Ep9: How can technology and data solutions work to end food waste?

Ep9: How can technology and data solutions work to end food waste?

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Colin Gilbert: We're talking about changing systematic parts of a network that support humanity every day. And so you can't turn it off, retune it, and restart it. And you need to do this while the legacy system is still feeding billions of people. But when we talk to members of the Zero100 community, and the subject matter experts, I'm actually more optimistic because they're very quick to point out technologies, especially digital technologies, when you add up the sum of their parts really do contribute to solving the problem. Victoria Marin: This is Radical Reinvention, a show by Zero100 about reimagining the world's supply chains.

I'm Victoria Marin. And while I'm not a supply chain professional, I am professionally curious. I'm a journalist, and the lead podcast producer here at Zero100. And since we've started this show, I've learned so much about how supply chains work, and what makes them broken. If you've been listening to our show, you know that Zero100's mission to create 0% carbon, 100% digitized supply chains, is at the heart of what we do.

We believe this means living in a world where people's needs are met, but the planet is preserved. To do that, we're working together with the world's most innovative supply chain pioneers, and industry experts to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the planet today, and we're inviting all of you along for the ride. Join us as we work to create a more sustainable and responsible supply chain one radical reinvention at a time. For today's episode, we're talking about a subject near and dear to my heart, food waste. Yes, food waste. I'm deeply passionate about things like waste management, and recycling, and composting at home.

So much so, that, and this is a true story, before I got married, my mother-in-law had serious concerns that I would be sorting garbage in my wedding dress. I promised her that I wouldn't, and I didn't. But I did end up sorting garbage later that night after I had changed out of my dress. Now that I'm a journalist whose work focuses on food, I've come across the issue of food waste time and time again over the past few years, without coming across significant or lasting solutions for fixing it at scale. So I'm really excited for today's episode. I'm gonna be joined by Zero100's head of research science, Colin Gilbert, who will help me unpack conversations I had with two people whose work is offering real and impactful ways forward in helping to end food waste, Giulia Stellari and Jackie Suggitt.

Giulia is a scientist, and the director for ESG and Impact at Fall Line Capital. Giulia Stellari: I'm Giulia Stellari, and I work for Fall Line Capital as director for ESG and Impact. I'm trained as a plant biologist, I became also really fascinated with the world of data, for agriculture specifically. So that's how I ended up founding a company called AgSquared, and then from there ended up moving to Unilever, where I became director for sustainable sourcing.

And now I'm taking all of these different experiences, biology, plant breeding, technology, supply chain, and incorporating it into my role at Fall Line Capital. Fall Line is an asset manager that's been around since 2011, founded with the purpose of buying undervalued, under-appreciated farmland, and investing in the farm's technology, agronomy, and soil conservation as a way to drive improved deals and better farmland values. The firm also started investing in early stage ag tech and food tech companies. Victoria Marin: Jackie is the director of Capital, Innovation, and Engagement at ReFED. ReFED is a non-profit that works to, quote, "End food loss and waste by advancing data-driven solutions." Jackie Suggitt: My name is Jackie Suggitt.

I am a director of Capital, Innovation and Engagement at ReFED. Food waste is a systemic issue, so there are people in all organizations that can somehow touch food waste. And I'd say one of the big parts of my job is expanding that tent and bringing new people into that tent, and finding the right way to connect with food waste as an issue.

ReFED is a non-profit focused on reducing food waste in the US. So it's exclusively focused on food waste, which I think is a really interesting and important place to be. Food waste is a systemic issue that happens to also touch economic and environmental, and social issues. So having a central repository of data and information, and focus on food waste really helps us to look at all of those issues systematically and have an impact.

Victoria Marin: I'm excited to share and unpack some of their insights. All right. So, Colin, you are back on the show despite your misgivings from earlier episodes.

Welcome back. Colin Gilbert: Thank you, Victoria. It's always a pleasure.

And I think this is the first time you and I have chatted. I'm usually on with Kevin, or Debra, or some supply chain person. Victoria Marin: I know. I know.

I'm so excited to talk about this with you, because even though I write a lot about food as a subject, this is the first time I'm talking about food waste, which I've never really thought about from the perspective of supply chain. So before we jump in to hear from you, I'd love to share some of the insights that we got from Jackie and Giulia Stellari about their perspective on why food waste is a supply chain issue. Jackie Suggitt: Food waste happens all along the supply chain, from farm to consumer. There's not a single component of the supply chain that is untouched. The reason it's important, I think, is because food waste is inefficiency, and inefficiencies are costs.

So this is a direct impact on business. There are also quantifiable impacts on the environment, on the broader economy, and on issues like food access and food insecurity. Giulia Stellari: Food waste is a huge greenhouse gas contributor, and a huge resource use inefficiency.

On the one hand, a billion people go to bed hungry at night. And at the same time, it is all too easy to just take an uneaten, not so appealing looking piece of food and toss it in the trash. But if we think about what it is that that represents, that's all the resources that went into growing that loaf of bread or raising that chicken, and so that means the water, and the land, and the nitrogen fertilizer, and the pests, and the human effort that went into too, and the diesel to drive the tractors, and so on.

Victoria Marin: Food waste in the US is something like 30 to 40% of the food supply. Like 133 billion pounds of food goes to waste every year, and that's despite about 10% of the country right now lives with food insecurity. So I'm curious about what you have to say about these stats, and about what Jackie and Giulia talked about. Colin Gilbert: Yeah.

So I agree with everything that Jackie and Giulia said. I think we need to define the scale of the problem, whether the scale of the problem is the same or different as we zero in and out of different localities. And then when you define waste or inefficiency, which I think was the key word that came up, where is efficiency in the system in the supply chain, as you look at how complicated it is from farm to table, or from livestock to butcher, or from point A to point B? And lastly, you need to look at what are the environmental impacts, and which technologies can best be brought to bear on which aspect of that problem. A lot of people might assume the US is the worst offender, but if you look at the global tallies, about 1/3 of food globally is also wasted.

The thing that struck me was this idea of inefficiency, which I think deserves a double click. Our food chain is the oldest and most developed supply chain in the world. Right? We've been living in an agrarian society for hundreds of years. But the global food supply chain is more modern than most people might imagine, because it's reliant on refrigeration.

And in the broad swath of history [laughs] refrigeration is relatively new. The first modern home refrigerators came out in the earliest part of the 20th century, leading into World War I. And so our ability to preserve food and ship it halfway around the world, and then import different stuff is a fairly modern phenomenon. And not balancing the food supply locally and enforcing shorter supply chains, and just expanding global trade flows is part and parcel of that inefficiency that has crept up per- more and more and more over the last hundred years. And it's not a coincidence that those hundred years is also the population boom that took us from 2 billion to approaching near 10 billion. Exactly in line with global trade, the expansion of food networks, and what we're doing now.

Victoria Marin: Really that demonstrates to me that this issue can't necessarily be defined by just a single country's responsibility. And finding where the inefficiencies are, is a good segue to the next thing I wanted to share from Giulia and Jackie and about where in the supply chain waste is most prevalent. Giulia Stellari: In highly consolidated, well-managed supply chains, let's say, in a grain supply chain in the US, or in Europe, or in Russia, Ukraine, et cetera, obviously prior to the current conflict, there were very minimal losses from a food waste perspective. Maybe less than 1%. That's because we have all of the facilities that are needed to store, dry, handle, ship, transport grain very efficiently. But the same situation is not the case all over the planet.

So if you go into more marginal farming environments, or in developing and emerging countries, maybe you would see 15, 20, 25% of that same grain crop being wasted. That's because you're missing the storage. Maybe you don't have the right kind of handling, you don't have the ability to dry the grain, or you don't have the efficiencies of the supply chain that would move it from point A to point B. And so what we end up with is a very varied landscape. Jackie Suggitt: So if we move beginning to end in that supply chain, farms account for about 20% of surplus food. So this is food that goes uneaten or unsold.

Manufacturing accounts for about 14%. Retail, restaurant, food service, et cetera, that accounts for about 28% of total surplus food. And then consumers are the highest, they're at 37%. It's not a siloed issue. So just because food waste is happening at farm, or at retail, doesn't mean that all the decisions leading to that waste happen within that sector. Things like produce specifications, those are set at retail, but they affect directly what's harvested off the farm.

And they're set at retail based on how consumers spend their dollars. So behaviors at every node in the supply chain are affecting the waste that actually happens at those nodes in the supply chain. Colin Gilbert: This is interesting, that connected exactly back to what we were talking about with the example of grain in the bread baskets like Ukraine before it gets to the final consumer. Waste gets progressively more as you get farther away from the origin or the source of the actual foodstuff. When you look at what the UN discloses, there's a balance in how you define where the waste is occurring. And we just heard a more nuanced view of that, but I think the simplified view is, like, half of the problem is really between harvest and retail, and the other half of the problem is what, during production, which is cooking, and food prep, and home and retail environments, and food service environments, et cetera.

And when you talk about supply chain, people usually only think about the first half of the problem, 'cause that's the classic source making move components to large agricultural productions. But when you bring in the consumer, and you look at supply chains in a more holistic fashion, a more circular fashion- Victoria Marin: Right. Right.

It really underscores how fixing it at one point isn't going to fix it at another point. Every point along the chain needs to be involved in addressing the problem. One of the biggest issues with food waste is the carbon output. And so I wanted to share a couple of clips from Giulia and then Jackie on that issues. Giulia Stellari: The life cycle of, let's say, a carton of milk, you would think that reducing packaging, or making sure that we used as little packaging as possible was one of the major drivers in driving down the footprint of that carton of milk.

But in reality, it turned out that the milk that could be spilled if you tried to reduce your footprint too much from a packaging standpoint had a much, much bigger footprint itself than the packaging. What that taught me was that every ounce of food that we produce is absolutely precious. Is precious because of all of the resources that go into it, and all of the waste that it represents when it's lost. And therefore treating that carefully and with respect throughout the value chain is an important duty that we all have who work in supply chain. Jackie Suggitt: The UN is estimating that we need a 50% increase in our food supply to feed our 2050 population, which is scary enough. But at the same time, climate change has reduced agricultural productivity by 21%.

And so we really need to be doing better with the food that we do have. And the implications go beyond food security. Wasted foods account for 4% of our greenhouse gas emissions, 18% of our crop land use, 14% of our water use. And it's actually almost 1/4 of our landfills.

It's the number one material going into our landfills. As far as how much unsold food is going to landfill, we're looking about 34.2%. Based on that number, we estimate 5.5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions associated with food in landfill. The really important sub-bullet there is that's just the emissions associated with that food in landfill. It is not all the supply chain emissions to get that food to the landfill.

So I think we need to be stopping this as early in the supply chain as possible. Right? 'Cause between harvesting, packaging, refrigerating, transporting, refrigerating again, we are just accumulating those emissions throughout the entire supply chain until food is eaten or not eaten. There is another hierarchy of prevention, rescue, and recycling in food waste. So with a heavy emphasis on prevention because of its ability to have drastic impacts on the environment and decarbonization of our supply chains. Colin Gilbert: That last point was the cincher for me.

And so I'm gonna say the same thing in a different way. If you talk to a carbon-skeptic about food waste, they'll say that it's not anywhere near the top of the list because EPA pins the emissions from food waste in millions of metric tons, not billions of metric tons. So they say it's a small part of the larger problem. Conceding that it is a big part of the waste problem, and the landfill problem, but what I would challenge back with is that if you put food waste in the context of the larger food production problem, and you take a more holistic integrated view, carbon emissions from food production are huge if you add up agriculture, livestock, fertilizer, land conversion and cultivation. You're talking about 16 billion metrics tons, or 30% of the overall problem. And so if you fix the waste problem, if you fix the demand problem, by extension, you are attacking the supply problem, and bringing the system back into harmony, back into balance.

Victoria Marin: Right. You know, we're all about optimism here at Zero100. Colin Gilbert: Well, some of us are, Victoria. Victoria Marin: [laughs]. Colin Gilbert: Some of us. Victoria Marin: I knew you were gonna get me on that one.

But I think it's worth taking a quick look at regenerative agriculture, and especially because Giulia's work is so focused on farming. And I want to share what she had to say about how she thinks it could be part of addressing food waste. Giulia Stellari: The framework of regenerative agriculture sits on top of a sustainable agriculture framework. Ultimately, a do-no-harm framework. It means ensure that you don't deplete your resources over time.

Whereas regenerative agriculture is aiming to enhance how those resources operate in your system. I think that there's one other concept of sustainability that we don't talk about a lot today, which I like to call Sustainability with a capital S. Basically thinking about it in the absolute sense of the world. So not, am I making this production system better year on year in a relative fashion? But do I have enough resources in this environment given current management and how everybody else around me is managing the resources, including the trade-offs? Do I have enough resources to sustain the production of this crop here in this environment indefinitely.

This is something that has to do with the bounty that nature, or nature and humans together, endow a particular piece of land with. For example, if your farm is heavily dependent on a well resource that is not managed, so an underground aquifer that is also competing with water use in cities, et cetera, and therefore there isn't enough recharge of the aquifer, then it will be difficult for that farm to exist sustainably, because eventually that water resource will go away. In the same way, if you are farming in an area that has a lot of slope, and maybe not so much topsoil, then to be able to farm that sustainably may mean that you're not able to s- grow certain crops on it, or you're not able to use certain practices just because if you do that, you will likely lose soil. And this is something that our current systems have a hard time factoring in. For example, crop subsidies today are given out not necessarily in respect of what crop would be best grown in that environment. However, it becomes clear after a while that growing the same crop on the same piece of land is not a sustainable way to farm.

You need to bring a crop rotation in order to avoid pests and diseases, and weed pressures, and so on. Colin Gilbert: So I am not gonna pretend to know about the science of farming. Because I'm a New Yorker, I can't even keep, like, fake plants alive.

But the one thing if I switch from a science hat to an economist's hat, that resonated with me about the regenerative agriculture framework. As she's talking about diversification and optimization, and de-risking. I think it's, like, 80% of almonds on the international market are grown in California's Central Valley. [laughs] And growing an ounce of almonds takes about 23 gallons of water in an area of the world that's in a systemic drought condition.

And so from a sheer risk-tolerance perspective, that outcome came about because it was profitable, and it was scalable, but it's not sustainable, [laughs] at the end of the day. And so what we're talking about is resetting the expectations given the fact that agricultural processes are destructive if they are taken to extremes. Victoria Marin: It seems like we know better than ever what the problem is, what the risks are, what we're potentially running into if things continue as they are. But the question is, what's keeping us from making real progress to ending food waste? Colin Gilbert: Yeah.

Let's start with some softball questions. I think that the reason that progress on this front is slow is that because we're talking about changing systematic parts of a network that support humanity every day. And so you can't turn it off, retune it, and restart it. And you need to do this while the legacy system is still feeding billions of people each and every day. I'm actually more optimistic because technologies, especially digital technologies that are point solution that when you add up the sum of their parts, really do contribute to solving the problem. And if you put enough of those in a chain together, then you get to a better outcome than, obviously, the loop that we're trapped in right now.

Victoria Marin: On that note, I actually wanted to share a bit from Jackie about ReFED's approach here. Jackie Suggitt: We actually model over 40 different solutions. Within manufacturing, we talk about things like manufacturing line optimization. And that can look high-tech or low-tech.

We actually just ran a case study that showed that tightening screws on a grain line led to a 70% reduction in waste, because less was spilling off that line. If we look at restaurants, and retail, and some of those consumer-facing businesses, everything from portion sizes, to standardizing date labels on products, to how we manage buffets, technology overall is playing a really exciting role in reducing food waste. That's one of the, the aspects of this that I find most interesting compared to some of our other climate solutions out there is that we don't have to wait for some big technology unlock to succeed.

Colin Gilbert: There's a brilliant academic journal article in Food Science and Technology that I think provides a framework of what buckets these solutions fit into. But if you kind of apply it to a supply chain model, we should just go through the phases in linear progression. If you look at Bowery Farming, which is a NYC startup, what they're really focused on is deploying technology to growing specific crops and products that secure kind of 95% savings in terms of energy or water usage, versus conventional agriculture. So really, really promising, but hasn't been scaled up yet. And then, what's already been commented on is, beyond production, once it's in transit, once it's in the system, once it's on the shelf, how do we make sure that we don't have to pull it from the shelf before someone buys it? And I think that people have to really break up that problem between improving the accuracy of the labels that we have versus the impact of the packaging that we wrap food products in.

And so there's a company called Mimica Labs that doing a really good job with, like, milk bottles, and protein labels, and bottle caps that have temperature sensors built into them. So when we're looking at these labels that say, "This milk is good for another eight weeks," you're like, "That can't [laughs] possibly be true." But if you have enough kind of sensors on the individual packaging, it can give you a better estimate of whether or not it's gonna extend or fall short of that estimated expiration date, which leads to less spoilage, which leads to less waste. And then on the impact side, there's a lot of companies that are finding out active ingredients, or leveraging biochemistry to basically neutralize the process of decay. We've done that for decades.

We used to wax fruit. The original killer app of how to preserve an apple. But we're getting really good at injecting kind of neutral gases into vacuum pack solutions that don't have the destabilizing effects of oxygen, or what happens when you have no packaging whatsoever. Once you switch from the sales channel into the production, or the use, or the end of the supply chain, and how things need to be recaptured, in the UK, where you have really advantageous population density ratios, there's great companies like Olleco that are collecting cooking oil to convert it to biofuel, and so that's a great example of building circularity into the system. Really finding out a way not to just reduce waste, but to take waste and make something valuable out of it, and reinfuse it, and reintroduce it into the system.

I think it's where we're gonna see the progress the most rapidly. If you change your altitude, try to visualize the entire thing and achieve what supply chain strategists refer to as end-to-end visibility- Victoria Marin: Right. That's actually a nice segue to sharing some of the solutions that Jackie pinpointed.

Jackie Suggitt: The first would be that companies are developing software solutions that use artificial intelligence to help improve forecasting demand, and managing inventory. So if you think about determining how many apples will be sold on a rainy Tuesday in Cleveland. Right? And that's based on education, and information, and weather patterns, and all sorts of inbound data that allows for those type of projections to take place. We are part of a partnership on the West Coast of the US called the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment that ran a pilot on these AI-type solutions.

And they found a 14.8% average reduction in food waste per store that was using this AI solution. Just for some context, if the entire grocery sector were to implement those solutions at that rate, we'd see over 900,000 tons of food waste annually prevented. So just putting some of that into context, I think that's a, a really interesting solution, and an exciting one to keep our eyes on going forward as those continue to improve. You know, sensors for temperature and quality monitoring throughout the cold chain, so ensuring that our cold chain integrity is in place, and there hasn't been unknown, or undocumented exposure for a product moving through the supply chain. Restaurants are now able to track and analyze waste through image recognition.

So as they're throwing quantities of food in the dumpster, or in compost, actually getting analytics back on what food was wasted, and how much. Which means they can redesign their menus, and their portion sizes accordingly. And then for consumers, we can all download apps on our phone now that help connect us to food that not only is preventing waste, but we can get for cheaper than maybe traditional outlets. So saving us money, and reducing food waste all at the same time. Victoria Marin: Here's Giulia talking about Fall Line's investments.

Giulia Stellari: The firm invests behind four specific verticals. So hardware, software, biotech, and food tech. And I think each of them actually have a role to play in addressing food waste. So in hardware, we're looking for technologies that make it radically more efficient, and less environmentally damaging to apply crop protection products, or to achieve a harvest. Utilizing new technologies like drones, for example.

And of course, one of the impacts that these systems can help to ensure is that you maximize your yield. In our venture practice, we invest in technologies that bring about a step change in performance at farm level. So this could be biotechnologies, or new hardware that's used on farms, new machinery that changes how a crop is weeded. Or it could be software that ultimately powers these machines, and this is one theme that I see today that is not really part of the food waste discussion, which is that every crop has a theoretical yield potential. Where these areas, I think, most cleanly intersect with food waste is around the technologies that help a crop reach its maximum potential while it's in the field. When a crop is growing in the field, it faces a variety of pressures.

It can be the weather, too hot, too cold, too much rain, too little rain. Or it can be weeds that encroach on the growing area and suck up nutrients and moisture from the crop. Or it can be pests and diseases that ultimately damage the usable portion of the crop, or make it last longer in the supermarket or on the consumer's refrigerator.

And so, all of these different pressures ultimately impact how much can be harvested from the field, and how much can be made available to sell to the consumer. And so when we look for technology, we look at those technologies that ultimately increase the amount of yield and sellable yield that a farmer can gain out of their fields. Victoria Marin: And then another point that Giulia made that I think is really important is that there are gaps in technology that we have to find solutions in some other way. Giulia Stellari: There's one element of technology for farms that I see as currently, actually a big gap.

And that is, what is the direct impact on the environment of how a farmer is managing the soil, or the water, or the crop. One of the things that's talked a lot about is how regenerative agriculture should be an outcomes-based process. Meaning, it's not about a certification, did you do XYZ? It's like how did your farm perform? And did you have a good outcome? So did you enhance biodiversity? Did you protect the soil? Did you clean up the water, et cetera, within the boundaries of your farm? But I've never seen any technology that actually directly measures a farm's environmental outcome, or output variables. Meaning, like, if you put fertilizer on a field, how much of it actually ran off? To do this is really difficult. You'd have to capture all of the water that runs off the field for every rain event over a certain amount of time, and start to understand, for example, how much soil was lost.

How much nitrogen was lost? How much phosphorus was lost? These are major pollutants that, every time it rains, get flushed into the water systems. Where we get that information from today is models. There was a study that was done, and that study shows that when it rains this hard, and there's so much slope on the land, and the following practices have been done, this is how much soil we expect is eroded. And if you lose this much soil, and you put on that much nitrogen, therefore it measures out, it calculates out how much nitrogen you might have lost, or how much phosphorus you have lost. But the reality is that individual fields are very different.

And how a farmer is actually is actually managing the field will lead to a very different outcome. So wouldn't it be amazing if there were ways to actually measure and give farmers some straightforward feedback that says, "These are the practices that you used, and here we measured this much nitrogen was lost from your field, or this much sediment ran off, or this much phosphorus ran off." Rather than relying it on models. Victoria Marin: See, I think these are really intriguing points that Giulia makes about yield potential, and how not reaching that is essentially a form of food waste in and of itself. Right? But I also can't help but wonder where are we now in terms of making real progress towards ending food waste that is already happening? The USDA in 2015 set a goal to cut food waste in half by 2030.

Now, it's 2023, are we halfway there? Are we close? Where are we on this? COVID, obviously, had a huge impact on how people started buying food, how they were eating food, w- how food was being wasted, and managed. So I think that variable is really important to underscore. I want to share what Jackie had to say about that, and then I'd love to hear your thoughts there too. Jackie Suggitt: We have to stop the acceleration and stall out before you can start the deceleration of, [laughs] of a trend. So based on 2019 data, after seeing about a 12% increase in the first part of the decade, we did see a leveling off starting in 2016. And we've now seen per capita surplus food decline by 2% since its high in 2016.

Another important note here, that's 2019 data, which means COVID is not included. I think it'll be really interesting when we do this update in April to see what the implications of COVID are. I think we have some guesses at sector levels of what happened. I think every sector was affected very differently. But regardless, I think the moral of the story is, we need to be accelerating action and doing more.

Colin Gilbert: You know, if you ask anybody in any industry what their target is relating to carbon reductions by 2030, everybody is gonna say, with some small margin of error, "We're gonna cut half of whatever we're doing by the end of the decade." But there is a data problem, there is a measurement problem, and we are coping with the aftermath of a black swan event in the form of COVID where we have no idea what happened [laughs] during that 18 month period, and we're just getting the data now. And so the one thing that I will add, in addition to the urgency of the problem, there is a urgency to track progress with a greater deal than pirical precision. Technology moves really quickly, policy moves really slowly, but there's a third leg of the stool, which was what's happening with consumer behavior.

And I think that more than anything else will make or break whether or not we hit those goals by 2030. Did everybody during COVID watching, uh, how much food they were throwing away suddenly change their behavior to a huge degree? Or are we just all hooked on subscription meal kits now? Did everybody switch to protein substitutes like Impossible Meat? These are the X factors that we do need to fill in so we understand in conjunction with policy and tech investment what is working where, and why, and double down on what is getting us back on the right trendline faster than trying to do everything at once. I think it was a useful exercise to think backwards from waste.

Because if you successfully cut waste, you shape demand, and thereby the oversupply problem. And slowly but surely, the system more efficient. That's not a learning that applicable just to food security, but for all supply chain practitioners.

There's waste in every single supply chain, and people at the end of the day are trying to accomplish the same things using some of the same technologies. I don't think tech alone is enough to get the job done. Beth Ford is the CEO of Land O'Lakes, she talks about the impact of public policy on the farming system, and the agricultural system that we're describing.

So beyond waste and the technology that can attack inefficiencies, we have to remember that the food chain is unique because it's an amalgamation of land management and government subsidies, and, uh, corporate agricultural business apparatus that's grown up over the last several decades to facilitate these global trade flows. And so what we really need to unpack through a combination of policy and operations and technologies is how we get smarter, and how we coordinate what we grow where and why. Technology is part of the solution, but not necessarily the magic bullet if we don't frame it in that way. Victoria Marin: We could probably do an entire series on food waste alone, and dig into this on so many different levels.

Colin Gilbert: Yeah, we need smaller topics. When's the culture in media podcast for Zero100 coming along? Victoria Marin: We could sidebar, and work on that as a special project. Colin Gilbert: All right. Victoria Marin: Colin, thank you so much for joining us and sharing such important insights. Colin Gilbert: No, thank you, Victoria.

I always learn so much from the guests that you interview, and very much enjoyed the conversation today. Victoria Marin: All right, friends. There you have it. That is it for Radical Reinvention Episode Nine.

Thank you to Jackie Suggitt from ReFED, Giulia Stellari from Fall Line Capital, and to Zero100's own Colin Gilbert for joining me today. You can find the links referenced throughout the episode in the show notes. And Zero100 community members can check out the episode's full interviews online at zero100.com. This episode of Radical Reinvention was produced by Diane Hope, Nick Heinemann, Brian Egan, Catherine Perry, and me, Victoria Marin. Colin Gilbert contributed research insights for the episode, and Ko Takasugi-Czernowin is our editor and sound engineer, and also composed our theme music. To find out more about Zero100, and to check out our content library, go to zero100.com.

If you're interested in joining our community of contributors, send us a note at hello@zero100.com.

2023-03-31 04:43

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