Eliminate Food Loss

Test Bed Vision:

To develop new strategies to avoid food loss from farm to retail by recovering and value adding to the edible portion of this loss to produce food ingredients/ products, which will enhance the sustainability of the food supply chain.

About 1/3 of produced food is wasted, contributing to food insecurity and negative environmental impacts. Limited strategies exist for recovery and re-use of food loss for the production of value-added products. This research testbed aimed to develop new strategies to avoid food loss from farm to retail by recovering and value-adding to the edible portion of this loss to produce food ingredients/ products, which will enhance the sustainability of the food supply chain. The focus was on the development of …

(a) Intelligent Decisions Making Tools – Mapping the food loss and location along various supply chains in Australia and using this as a basis for informed/intelligent decision making

(b) New Sensors – Development of advanced sensing technologies to discriminate between various supplies of edible food loss material to enable decisions to be made on fitness for purpose of food loss raw material for end-use and

(c) New Processing Technologies for Stabilisation of Food Loss Materials and Conversion: – Development of efficient processing and preservation and sensor technologies that are safe, sustainable, and economically attractive to various players in the supply chain for conversion of edible food loss to healthy and nutritious food and to help reduce waste.

This test bed was led by Maryann Augustin and Luz Sanguansri from CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food, and was a collaboration by staff from CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food, Health and Biosecurity, Data61, and Manufacturing .