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TORONTO, January 2023 -- Second Harvest has announced today the completion of its two-year Food Loss and Waste Implementation Project, funded by the Walmart Foundation. This extensive project included food loss and waste technical implementation support, change management and goal-setting consulting, and redistribution support for 20 large-scale Canadian companies in the food processing and manufacturing sector.
In total, this project in partnership with Anthesis and Enviro-Stewards, successfully prevented 3,109,433 kg/year of food loss and waste. An infographic summarizing the results of this project can be found here.
Although staffing shortages and the COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to some waste reduction implementation efforts, the project’s food redistribution goal was still surpassed by 7%, directly rescuing 100,295 kg of surplus edible food.
In Canada, 58 per cent of food produced for Canadians is lost or wasted every year, of which 47 per cent, or 16.77 million metric tonnes, comes from processing and manufacturing. When this food ends up in landfill, it generates 56.5 million metric tonnes of CO2e emissions, contributing significantly to climate change. While this good, healthy food is lost, nearly 1 in 6 Canadian families face food insecurity and struggle to access nutrition and put food on the table.
“It’s been an incredibly rewarding process to work with these companies in preventing food loss and waste. As a food rescue organization, we are laser-focused on ensuring no good food goes to waste, but prevention at source remains the most important tool to manage the global food and environmental crises we’re facing,” Lori Nikkel, CEO of Second Harvest said. “The work from this project has redirected a significant amount of food to non-profits and community food programs and represents exactly the kind of industry-wide collaboration on measurement, management and prevention that is needed.”
“Second Harvest has helped identify sustainable solutions that have the potential to advance food loss and waste practices across the food industry,” said Naomi Gunnell, director of Walmart.org’s Healthier Food for All initiative. “We’re excited about how this work demonstrates that philanthropy can catalyze cross-sector innovation to realize positive social, environmental and economic sustainability.”
"It was one thing to identify and bring awareness of the food loss and waste problem to companies and the industry in Phase 1,” said Cher Mereweather, Agri-Food Sector Lead at Anthesis North America. “To have the opportunity to go back and demonstrate the actual impact and support the companies with goal-setting and change management in Phase 2 was really powerful."
“Enviro-Stewards was grateful for this opportunity to work with 20 food & beverage processing facilities to implement & verify the performance of food loss prevention measures that we identified during our original assessment work with the facilities,” said Bruce Taylor, President of Enviro-Stewards Inc. “Even though the social, environmental, and economic benefits of prevention are very compelling, results are not harvested until the measures are actually implemented. It was a pleasure to work with each facility’s team to implement the measures and enhance a culture of continuous improvement.”
About Second Harvest
Second Harvest is Canada's largest food rescue organization and is a global thought leader on perishable food redistribution. We operate at the intersection of hunger relief and environmental protection, tackling food loss and waste through food redistribution, research, awareness, and education, continually innovating and collaborating to ensure a more sustainable planet.
We work with thousands of food businesses from across the supply chain utilizing logistics and technology to reduce the amount of edible food going to waste, thereby diverting unnecessary greenhouse gases from entering the environment. Our inclusive model ensures this healthy surplus food is redirected to thousands of charities and non-profits across the country, providing millions of Canadians experiencing food insecurity access to the nourishment they need.
www.secondharvest.ca
About Anthesis
Anthesis is the sustainability activator. Proud to be a B Corp, we seek to make a significant contribution to a world which is more resilient and productive. We do this by working with cities, companies, and other organizations to drive sustainable performance. We develop financially driven sustainability strategies, underpinned by technical expertise, and delivered by innovative collaborative teams across the world. Anthesis has clients across all industry sectors and supports some of the world's largest multinationals such as Reckitt, Cisco, Tesco, The North Face, and Target. The company brings together over 1,100 experts operating in 40 countries around the world and has offices in Andorra, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Middle East, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. www.anthesisgroup.com
About Enviro-Stewards
Enviro-Stewards’ engineers and scientists offer a consultative and analytical, systems-based approach in order to identify and implement practical and economically feasible solutions to prevent food loss and guide organizations to net zero carbon. A Certified B Corporation, they are focused on stimulating an increased margin on sales while reducing environmental footprints and improving social conditions (read more on this). Their innovative solutions have retained millions of meals in the food supply and saved clients millions of dollars in operating costs, eliminated thousands of tonnes of hazardous waste, cut back natural gas usage by millions of cubic metres, and reduced millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.enviro-stewards.com/
