The issue of food loss is not just a question of technological advancement but also improvement of the connection between producers and consumers. In Costa Rica, the government is very aware of strengthening this connection as some commodities today suffer from value chains with up to seven links between producer and consumer. Roberto Azofeifa, the director of Sustainable Production at the Ministry of Agriculture, shows what kind of concrete initiatives the government promotes and supports. Hello, my name is Roberto Azofeifa, I work at the Ministry of Agriculture. And I'm in charge of the agro-environmental production programme, where we promote sustainable agricultural practices, along the whole nutritional chain. Well, we are in Santa Ana at the Onion Fair. It's a theme-based fair, which is once a year. It's basically an activity, that is realized due to a public-private partnership. The producers are organized in what is here called a regional agricultural center, which is an organization of small producers, and they have received help from a range of organizations from the public sector. Fairs like this have several co-benefits with regard to food loss and waste. For example, the producers are not limited to selling products which fit a set of exogenous standards. An important aspect of this event is the reduction of food loss, because here the producers can sell their products in all different sizes to different prices. This makes it possible for the producer to make the most out of his production from the farm, because not all products have the same size. Therefore the fair is a way of helping the producer improving his efficiency, in regards to what he is producing, but at the same time the consumer stands to benefit, as they can buy products of different qualities and different sizes to different uses in the households. So by putting together this fair in a partnership between the private producers and the public organizations, the producers can themselves improve their own financial situations. When facing the producers themselves, the consumers can also get a better understanding of the product, which may lead them to respect it more and to reduce food waste in the household. It is really important, that here the consumer can also hear from the producer about the different aspects of the products. Today the producers might have a different understanding of the quality and use, than the consumers have. Therefore this interaction contributes to the producers being more aware of the consumers preferences in regards to the quality of both the final product and the process behind it, for example the technologies used to prevent diseases or to fertilize. In Costa Rica several public-private partnerships secure food banks for people with few economic resources and who would otherwise suffer from malnutrition. Looking ahead, the government wants to improve market conditions instead so that everyone can afford their own nutritious food. In this way the fairs also serve an important function in that different socio-economic groups can buy at different times of the day. The prices at the agricultural fairs, are set in relation to the alternative vendors, and their prices during the week, however here it is very possible, that people with fewer economic ressources can buy foods at low prices, because at the end of the day the producers want to sell all the foods, that they have brought to the market. Because of this setup, people with fewer ressources have access to fresh foods, that have a good quality, but at a much lower price, because the producers prefer to sell all, instead of bringing it home again. In supermarkets and stores in Europe, prices do not normally fluctuate in the same way during the course of a day. Combined with the fact that consumers value a large freedom of choice when it comes to products many stores have to throw out massive amounts of unsold food at the end of the day. The people and company behind the app Too Good To Go have decided to confront this challenge. Hi my name is Mikkel and I'm the country manager for Too Good To Go in Denmark. Too Good To Go is an app that fights food waste across Europe and the way that we do that is by connecting consumers with stores that have surplus food at the end of the day. We allow these consumers to reserve the food in the store at the end of the day and when the store is about to close the consumer will go and pick up that food and take it home and eat it instead of the store having to throw it out that brings a lot of benefits, but of course the main one is that the store doesn't have to throw out food and the consumer gets a good meal at a good price. So by doing this we save around 50 thousand meals a day across Europe and that number of course we expect that to increase as we get more stores to join this community of people who care about food waste. In Denmark alone, 700 thousand tons of food are thrown out every year. Only 23% of the food waste happens at the retail link however. Therefore Too Good To Go is expanding beyond just being an app and building the organization on four pillars: producers, consumers, education and politics. These four pillars is what makes up our fight against food waste and our movement against food waste so in businesses obviously we want to collaborate with as many businesses as possible to fight food waste at the retail level of the value chain every day, that makes a lot of sense. The consumers make up one half of our platform, so of course if businesses put up food for sale on our platform we also need some consumers to take that food of the hands of the businesses, so that's one part of the consumer equation, but consumers is also important to us because most of the food waste that happens in Denmark and across Europe, where we operate, most of that food waste happens in people's homes. That's around 37% of all the food that is thrown out, that happens in people's homes, so when consumers are part of the Too Good To Go environment, we get a chance to communicate to them about food waste and why it's such a big problem, so because consumers help us by taking off food of businesses hands, but also because we can impact them and help them understand the problem of food waste and what they can do against it, consumers is a really important pillar in our movement against food waste. The third one is education and education for us means that we need to educate both consumers and businesses but also you could call it general citizens we spend a lot of time with schools to educate younger people about the problem of food waste and what they can do about it at home that means that we spend a lot of time and resources on going out to schools and and having lectures on food waste and going to dialogue with these schools to find out how we together can solve the the food waste problem. It also means that we collaborate with big publishers to produce education material that that takes food waste and makes it into a an actionable education plan for schools all across Europe that's something that we're really proud to do and that's something that we are very happy that that the schools have taken as a good opportunity to talk about a very relevant societal issue. The last pillar of our fight against food waste, the politics, means impact in politics in the countries that that we're present in that and that's mainly Europe right now so there's something to be done at the governmental level in the in the seperate countries but there's also something to be done when we get to the next step in Europe and in Brussels where we can impact food waste. The different pillars show how vital it is to combine different levers to instigate change. Transformation requires that technological progress be combined not only with better finance and behavioral change, but also better policies. The food waste crisis can't be solved by companies like Too Good To Go alone and one of the big pushes that we can see in the movement is when big legislative changes around food happens. One good example of that is when France introduced the law, that made it almost illegal, or at least connected with big fines to throw out food. So that means that stores will look for alternative solutions to throwing out the food and Too Good To Go obviously is a good choice here because you can actually sell the food, get a little bit of the money back and have consumers come to your store to pick up the food and get a good experience in your store. So that's a good example of when legislation supports the fight against food waste, we've also seen other examples that we've talked to the to our partner stores about where legislation directly incentivizes more food waste. One example is that, if stores here in Denmark if they give the food away to charitable organizations they will actually get fined because they will not be able to get their VAT back on the goods that they hand it out on the other hand if they choose to destroy the food they will actually be able to get the VAT back so that means that there's a big incentive to destroy the food instead of giving it to charitable organizations who will then distribute it to people in need. That's a very good or bad example of when legislation creates more food waste than we need. We need to change that, and this VAT issue is something that we in Too Good To Go would like to try to change when we get further on in our political agenda. Policies and practices are not just exogenous to companies like Too Good To Go, they are also something that the organization itself can affect. One of the political issues that we would really like to tackle and that we've have had some success with both in Denmark and in France is the problem of date labeling. Research from the European Union has shown that up to ten percent of all the food that is thrown out in Europe each year comes from a misunderstanding of date labeling on regular products like breakfast cereal or rice in your drawer. Basically people mistake the two date labels 'best before' and 'use by' and think they mean the same thing. That means that people just throw out the food whenever it reaches its 'best before' date and of course we would like to do something against those ten percent of food that is just thrown out. It's not something that's directly related to our app but it's it's one of these things that we can communicate about in a very meaningful way to the consumers that takes part in the fight against food waste in our app on a regular basis. We get this chance to educate them and to throw out less food in their homes because they have come to us and saved food with us every day. So what we did in in Denmark was that we created a coalition with ten big producers of food that is Urtekram, Orkla and Unilever for an example, who all pledged to change their date labels. So what they're going to do it's a very simple little change but it makes a big difference because on all the 'best before' date labels that they have they're gonna add 'often good after' so that there's no doubt that the food is definitely best before, but it can often be good in days and weeks after this date on the label and we back that up as Too Good To Go with a communication campaign that asks people to smell their food and to look at it and to taste it and if all three things are fine if it tastes good and if it smells good and if it looks fine, then the food is probably still safe to eat and you should definitely eat it instead of throwing it out. Basically what we're doing is fighting food waste in food labels, but what we're also asking people to do is be more conscious about the food that surrounds you and that you consume every day.
