World-leading food waste expert Dr Julian Parfitt, Resource Policy Advisor & Practice Leader at Anthesis, considers how we must increase the efficiency in food supply chains at a local and global scale to solve the inextricably-linked challenges of food poverty and food waste.

It’s World Food Day this Sunday (October 16). With this year’s focus being on the need for food production and agricultural practices to adapt to our changing climate, the London Evening Standard Food Forum I attended earlier this week covered this with a local angle: how can we feed everyone in the UK’s capital by making food surpluses currently being wasted available to those in need?

At the Evening Standard event, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan identified the importance of working together to find solutions to food waste and poverty. He also called for greater transparency in food waste reporting across the food supply chain – a critical issue when there are so many Londoners living in food poverty today. Greater transparency in reporting food waste data by manufacturers and retailers is an important step towards unlocking the potential within supply chain food waste. After all, what you don’t measure, you can’t manage.

The event also threw up some thought-provoking first-hand stories of waste avoidance in action, including from author and campaigner Tristram Stuart, one of the panel members. He is tackling food waste first hand through a solution to bread waste first introduced by the Babylonians 3,000 years ago and since forgotten: turn it into beer. Toast Ale, a not-for-profit craft beer enterprise launched earlier this year, has so far brewed 50,000 bottles of beer from bread donated by the food industry and cafés. As part of the rationale behind this innovation, Tristram points out that "environmentalism has become associated with puritanism and going without, but my philosophy is: if you want to change the world you have to make a better party than the people who are destroying it.[1]"

Anthesis have extensive experience in tackling the challenge of food sustainability across sectors and industries. To find out more, please contact Julian.Parfitt@anthesisgroup.com. 

[1] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/foodforlondon/food-for-london-raise-a-toast-to-the-man-who-turns-bread-into-beer-a3364911.html