**4. Reducing food losses and waste for a sustainable food system**

In the United States, food wastes amount to approximately \$278 billion annually, equivalent to feeding nearly 260 million people [16]. Globally, more than 1 billion metric tons of food per year never make it to the market. The market value of this lost food is almost a trillion dollars, and it has a significant negative impact on the environment. Food lost and wasted each year results in about 8% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Around the globe, food losses are generally in the range of about 30% [17]. Many factors contribute to food losses, and they vary depending upon the region. In sub-Saharan Africa, a considerable amount of food loss occurs at the production stage, typically on-farm or close to a farm, during the handling and storage of harvested crops. These high losses are often due to a lack of proper infrastructure for the safe storage of cereal grains and a cold chain for perishables such as fruits and vegetables. However, in these regions, food losses during home preparation are generally small. In North America and some of the more industrialized countries, food losses during the production stage are small because of the highly developed infrastructure of the storage and transportation sector. Still, losses increase notably at the home and out-of-home preparation and consumption stage. Therefore, regionbased solutions are necessary to reduce food losses for a sustainable food system.

In the food processing sector, trimming, overproduction, product and packaging damage, product graded as of low market value due to esthetic reasons, and technical malfunctions of processing equipment are often cited as fundamental causes of food losses and waste [18]. To minimize these losses in the processing sector, technological know-how and resources for operators need improvement, including

### *A Quest for Sustainability in the Food Enterprise DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99973*

training the staff and reengineering processes to avoid product wastage during changes in product lines [17].

In most industrialized countries, packaged foods are often labeled with an expected shelf life to inform the consumer of how long the manufacturer assures safety and quality. While there is considerable merit in providing such information to the consumer, unfortunately, due to the lack of a standard shelf-life dating system, considerable confusion exists in interpreting shelf-life information. Furthermore, both elapsed time and environmental conditions, most notably temperature, affect food quality and safety. Consequently, using only a time-based shelf-life dating system, there is increased food wastage at the consumer level when acceptable food is discarded just because the label indicates that an expiration date has been reached. Since many of the food's quality characteristics change due to an integrated effect of time and temperature, there has been considerable interest in developing indicators that can be used for objective interpretation of the food's shelf life. Research in this area originated in the early 1980s [19]. Time-temperature indicators are used commercially in the distribution of vaccines and other medical drugs. They provide an objective indication of any heat abuse that a product may have received during shipment and storage and its remaining shelf life. While the early devices used biochemical or polymeric materials as indicators, with recent advances in electronic sensing and miniaturization, digital indicators are now being investigated for these applications. With cloud-based systems, data obtained from the indicators can be directly transferred to the server and used for inventory management. Such systems can be effectively used in the transportation, distribution, storage, and retail marketing of perishable foods [16, 20].

An emerging technology, blockchain, offers considerable promise to manage and share data in the food distribution systems. Blockchain allows a decentralized approach to distributing encrypted records of data securely over peer-to-peer networks. Besides information about product flow, other data relevant to food safety, quality, and resource use can be efficiently transmitted transparently. In tracking food from production to retail, this technology, when fully implemented, offers the potential to improve the safety and quality of food delivered to the consumer. Integrated systems for accessing and processing data on distribution are especially useful in time-sensitive situations involving product recalls. Innovations in food distribution such as blockchain will be necessary for the quest to improve the sustainability of the food system.
