An average person throws away at least 75 kilograms up to 163 kgs of food waste each year in Arab countries, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) latest report, ‘The State of Food Waste in West Asia’. The UN report studied the state of food loss in the 12 countries in West Asian region comprising Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. 

“Food waste in West Asia is alarming as it represents an estimated 34 per cent of the total food served,” the report said. It also noted that during Ramadan, 25 to 50 per cent of food prepared goes to waste. 

A high percentage of households (89.8 per cent) said that the main reason for throwing the food away is expiry date. The findings also showed that other reasons for food loss were smell and taste, as well as the undesirable look such as blemishes. The report further identified fruits, vegetables, and salads to be the most frequent contributors to food waste generation. 

Understanding the attitudes and behaviours of households across the region is important according to UNEP, citing that having the available data offers opportunities to promote sustainable lifestyles and empower the youth to make a positive impact. Some of the key findings in the report also highlighted the importance of raising awareness about the impact of food waste on the environment and food security. 

“It is important to tackle food waste in West Asia as a means to reduce pressure on landfills and minimize methane emissions that contribute to climate change,” the report explained. 

Addressing food loss is also key to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal 12, which seeks to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.” Under SDG 12, one of the targets is to cut at least half of the per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level, as well as reducing food loss along the production and supply chains by 2030.

Another key finding of the report was the impact of the pandemic on eating habits within households. In a survey of 200 participants from July to November 2020, 33 per cent revealed that their food waste increased during COVID-19 while 67 per cent said it remain unchanged. Respondents, however, noted their increase of using food leftovers during this period.

With the magnitude of food loss in the region, the report recommended that new policies must be developed to drive support towards cutting food waste and encourage as well various supply chain operators to invest and adjust. Furthermore, an increase in investments should go along with adopting and transferring relevant technologies to address the issue. 

The robust startups community in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are the new source of hope for the region to tackle its massive food waste issue. Wamda, a platform for entrepreneurs, has identified several leading startups – from Morocco to the UAE – that are addressing the inefficiencies in the local food system using innovative solutions.  

The Wamda report cited that up to 250 kilograms of food per capita are discarded annually in the MENA region, adding that in Saudi Arabia about 427kg of food are wasted by an average person annually, while the UAE trails at 197kg per year. These two countries have now committed to reduce 50 per cent of their food waste and loss by 2030, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

Jordan-based Decapolis, a startup which taps the latest technologies such as data analytics and blockchain, has taken the lead to tackle food waste issue at the farming stage. Through its system, farmers can enhance its produce of fruit and vegetables that meet global standards, and thereby cut on produce for export that is rendered non-compliant.

Another startup identified by Wamda is the EreoGo, a company based in the UAE which focuses on saving ‘ugly’, soon-to-expire, and surplus produce to get a makeover and be appreciated by consumers, and thereby saving them from being discarded. It aims to change the perception around ugly produce and offer a transparent platform for consumers to better understand their purchases and its impact on the environment.

In Saudi Arabia, a food preservation startup called Uvera offers a technology solution which uses ultraviolet rays to extend the shelf life of food. According to Wamda, the company targets to market an in-house built-in device for food providers, as well as a household version for individual users. Uvera looks to officially launch to the market in 2022.

Meanwhile, redistributing excess or rescued food is the focus of TeKeya, a social enterprise in Egypt which offers restaurants two ways to redistribute surplus food. One form is to sell the imperfect, untouched, yet healthy food on TeKeya’s application for half the original price, while another option is to subscribe to the startup’s model where they donate the food instead of selling it. In this approach, TeKeya supports restaurants in increasing their customer base as well as profits, while reducing food loss.

In Morocco, newly launched startup Foodeals operates similar to TeKeya by providing two food waste solutions through its app. Founded in 2020, it seeks to attract local food providers to offer discounted surplus food in Foodeals platform as well as connect with corporate, supermarkets, and food retailers through its B2B Foodeals Donate service. 

While the journey is not always smooth for these entrepreneurs, Wamda noted that “effective steps to fight food waste require heavier partnerships between foodtech businesses, regulatory authorities, and every participant in the food supply chain”.

Shopping with my eyes is second nature to me. But I could be using so many more senses.

How we buy food changed dramatically over the past century and a half. For many, particularly in the industrialized world, buying food has become a one-dimensional experience based primarily on looks. As a business historian, I found myself intrigued by the disconnection between what we experience when we purchase food and what we experience and value when we’re eating food—the smells, tastes, textures, and, of course, sight. How did visual information come to be king? And what do we lose with our other senses relegated to the sidelines?

As I investigated, I discovered people’s sensory experience in food shopping and eating changed as a product of complex interplay between advances in science and business, how those advances were reflected by our attitude toward nature, and the introduction of new political and economic powers. Over time, the forces of industrialization and standardization pushed for a bright, uniform look of food available year-round, exposing people to new visual and taste experiences. But this came at a cost to the other senses and diminished more localized relationships with food.

Eye appeal has become buy appeal. But why and how? A history of how they became connected provides insight into the transformation of people’s relationships with food, nature, and society.

Back in time: From a market to a supermarket

If you lived in late nineteenth-century New York City, you would have likely purchased your food at a public market, where you could see and touch produce, smell combinations of the foods and spices for sale, and speak to sellers and other customers. In this multisensorial environment, you would have discerned the quality of foods through their appearance, smell, and texture, and through communication.

Meanwhile, in a regular grocery store, your sensory access to food may have been relatively limited. A store clerk would usually retrieve goods for you from a shelf behind the counter. And although grocery stores sold some perishable foods, their major food trade was canned and other processed products. After stopping by the grocery, you would make your way to the butcher shop and then the produce shop, which would have been separate.

Beginning in the 1920s, large grocery stores began absorbing neighboring butcher shops and produce stores. By the mid twentieth century, you would be shopping in grocery stores similar to what you’d be familiar with today. Stores that carried everything you need—butcher, baker, produce, and packaged items. Bright lights and colorful displays, aisles and aisles of options, carefully displayed and enthusiastically marketed.

Standardizing the senses

This change in our sensory experience involved a shift in the entire food chain from producers to distributors and retailers since the late nineteenth century. The United States was then at the forefront of the industrialization of agriculture and food processing, the emergence of the food-coloring business, and the growth of a modern food retailing system. The early development of the mass production and mass marketing of foods proved particularly conducive to the standardization of food colors.

With rapid industrialization and market expansion in the United States from the 1870s on, agricultural producers and food processors sought to streamline production, emphasizing efficiency, consistency, and standardization. Through this shift many consumers attained an unprecedented variety of foods. Mass production, long-distance transportation systems, and refrigeration technology meant a wider variety of both agricultural and processed products reached a broader population. But sensory experiences became increasingly uniform and predictable. A bag of apples, a box of breakfast cereal, and a tub of margarine invariably offered consumers from Los Angeles to New York the same color and the same flavor.

Prioritizing our visual experience was key for this shift. Color turned out to be easier to control, reproduce, and commoditize than did other sensory factors. The smell of food, for example, was difficult to convey in print or other media. Color served as a powerful communication tool for the food industry not only to appeal to the eyes of consumers but also to stimulate gustatory, olfactory, and tactile sensations.

Farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers began devoting enormous resources to determine and create the “right” color of foods, which many consumers would recognize and, in time, take for granted.

Manufacturing “natural” and “fresh”

Seeking to create uniform, bright colors as the sign of succulent fruits and vegetables, growers and packers tended to prioritize the appearance of their produce over the actual taste. Several studies conducted in the 1920s and 1930s suggested that produce artificially ripened with ethylene gas (a gas that helped fasten a ripening process of fruits and vegetables) did not develop full flavor due to a lower sugar content than those ripened on the plant. One study, for instance, showed that tomatoes ripened by ethylene remained solid for a longer period than did vine-ripened fruits. The firm fruit was easy to transport and looked good, but it came at the expense of flavor and texture.

One example from the Florida citrus industry shows even more complicated relations between taste and color. Orange growers sought to create a color to “match” the taste of food that consumers expected, or what growers believed consumers wanted. A certain variety of oranges grown in the state ripened without change in skin color due to the climate. Growers believed that these green oranges would not sell in the national market even if the fruit was perfectly ripe; they hence began coloring the skin orange with synthetic dyes in the early 1930s. By the mid-1940s, nearly 70 percent of fresh oranges shipped out of the state were colored with dyes.

This citrus coloring practice caused an uproar among the public, as well as the federal government, leading to a Supreme Court case in 1958 (the case concerned the safety of the dye used for coloring oranges). Some government officials considered the use of dye unacceptable while they insisted that ethylene treatment was legitimate as it simply enhanced a “natural” process. Meanwhile, consumers criticized the coloring practice as the deception of consumers, believing (sometimes stubbornly) that ripe oranges should look naturally orange, although green color was the “natural” color of oranges in this case. With industrialization and mechanization of agriculture—embodying what Leo Marx dubbed “the machine in the garden”—the line between the natural and the artificial, particularly in the case of agricultural produce, became increasingly difficult to draw.

Creating “natural” and “fresh” color was important also for processed foods like cured meat products. Since the nineteenth century, meatpackers had been using synthetic dyes in sausages and other meat products to give them a “fresh” red shade. Later, in the mid twentieth century, chemical companies introduced various additives, such as preservatives and antioxidant additives, for preventing cured meats from discoloring. Dyes and preservatives made meat products “chemically fresh” and provided retailers with more stable and reliable ways of manipulating the freshness of foods than refrigeration and packaging.

A colorful centerpiece

“We do our gardening in the grocery or delicatessen, and in our selection of foods odor and taste have taken an inferior place to sight,” noted a U.S. Department Agriculture scientist in 1929. By then, colorful vegetables and fruits and bright red meat became the centerpiece of the store to visually attract shoppers. Grocers believed that the appearance of displays was the most important factor in appealing to consumers and moving stocks of fruits and vegetables, and that the attractive display of agricultural produce influenced the ambience of the entire store. They thus arranged the produce section in the best position in the store—usually near the entrance.

One 1930s grocery journal gave grocers advice on how to make a produce section visually attractive:

“Place alternate rows of reds, whites, greens and yellows. Make narrow alternating bands or piles of red radishes, lettuce, carrots, spinach and celery, etc. that will give the appearance of so many colored ribbons. Arrange your fruits the same way, alternating masses of oranges, grapefruit, apples, lemons, tangerines and pears so that the contrasting colors will catch the shopper’s eye.” (Progressive Grocer, September 1935)

One grocer asserted that when each item was shown “in mass arrangement with special consideration for freshness and color contrast,” customers could not “resist buying liberally.”

The colors of produce and meat were important for grocery store operation not only because they brightened up store interiors and attracted consumers, but also because they served as a critical indicator of food quality, which determined whether a customer would buy a particular item.

Streamlining social interactions

While modern groceries became a vision-centered environment, they also streamlined our social interactions. In self-service stores, we wander around the store independently.

The introduction of the first self-service merchandising is attributed to Clarence Saunders’s Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1917. When self-service was a novel system in the 1920s and 1930s, neither consumers nor store clerks were fully satisfied with the system. Both wanted face-to-face interactions when necessary. In fact, grocers commonly kept service-type operation to some extent, say in the deli department. But over-time, many of these interactions gave way to self-service too. By the end of the 1950s, self-service had become the common way of buying foods in the United States. As a consequence, we rely more on our eyes in selecting foods than on assistance from specialists, like butchers, fishmongers, and produce sellers (except at specialty stores).

Technological advances after WWII further emphasized sight. Fluorescent light meant food could remain brightly light and wouldn’t spoil (incandescent bulbs gave off heat). Transparent packaging like cellophane ostensibly allowed consumers to see the “true” appearance of foods through the package. And refrigeration slowed the spoilage of perishable food such as meat and vegetables, helping both keep their “fresh” colors. Consumers could now see the foods, but all their other senses were blinded.

Uniformly bright red meat, brilliant green spinach, and shining red tomatoes, sealed in transparent film and displayed in sanitized cases, came to embody the aesthetics of “freshness” in modern self-service supermarkets. The bright color of perishable items sealed in transparent film and displayed in refrigerated cases, represented what Susanne Freidberg called “industrial freshness” in the place where nature and technology intersected.

Now, we often make assumptions about food quality based largely on how they look, rather than factors that affect taste and nutritional quality, such as how much time has passed after fruits and vegetables were harvested and meat was cut.

This article originally appeared on behavioralscientist.org

Worldwide, tonnes of edible food are lost or wasted every day. Between harvest and retail alone, around 14 percent of all food produced globally is lost. Huge quantities of food are also wasted in retail or at the consumer level.

For many people in the world, food waste has become a habit: buying more food than we need at markets, letting fruits and vegetables spoil at home, or taking larger portions than we can eat.

These habits put extra strain on our natural resources and damage our environment. When we waste food, we waste the labour, effort, investment, and precious resources (like water, seeds, feed, etc.) that go into producing it, not to mention the resources that go into transporting and processing it. In short, wasting food increases greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to climate change.

It’s a big problem. In fact, worldwide, tonnes of edible food is lost or wasted every day. Between harvest and retail alone, around 14 percent of all food produced globally is lost. Huge quantities of food are also wasted in retail or at the consumer level.

The part of food that is lost from harvest up to, but not including, the retail level is called food loss. The part wasted at the consumer or retail level is referred to as food waste. We make this distinction to address the root causes of this problem, a problem that everyone from farmers and producers to customers and shop-owners can help end.

Reducing food loss and waste is essential in a world where millions of people go hungry every day. When we reduce waste, we respect that food is not a given for the millions of people who go hungry every day.

It’s up to us to change our habits to make not wasting food a way of life!

Here are some easy actions you can take to re-connect to food and what it stands for:

1. Adopt a healthier, more sustainable diet

Life is fast-paced and preparing nutritious meals can be a challenge, but healthy meals don’t have to be elaborate. The internet is full of quick healthy recipes that you can share with your family and friends

2. Buy only what you need

Plan your meals. Make a shopping list and stick to it, and avoid impulse buys. Not only will you waste less food, you’ll also save money!

3. Pick ugly fruit and vegetables

Don’t judge food by its appearance! Oddly-shaped or bruised fruits and vegetables are often thrown away because they don’t meet arbitrary cosmetic standards. Don’t worry – they taste the same! Use mature fruit for smoothies, juices and desserts.

This article originally appeared on fao.org

Apeel Sciences, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and recognized among TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions and Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, announced a $250 million round of new funding and a $1 billion valuation.

GIC led the most current capital raise, and with previous investment from Oprah Winfrey in 2019 and others, it brings the company’s valuation to over one billion dollars. The new financing will enable the company to continue tackling the food waste problem on the global level. In 2020, Apeel is on track to save 20 million pieces of fruit from going to waste at retail stores, while also extending shelf-life in the home where food waste rates are three times as high.

Founded in 2012, the company develops rot-reduction coatings for produce available at top food retailers in the United States and Europe. The coatings are plant-derived and double or triple the shelf life of many fruits and vegetables, without needing refrigeration, the company said in a written statement.

This year, Apeel said it is on track to save 20 million pieces of fruit from going to waste at retailers, as well as in homes, where food waste rates are three times as high.

Apeel is on a mission to combat food waste by using its plant-derived solution to add a little extra “peel” to the surface of fruits and vegetables, doubling to tripling the shelf life of many produce types without the need for refrigeration.

An updated report by Project Drawdown recently identified the reduction of food waste as the number one solution to address climate change based on the greenhouse gases emitted from both the production of food and having it ultimately decompose in a landfill.

Apeel dramatically reduces food waste throughout almost every step of the supply chain — from packer to retailer and ultimately to consumers at home — thereby increasing the efficiency of Earth’s resources required to feed a global population. While driving value for U.S. and European produce suppliers and retailers will remain a top priority, Apeel’s funding also ensures greater support of the company’s initiatives in economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America that are at greater risk of food security issues and food waste.

In recent weeks, COVID-19 and its vast personal and economic impact have caused major disruptions in the food supply chain.

Understanding the resources and functions required to grow, produce and move food through the system has made the need to safeguard our precious food supply more apparent than ever. The current food system is calibrated so closely to past supply and demand expectations and the exact perishability of fresh produce that when the system is stretched, the system breaks.

By introducing more time, access and freshness across the supply chain, Apeel’s technology extends value and increases operational flexibility for suppliers and retailers. Additionally, shoppers who are more cognizant of their own personal food supply can bring home high quality produce with a longer window to enjoy it.

Apeel’s news follows another sustainable food startup, San Francisco-based Imperfect Foods, which said it raised $72 million in Series C funding on May 20, led by Insight Partners.

Sources: crunchbase news and Blue Book Services

Dubai Central Lab says process turns waste into grey water while saving money and time.

Food waste is a growing problem in the UAE. So World Food Day (16th October) provides the perfect opportunity to start reducing the amount of food we throw away.

You may not think you personally are having much of an impact, but take a closer look at your garbage: orange peels, broccoli stalks, the carcass of the rotisserie chicken you bought for dinner. Yes, all of those things count.

We are already seeing restaurants re-purposing spent grain produced from brewing beer, using fruit scraps as garnishes, or companies creating vegetable chips out of pulp leftover from juice production. By-products from fruits, vegetables, whole grains, or dairy foods can hold the key to the future of nutrition innovation. For example, did you know whey protein used to be a by-product that was thrown away after cheese production, but is estimated to reach a market size of $13.5 billion globally by 2021?

So what about making use of all of those food scraps that end up in the trash? Composting is an obvious and great place to start. But it turns out you can use scraps — like those citrus peels, melon rinds and cauliflower stems you’d normally toss — to whip up delightfully unique and nutritious recipes. These tips will help you waste less of the foods you cook with and lower your grocery bill, too.

Here’s the list of 9 creative ways to cut down food waste:

1. Add fruit or vegetable pulp to muffins
2. Make veggie chips out of broccoli or cauliflower stalks
3. Shred melon rend to add to stir fry
4. Blend fruit scraps into smoothies
5. Bake with near-spoiled fruits
6. Make compote out of bruised fruit
7. Use zested citrus peels as garnishes or in smoothies
8. Make soup out of rotisserie chicken remains
9. Include stems of leafy greens in your recipes

For the full details, read the full article on NBC News.