Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
In 2017, I spent just $8 on food for the entire year.
I did this to prove a point:
that we waste so much food
that it's perfectly possible
for an ordinary person like myself to eat for free, to live on food waste.
Food waste is a complex topic.
It involves many stakeholders.
When somebody comes up to me
and says they've got a solution for food waste,
I tell them, 'Put aside your solution.
Seek first to understand the problem in its entirety.
Because if you don't understand the problem,
how are you going to find a solution that is both lasting and impactful?'
So let's talk about the problem.
In Singapore, 90% of our food is grown on overseas farms.
It's imported to Singapore, it's distributed by wholesalers,
it's sold by retailers, and it's bought by consumers.
And at every stage of this food supply chain,
tons of perfectly edible food get thrown away.
In 2017, as a nation, we wasted 809,000 tonnes of food.
That's equivalent to the combined weight of everyone in Singapore, times two.
When we think about food waste,
what comes to mind is smelly, rotting food -
the kind that we see in our bins
or the kind that we smell in our rubbish trucks.
What we don't see
are the tons of perfectly edible food that get thrown away
because they're the wrong size,
the wrong shape, the wrong colour,
or they don't meet other superficial standards
set by supermarkets and retailers.
So let's look at this problem from the perspective of the retailer.
Imagine you run a supermarket.
You know rental is high in Singapore, so you have limited shelf space.
For every type of vegetable that you sell, you have two shelves.
On one shelf, you place the perfect-looking ones,
and on the other shelf, you place the ugly-looking ones.
The perfect ones are easy to sell;
the ugly ones, not so.
Keeping in mind that you bought these -
both the nice-looking ones and the ugly-looking ones -
from your supplier at the same price,
you know that your customer
is not going to buy the ugly-looking one from you
at the same price as the nice-looking one.
So you have to price it at a discount.
Now, bearing in mind
that as a business your goal is to make as much money as possible,
does it then make business sense
to have one shelf of nice-looking vegetables
that you can sell for a higher profit margin
and another shelf of ugly-looking vegetables
that you have to sell at a lower profit margin?
No, it just doesn't make sense.
What makes sense is having two shelves of nice-looking vegetables
that you can sell at a higher profit margin.
And as for the ugly ones, you just throw it away,
and you price the cost of that waste into the ones that you do sell.
Now, you might be thinking
this just has to do with customer buying behaviour.
You just need to educate the customers
to let them know that the ugly foods
are just as nutritious as the good-looking ones.
But there's a problem with this.
Have you taken a look at your supermarket advertisements?
Do you see any ugly foods in there?
You don't.
The problem is that our customers have already been 'educated' by supermarkets
to expect only the freshest, most perfect-looking food
when they come to the supermarket.
Why?
Because when your customers come to your supermarket
expecting only the freshest, most perfect-looking food,
you can sell it to them at the highest profit margin.
That is the first cause of food waste in Singapore -
cosmetic standards as judged by customers,
but as 'educated' by supermarkets and retailers
so that they can sell more and make as much money as possible.
Let's move on to the second cause of food waste.
Take a look at the photo on the left.
Those are small potatoes.
You can see them in comparison to the size of the hand.
Now, would you believe me
if I told you that these potatoes were big potatoes?
If these potatoes were sold at a supermarket,
they will be classified as 'big' potatoes.
But because these potatoes were too small
to be sold at a supermarket as big potatoes,
they were thrown away.
And on the right, you will see sweet potatoes
that are too big to be sold at a supermarket.
Besides small and big, you also have funny, odd-sized shaped vegetables.
You've got a radish and a capsicum,
and I totally would buy this because it's buy one, get one free.
(Laughter)
What is wrong with odd-sized vegetables that are too big or too small?
Well, again, imagining that you're running a supermarket,
you have cartons of vegetables,
and, say, for each carton, you've got maybe 50 vegetables in there.
When you have vegetables that are too big or too small,
too long or too short, or odd-sized like this,
then your packing is going to be inefficient.
And when your packing is inefficient, you end up losing money.
So what you do is you set in place certain packing standards
for the vegetables:
you have vegetables that fall within a certain size range,
a certain shape range.
And this instruction, you pass it on to your supplier.
Let me share with you how one supermarket in Singapore does it.
The supplier brings a pallet of vegetables to the supermarket.
Each pallet has about 50 cartons,
and each carton has about 50 vegetables in there.
When it reaches the supermarket,
the representative comes out and does a sample check.
He picks at random one of these cartons
and opens it up.
If the vegetables in there do not meet their packing standards,
they reject the entire pallet.
Put yourselves in the shoes of the wholesaler.
Your big customer has just rejected one pallet of vegetables.
What are you going to do with it?
You could find another customer, but that would cost you time.
And in business, time is money.
You've got new vegetables coming in every day;
you don't have the time to waste to find another customer.
So you weigh the pros and cons,
and you realise that it's more cost-effective
for your business
to just dump the entire pallet
than to try to find other customers.
So that is the second cause of food waste -
superficial packing standards by supermarkets and retailers
that have nothing to do with how nutritious the food is
but everything to do with making the business more efficient
so that you can sell more, sell faster, and make more money.
Let's go to the third cause of food waste -
all the way up to the top of the food supply chain
between the farms and the importers.
The farm says to the importer,
if you want to buy my vegetables,
then you have to take everything that I produce.
And the importer agrees to that.
So now you're the farmer,
and you know that nature is not perfect,
nature is unpredictable.
Sometimes you have freak weather patterns,
made worse now by climate change.
And sometimes, insects will come and consume your crops.
You have these quotas to meet,
quotas set in place by your importer.
How do you make sure that even when there's some crop loss,
you still can meet those quotas?
Simple - you grow more than you have to.
But when the weather is perfect,
when no insects come and eat your crops,
what happens?
You're going to have what we call 'a bountiful harvest'.
And not just your farm will have that bountiful harvest -
all the surrounding farms are going to have the same bountiful harvest.
You're going to have an oversupply in the market.
When supply outstrips demand, prices fall.
When your importer comes to buy your vegetables,
you're not going to make much money from selling the vegetables,
because the prices are low.
You might even lose money.
Now you're the importer.
You incur fixed costs when you import vegetables to Singapore:
transportation, packaging, taxes.
To make a profit for your business, you have to sell it at a certain price.
But when there is an oversupply,
prices are low.
With every batch of vegetables you put into the market,
that you sell in the market,
prices will drop further.
And you might end up losing money instead.
So what do you do?
As a business, you want to lose as little money as possible.
The best way to do it,
from the business perspective,
is not to put the vegetables into the market -
it's to dump them all.
It's an oversupply;
you've got new batches coming in every day.
So you keep prices up
by throwing away the food instead of selling it.
So that's the third cause of food waste -
mismatch of supply and demand
that results in food suppliers like farms and importers
throwing away food instead of selling it.
That keeps prices up,
and you lose as little money as possible.
So let's recap.
The first cause of food waste is cosmetic standards by customers.
The second cause of food waste is packing standards set by retailers.
And the third one is mismatch of supply and demand
at the farms and importers.
If you notice,
there's an underlying thread that links all three of these causes.
The underlying thread is this:
businesses exist to make as much money as possible.
Now that we know what really causes food waste in Singapore,
we can start looking at possible solutions.
First, we need to change the way we think about food.
When we change the way we measure the value of food,
we change the way we think about it.
I spoke to some people about the food waste we have in Singapore,
and we found out that about 60% of the food that we throw away
can actually be salvaged and eaten.
But we're not;
we're throwing away most of it.
At the same time, we have 1 in 10 Singaporeans
who can't afford sufficiently nutritious food.
Why isn't somebody doing more about it?
So we started SG Food Rescue.
Every week, we go to wholesalers and importers.
We ask them not to throw away the food
but to give it to us instead.
What do we do with it?
We share it with our community of volunteers, our food rescuers,
but 90% of it goes to soup kitchens and charity organisations
that feed the needy.
We started this in February 2018,
and now, six months later,
we've rescued about 50 tonnes of food.
(Applause)
Thank you.
That's equivalent to more than 150,000 meals.
But even so, this is just a tiny drop of water in the ocean.
It represents just 0.01% of all the food in Singapore
that can be salvaged and eaten.
I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution for the problem of food waste,
but I do know what really causes it.
What really causes it
is that we do not look at food as a basic human right
but as a way to make as much money as possible.
And that is the only reason
why we prefer to throw away tons of food every day
instead of giving it to people who need it the most.
I believe that if we change the way we look at food,
we can do something about this.
We can work together to erase hunger,
to eliminate food insecurity,
and to reduce the colossal scale of food waste in Singapore
because food waste is everybody's problem
and, therefore, every one of us has to be part of the solution.
Thank you.
(Applause)