TRANSCRIPT
Amy Robinson: One of the biggest news stories of 2022 was inflation. And if you’ve been listening to this station over the past year, you likely heard a lot of stories about rising food prices, how they’ve risen 11% over the past year. But what hasn’t been discussed is the cost of food waste during this period of inflation. Rick Brewer reports
Rick Brewer: First some numbers. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as much as 40%of the total food supply is food waste. In 2010, that amounted to 133 billion pounds of food worth more than $160 million.
RB: And here’s the kicker, the FDA says 20% of that. So nearly 27 billion pounds of food is wasted because consumers are confused. Best by and expiration dates simply throw us off.
Neal Fortin: A product might be labeled best buy or expires by, but it may still be perfectly safe.
RB: Neal Fortin is the director of the Institute of Food Laws and Regulations at Michigan State University. He says most food manufactures are not required by law to use specific language on labels and dates. They can just decide what language they use, like best by, use by, or expires by.
NF: The classic example is salad dressing, which has such a low PH, it's so acidic, that it probably has a decade of useful consumption after the expiration date.
RB: Fortin says some people interpret a best by date as a deadline to throw the food away. They worry it will make them sick. But he says in most cases, it’s highly unlikely the food will harm you. Products like baby formula and meat products do have stricter regulations, but best by on your box of cereal simply means the food manufacturer doesn’t guarantee freshness after a certain date.
NF: If you're a food manufacturer or a retailer you don't want to have extra stuff left at the end of this shelf life, you want to move that product out, you put the old product on sale, you move it out when it's getting near the best buy date. So you'll see companies use all different types of terms expires by best buy freeze by. You really have to use your common sense.
RB: The food manufacturers Neal is talking about are tasked with the impossible. They have to predict the future by anticipating what people are going to buy weeks from now and when they make too much food.
Kimberly Jones: And they'll throw it in the garbage.
RB: This is Kimberly Jones, director of sales and purchasing at Natural Choice Foods based in the small town of Marne, that’s in Ottawa county. Natural Choice operates within a section of the food distribution system known as the overstock economy. So, when a manufacturer makes too much food. Natural Choice comes in, buys it, and sells it in one of its five Daily Deals grocery stores.
KJ: Where we come in is when product gets to 60 or 45 days of shelf life left, that product can't go to a big retailer because those big retailers have regional distribution centers that then service their stores, so it doesn't go directly to X store.
RB: And Natural Choice doesn’t just sell food that's close to the end date. They also repackage food and I literally mean they take food out of its original packaging and putting it in a new package. It’s a highly regulated process that only a handful of companies across the country attempt. Inspectors from the USDA and FDA visit Natural Choice every day to make sure they meet repacking standards. Jamie Wiles is the senior manager of repack operations for Natural Choice Foods.
Jamie Wiles: So when it's a nationally recognized brand, like Tyson or Kraft, generally doesn't require repack. But as soon as it has a specific store or restaurant chain’s name on it, it changes the game, and that's where repack comes in.
RB: So, when private labels, like a fast-food restaurant’s hamburger or a big-box store’s brand of hot dogs, sell food to Natural Choice for re-packing they don’t want people to know it's their product so Natural Choice offers private brand protection.
JW: In this particular case, we're packaging bacon in this is indeed bacon that came in as a private label. And so we're cutting the packaging away from that in its retail size form. And we're putting it into a bulk form. So while that used to be one package at probably 12, or 16 ounces, it's now going out as a 15-pound case.
RB: According to Wiles, for the first 8 months of 2022, Natural Choice Foods has re-packed more than six million pounds of food that would have otherwise been thrown into a landfill.
RB: The Environmental Protection Agency estimates more food reaches landfills than any other single material in everyday trash. And food emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The EPA says in 2017, 14-percent of all methane emissions came from food waste. It’s a trend that is likely to continue, unless the USDA meets its goal of cutting food loss and waste in half by 2030. I’m Rick Brewer, WCMU News.
