As you witnessed the panic buying of tins of beans, mounds of pasta and bags of flour for those sourdough starters during lockdown, or struggled to get your favourite loaf of bread but noticed the fruit and vegetable aisle untouched — the issue of food waste might have crossed your mind.

If it worried or concerned you, you were right to be alarmed. COVID-19 has had a hugely detrimental effect on the fight against food wastage and the problem is set to mount without intervention, with unprecedented damaging effects on the environment. While we cheered at the clear skies and rivers and canals from reduced pollution, the food we didn’t eat that went spoiled has created landfill gas.

This is around half methane and half carbon dioxide, and is produced during the decomposition of organic matter. As you will know, methane is a greenhouse gas, which can trap heat very effectively — with estimates that it is responsible for around 20% to 40% of total global warming to date.

Studies have shown that cutting down on food waste could have nearly the same impact on reducing emissions in 30 years as something we all look at as part of the solution — onshore wind turbines. To put that into numbers, it’s 70 billion tons of greenhouse gases.

COVID has seen country after country make tonnes of waste. Looking long term, achieving individual country climate commitments will be very hard to do without addressing food waste — and this was a concern before coronavirus.

This is an emotive issue for us all and no sane person could find the sight of piles of food going uneaten and spoiled as anything less than abhorrent. The UN has warned that 49 million extra people above what is sadly ‘normal’ may fall into extreme poverty due to the COVID-19 crisis, and this will mean a growth in people who are ‘acutely food or nutrition insecure’.

In places where income is low, wastage still occurs earlier in the supply chain, for example, food rots on farms or spoils during storage or distribution. This problem was made worse from the disruptions COVID-19 brought.

Why did wastage occur?

Disrupted supply routes and unpredictable demands marked the first wave of issues.

As you might imagine, supply chains need predictability to cope and simply, no- one was prepared for the disruption of COVID-19.

Logistically, the chain broke in many areas. Plants closed down, labour shortages came about as members of the workforce were sick or shielding, and products couldn’t be distributed and delivered with the same effectiveness.

At the height of the pandemic, supermarkets were struggling to provide enough delivery slots to provide for customers — this meant that food could have been sitting in warehouses and been wasted.

We worked closely with our large chains during COVID-19 and managed to implement a direct-to-consumer offering with a major supermarket in only 6 days — providing an eCommerce front end, pick and pack and customer service direct from their warehouse to consumers using a third party for delivery to get food where it needed to be, but many others didn’t have this technology in place.

Global lockdowns saw industries that make large orders, such as restaurants and hotels, schools and canteens all grind to a halt. The orders were made, food produced and ready, so excess supply was simply left over.

We heard of farmers dumping milk, eggs and other food items, the chicken processor that was forced to destroy 750,000 unhatched eggs a week, giant wheels of cheese, destined for a hotel buffet, left with no one to consume them.

When a supply chain is export-orientated, with many moving parts and stages, if one part is affected, the whole chain can break down and there is simply too much food produced to be absorbed locally. This created a major problem that resulted in waste.

What will happen next?

Out of home consumption has been replaced by at-home consumption but as we ease into a new normal, ongoing food wastage is likely to remain an issue for some time, as well as the aftershocks of the first wave of COVID-19.

It is only with the right technology and know-how that anyone can be fully prepared for whatever may lay ahead.

This is not the first shock and more will come. In the next 2 decades, we are looking at an increase of billions of people to our planet.

Although solutions at the consumer level are difficult to implement, food loss and waste management tools that help measurement, reporting and targets at a corporate and supplier level will have one of the biggest impacts.

COVID-19 let the world glimpse behind the curtain into the world of supply chains — a revealing insight for those who previously may have shopped and consumed with little concern for what goes on behind the scenes or takes food from field to fork.

The issue of food waste is by no means new — but is certainly something that COVID-19 exacerbated.

Our solutions do what they can to influence sustainable responsibility in the food and beverage supply chain.