambitious research projects on resource use
and resource efficiency that's ever been taken on.
We were looking at resource use across all resources,
including energy, water, minerals, and food,
and trying to think what could be done about it
to meet the needs for the next 20 years.
We had a challenge of tying it all together.
So one way we did that was we put a cost on resource waste.
If you put a cost on the amount of food being wasted,
you would find that it's nearly one trillion dollars
worth of waste every year.
That's one trillion dollars of food being wasted annually.
To put that in perspective, that is one per cent of global output.
Or 2.5 billion dollars of food wasted day in and day out.
Now you can look at that trillion dollar issue,
but you can also think of it as an opportunity.
For an entrepreneur who is approaching a one-trillion-dollar market,
that's a modern day gold rush.
Think of the billions being made
in areas like fuel efficiency in cars and electric mobiles,
or looking at what can be done to make buildings more energy efficient.
We are making fantastic progress in this area,
but in food waste, we're just getting started.
To help you understand where the opportunities lie,
I then want to talk about where food waste occurs.
What you first have to think of it is as two different stories.
In developing regions like Africa, what is grown is harvested.
And what makes it to the table is eaten.
But 40 per cent of fruits and vegetables that go in the supply chain
never make it out to the other end.
Because of inadequate facilities,
meaning that there's inefficient processing, storage, and distribution
that unfortunately food is wasted along the way.
The great news is that in the UK and the US,
we've broadly solved that problem.
We have modern supply chains that, with incredible efficiency,
get food from farm to our tables at a very low cost.
The problem is that we've taken two steps backwards.
We no longer respect the food at the farm,
and we no longer respect the food at the table.
At farms, 20 per cent of food is wasted from fruits and vegetables
because either it doesn't meet exacting standards
or because last minute, we change orders on farmers,
who then have no other options
but to take a look at what they once thought was a bumper crop
and plow it back into the field.
At homes, we buy too much,
and in businesses, we often make too much and put too much on plates,
meaning that 20 per cent of the food that goes into those buildings
never gets actually put into someone's mouth.
That food gets wasted as well.
You can look at this and you can think,
"Jeez, this is incredible, how do we solve this problem?"
Well, the fact is we can do something about it.
We can build modern technology at a low cost that will allow
developing countries to leapfrog the way that we work with our supply chains today
and take care of that food.
We can create a new market that allows food
that would have otherwise been wasted at the farm,
to be transferred from suppliers to buyers who want that food
and can make use of it in the supply chain.
And we can build awareness and provide technology to help people
understand what's being wasted at the point of consumption,
so that they can make better planning decisions
and prevent food waste at home and in commercial kitchens.
The fact is that there are some green shoots of companies
doing things about this today.
Take, for example, India.
Ten billion dollars worth of food
is wasted because of unreliable cold chains in India.
Those are supply chains that have to maintain
a constant temperature to take care of that perishable produce
as it goes from farm to the point of consumption.
Companies like Promethean Power Systems are building solar powered refrigerators
to allow farmers to disconnect from an unreliable grid,
no longer rely on diesel fuel,
and reduce food waste while improving their livelihood at the same.
When it comes to imperfect produce,
what we found and what we've seen is really that it's all about branding.
This food is perfectly good to eat.
Retailers like Carrefour
and food service providers like Compass Group
are finding ways to take this food and bring it into their business,
and make use of it.
Either calling it "inglorious fruits and vegetables"
and selling it to consumers at a lower cost,
or "imperfectly delicious food" and bringing it into their kitchen
and making use of it to reduce waste
and have a more efficient business at the same time.
Then there's the company that I'm building, Winnow.
We put technology into large-scale kitchens
to help them understand what's being wasted.
We then provide them with tools to help them make better planning decisions.
We found that when you put technology to show people this in the kitchens,
you can cut food waste by value in half.
In many times, you can do it by 70 per cent or more.
For kitchens which are a tight business and a difficult business to run,
it's a significant margin uplift;
two to six percentage points to be able to reduce food waste.
Now we're saving our clients three million dollars a year in food costs
by deploying our technology.
But to put that into perspective, we estimate that 80 billion dollars a year
is the cost that the hospitality industry faces due to food waste.
So we're really just getting started.
We built our business as a for-profit company on purpose
because we believe that business can be a force for good.
We believe that when you identify a profitable model,
people will invest in that model,
scale it up, and solve the problem in a meaningful way.
We're part of a small but growing community of entrepreneurs
that are trying to solve this issue.
And I invite you to join us.
If you're an entrepreneur and you care about food,
find a spot in the supply chain that you're passionate about,
and build something that solves this problem.
It's an enormous market, an enormous opportunity,
and I promise you, getting out of bed, you will feel great
that you are trying to solve this problem; it's an entrepreneur's dream.
If you're an investor, invest in good companies solving this problem.
The scale of the market means
that those that crack this issue are going to create tremendous value.
And if you're in the food business,
take a look at your own business, understand what you're wasting,
Then look around and see how people can help you to solve it.
You will probably find
that is one of the most profitable investments you could ever make.
If you love food and you hate seeing it wasted, I invite you to join the fight.
It is one of the most exciting and challenging opportunities
we will face in our generation.
Thank you.
(Applause)