Page 14 - Food & Drink Magazine Sep-Oct 2020

ENVIRONMENT MATTERS
Training to waste less
Reducing food waste can lead to new income streams for businesses. Emily Mantilla and Tanya Wilkins from the Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) explain the who, what, where, why and how of food waste training to make it happen.
THE Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) is focused on its 10-year journey towards an Australia without food waste. Its three part focus is to reduce food waste, transform unavoidable waste into new products, and engage businesses and industry to deliver real change.
One of the CRC projects is the Industry Connection Hub, led by Honey and Fox. This Hub brings together powerhouse Australian food supply chain industry associations like the Australian Food and Grocery Council, the Australian Food Cold Chain Council and the Australian Institute of Packaging for the purpose of funnelling research results out to industry and to deliver industry training.
Most recently, Honey and Fox carried out an Australian food industry training needs analysis through the Hub network. It looked at what industry training would have the biggest impact on reducing food waste in micro, small, medium and large businesses throughout the supply chain.
It also sought to understand what food waste training already exists and where opportunities existed for the CRC and the Hub to fill any identified gaps.
The first revelation was the limited amount of online
searches for training in this area. For the CRC, it confirmed how much work there is to be done. The Australian Government’s National Food Waste Baseline confirms
7.3 million tonnes of food waste a year (households account for 34 per cent, primary production 31 per cent, manufacturing
23 per cent, and wholesalers, retail, restaurants and institutions the remainder).
Interestingly though, when our survey asked Australian food businesses where they thought the most food waste was coming from, the top three areas identified were packaging of food (as when you package food you put expiry dates on products, as well as packaging being damaged throughout the supply chain), processing food, and the food service sector.
BEING STRATEGIC
Where the food waste is occurring positions the opportunities, and without this level of understanding it makes it really difficult to do something strategic about it.
Australian food businesses told us that they didn’t really search for training because they didn’t really know food waste was an issue. Again, this comes back to raising the awareness about food waste from a business perspective and encouraging engagement with food waste from all levels of staff.
Much like the CRC’s current consumer focused ‘Fight Food
Waste – it’s easy as’ digital campaign running
on Facebook and
Instagram, industry need something
similar so they also know it’s ‘easy as’ to save
money by reducing food waste.
In the desktop audit component of the training needs analysis research, we found over 300 vocational education training (e.g. TAFE) units out of a possible 16,000 that contained ‘food’ and ‘waste’. Five out of the total of 18 national training packages contained at least one unit that was focused on food waste.
The Seafood Industry Training Package was the only one that had a specific unit dedicated to food waste. This is a result of work in the past by the Australian Seafood CRC to get this included in the training package.
And this is what the Fight Food Waste CRC and Industry Connection Hub members are looking to do as part of this project – see food waste prevention taught in as many units as possible where food waste can occur throughout the supply chain – from grower through to retailer. Non-nationally recognised training – where participants do not receive a formal qualification or certification – is trending as the preferred training method. This is not a surprise when you consider the sector is mostly owner/operators, very often regionally based and time poor. If they’re going to do training, they want it relevant, fast and at their fingertips.
The CRC is about to launch a searchable food waste training database to make the process of finding relevant food waste training easier for businesses.
DIFFERENT SIZES, DIFFERENT NEEDS
When it came to specific training needs, we heard from micro- businesses that they want tips and tricks to raise the profile of food waste in their business and