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Infor helps manufacturers make India sustainable by minimising food wastage
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Wednesday, 08 September, 2021, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Our Bureau, Bengaluru
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Infor has observed that there is an urgent need for manufacturers to optimise processes and adopt more transparent food supply chains to address the increasing concerns of food security, climate change and the pressure building on the ecosystem.
Marcel Koks, industry and solution strategy director, food and beverage, Infor, said, Food wastage is an overarching concern, putting a strain on building a sustainable future. The cumulative effect of every decision in the food supply chain, from farm to plate, have short- and long-term consequences contributing to a global matter. From production and processing to retail and consumption, food loss occurs at all stages in the food supply chain. While exploitation at consumer level accounts for majority of the overall food wastage, in developing nations, significant losses occur primarily in the manufacturing and processing stages.”
UN Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index stated that over 900 million tons of food are thrown away every year, with household food waste accounting for 60% of that total. In India, food waste is on a rise with the rapidly growing population and it ranks 94th in the 2020 Global Hunger Index. Yet each annually every Indian home waste an average of 50 kg food, as per the Food Waste Index Report 2021.
Responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions, the global food system is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, which makes the amount of food wasted an even more difficult figure to digest. This excess food waste usually ends up in landfills, creating potent greenhouse gases which have dire environmental implications.
“One of the key areas to be addressed is consumer confusion over dates on products. Consumer education obviously has a role to play in reducing food waste. Building awareness about how best-before dates are not the same as use-by dates needs consistent labelling,” said Koks.
“There is need for more information on fridge temperatures. For instance, even just a 1°C increase in fridge temperature can cut a whole day off the life of some products. Some supermarkets are experimenting with smart shelves, which reduce the price of items, in line with decreasing use-by and best-before dates. This technology has the potential to make it all the way into the home, with smart fridges able to alert consumers to impending use-by dates,” added Koks.
“When it comes to shelf life, one size really does not fit all, particularly with perishable products, and can also vary dramatically from batch to batch. Here Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), capabilities can help manufacturers to take into account all the different variables at all stages of the farm-to-fork supply chain to formulate a dynamic shelf life for each product,” said Koks.
Internet of Things (IoT), devices helps measure the vital variables and feed this crucial information back into intelligent systems for analysis to determine optimum use-by or best-before dates, which are aligned to the specific quality attributes of an individual batch of products.
“The right technology holds the key to placing food manufacturers. Forward-thinking businesses are already recognizing this, making use of the information and tools available to them, along the entire breadth of the wider supply chain, to gain the insight needed to inform best practices for dynamic dating of food products. This approach paves the way for less food to be wasted across the globe, representing a concerted effort on behalf of the food industry to find a solution to one of the most pressing challenges,” concluded Koks.
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