The financial impact of food waste can affect almost the entire spectrum of expenditure in a food business. Alongside the obvious lost revenue from unsaleable product, it’s likely there’ll be costs incurred from multiple sources:
Reducing food waste can also improve your operational efficiency. Food waste can indicate process inefficiencies which essentially result in raw materials being purchased & transformed, but not successfully converted into a saleable product.
Minimising food waste also benefits the environment by reducing:
We’ll start by measuring your food waste outputs to identify the functions and production processes generating the highest food waste by volume and value. During this process, we’ll identify any gaps to enhance the accuracy of your food waste data.
We’ll then examine each step of your process to identify your food waste hotspots. Using root cause analysis, we’ll determine the underlying causes of the waste to better identify suitable solutions to achieve your waste reduction goals.
We’ll support you in defining your food waste metrics so you can track your progress and performance against your food waste reduction initiatives.
The return on investment from being able to divert food waste previously destined for landfill into revenue producing saleable product could be enormous.
If you need more information on how to do your own food waste assessment, you can read our blog – “How to reduce food waste in your business”. It will give you a basic understanding of the process.
If you want to get a full in-depth understanding of the process so you can do it yourself, consider signing up to our online course which explains in step-by-step detail exactly how to reduce food waste in manufacturing.
Alternately, get in touch with us if you’d like us to come and work directly with you to conduct an onsite food waste assessment.
Measuring and preventing food waste is not a one-off exercise, it’s an ongoing process.
While food waste can often be redirected from landfill into beneficial end uses like food donation, pet food & animal feed, the big financial benefits come from reducing food waste at its source.
You may have already adopted lean manufacturing to improve your process efficiency, increase yields & minimise waste, but there’s often still the potential to reassess and further tighten waste tolerances to achieve additional gains.
An in-person facilitated workshop is a powerful method to unite key stakeholders simultaneously, concentrating on reducing food waste throughout a specific supply chain.
Here’s why this collaborative approach is most effective:
Collaborating with your supply chain partners is a powerful way to holistically reduce total food waste, not just shift food waste from one part of the chain to another.
It’s also a great opportunity to work with your suppliers to problem solve on a common challenge and to determine solutions and actions that can often benefit multiple businesses.
In our experience, raw material suppliers, service providers for storage, transport & logistics and retail customers have been enthusiastic to contribute to ‘whole of supply chain’ solutions through facilitated workshops.
If you need more information on how to do this, our blog “How to best reduce food waste in your supply chain” will give you further insights on the basis of our approach.
Get in touch if you’d like us to come onsite and have us work directly with your team.
By prioritising procurement, your business can reduce waste at its origin to gain the maximum financial and environmental benefits throughout the supply network.
Strategies to reduce food waste through procurement could include:
We’ve collaborated with vegetable processors, commercial bakeries, ingredient manufacturers and dairy processors to identify areas of significant food waste within their operations to develop tailored solutions.
By identifying their waste hotspots, we’re able to guide the development of a customised food waste action plan for their businesses.
Our strategy focuses on analysing your production processes to identify food waste hotspots, work with you to identify the causes and then develop targeted solutions to prevent, reduce, redirect or repurpose your food waste.
We’ve conducted workshops with an Australian vegetable processor to collaboratively map their supply network. This allowed problem areas to be identified so that solutions could be found to reduce food waste at various stages.
Some of the opportunities we’ve identified in our workshops have included:
The most effective outcomes arise when a diverse group of stakeholders work together to identify food waste at each stage and develop shared strategies to minimise it.
Most businesses will have some level of food waste. Getting to the mindset where your ‘waste problem’ is deemed significant enough to look for opportunities is the game-changing moment. We can guide you along this path and assess the potential opportunities with you.
We’ll work through your processes to find all your food waste outputs and prioritise them based on volume or value to identify your actionable hotspots. Focusing efforts on the most critical food waste hotspots enables you to maximise the benefits.
Identifying solutions requires a holistic approach, with the end goal being to find suitable, long-term solutions. Often solutions will be quickly apparent and involve relatively simple fixes. Other causes however will require a more complex, multi-faceted resolution.
Unlock the potential of your food waste or consider options to redirect your food waste to higher value destinations than landfill. We’ll help identify options to valorise your food waste, potentially creating a new revenue stream for your business.
