Food waste within food supply chains: quantification and potential for change to 2050

By J. Parfitt, M. Barthel, S. Macnaughton. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2010

3,061 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Food waste in the global food supply chain is reviewed in relation to the prospects for feeding a population of nine billion by 2050. Different definitions of food waste with respect to the complexities of food supply chains (FSCs)are discussed. An international literature review found a dearth of data on food waste and estimates varied widely; those for post-harvest losses of grain in developing countries might be overestimated. As much of the post-harvest loss data for developing countries was collected over 30 years ago, current global losses cannot be quantified. A significant gap exists in the understanding of the food waste implications of the rapid development of ‘BRIC’ economies. The limited data suggest that losses are much higher at the immediate post-harvest stages in developing countries and higher for perishable foods across industrialized and developing economies alike. For affluent economies, post-consumer food waste accounts for the greatest overall losses. To supplement the fragmentary picture and to gain a forward view, interviews were conducted with international FSC experts. The analyses highlighted the scale of the problem, the scope for improved system efficiencies and the challenges of affecting behavioural change to reduce post-consumer waste in affluent populations.

Subfields: Food Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51566c5011f3bc7d66d1831061a047bdbbecb94f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Food Science

1. J. Aschemann‐Witzel
2. Luca Falasconi
3. Hong Liu
4. Breda McCarthy
5. G. Ares
6. A. Giménez
7. J. Hyman
8. J. Buzby

In Plant Science

1. J. Aschemann‐Witzel
2. J. Hyman
3. J. Buzby
4. A. Faus
5. Albino Maggio
6. D. Miller
7. Paolo D'Odorico
8. J. Antle

Citations in the corpus

• Food Waste Generation at Household Level: Results of a Survey among Employees of Two European Research Centers in Italy and Germany (2015, background): “It is also likely that they continue to retain the same attitudes and behaviors to food that they had all their lives in the age of retirement (similar [45]).”
• Understanding the antecedents of consumers' attitudes towards doggy bags in restaurants: Concern about food waste, culture, norms and emotions (2017, background): “…food chain have a role to play in preventing and reducing food waste, from those who produce and process foods (farmers, food manufacturers and processors) to those who make foods available for consumption (hospitality sector, retailers) and ultimately consumers themselves (Parfitt et al., 2010).”
• Food System Sustainability and Food Security: Connecting the Dots (2014, background): “[82], the term ‘food losses’ refers to the decrease in edible food mass throughout the part of the supply chain leading specifically to edible food for human consumption.”
• The interconnected challenges for food security from a food regimes perspective: Energy, climate and malconsumption (2013, neutral): “Although this results in excessive amounts of food waste (Parfitt et al 2010, Stuart 2009) it might also be argued that the system encourages consumption of cheap food, with significant consequences for personal health and wellbeing.”
• Food waste matters - A systematic review of household food waste practices and their policy implications (2018, background): “Given the high amounts of food waste occurring on the household level, the prevention of food waste at the final stages of the supply chain is of utmost importance to help prevent further climate change (Parfitt et al., 2010).”
• Consumer-Related Food Waste: Causes and Potential for Action (2015, background): “For example, some authors mention ineffective food overconsumption and subsequent obesity-related health problems as a kind of food waste (“over-nutrition” [10]).”
• Global food waste across the income spectrum: Implications for food prices, production and resource use (2020, background): “The absence of such a standard has contributed to a dearth of comparable data (Parfitt et al., 2010; Bellemare et al., 2017) leading to poorly informed efforts attempting to reduce food waste (Bellemare et al.”
• Consumer perception and preference for suboptimal food under the emerging practice of expiration date based pricing in supermarkets (2018, background): “In developing countries, the greater share of food waste occurs in the consumption phase (Parfitt et al., 2010).”
• Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System (2015, background): “As a consequence, some food products may require updated processing, packaging, and storage or may require protective packaging for the first time (Parfitt et al. 2010).”