Food Waste Matters

National Food Waste Policy workshopIt’s been a really busy time for Fight Food Waste over the last few months. We started with a National Food Waste Policy workshop in November last year, which was a great success and hopefully will lead to the establishment of a new policy division within the organisation in the future.National Food Waste SummitAt the end of November, we hosted the second National Food Waste Summit in Brisbane, which was a great success. Over 250 people were involved with that event. We will be doing another one in a couple of years, in July/August of 2024. So please mark your calendars now and we’ll get details out around that as soon as possible.Become a financially sustainable organizationOver Christmas and the New Year period, we’ve been undertaking a number of consultancies around our future direction and strategy. That’s because we want to become a financially sustainable organisation post our immediate CRC and Stop Free Waste Australia funding and we’re looking at how we can do that.And we’re doing another piece around our overall branding and the integration of our two current divisions or teams, which is Stop Food Waste Australia and Fight Food Waste CRC. So lots going on on that front.Revised Investment FrameworkIn January this year, we released a revised investment framework that involves $5 million in new leverage available for our existing participants, but also new industry participants would like to join us and undertake some really innovative R&D with the Fight Food Waste CRC. And more recently, we’ve had some good success around launching a third sector action plan for Stop Food Waste Australia, and that was for the bread and bakery sector. We’ve also got some really exciting new signatories to announce with the Australian Food Pact in the coming weeks.Evoke AG eventEvoke AG was on last week. There were 1600 people that attended that. It was a great event. Really innovative kind of thoughts around how we feed a population of near 10 billion people by 2050, when right now we’ve got a known food gap of 56%. So the panel I was on was all around sustainable protein production and not just typical red meat proteins, but looking at alternative proteins such as plants and insect protein and making sure that as we go into these new areas that we’re doing them with a circular economy in mind and making sure that we’re not creating waste in that process.For example, in the pulse protein production, there’s about 75% waste stream, which is mainly starch and fibre and we’d really like to see all of that go back into food production and in particular human food consumption, rather than just being sent off to low- value uses, which a lot of it is. That’s what happens now. So really exciting field, the Evoke AG itself is two days of very solid networking.There were amazing speakers from around the world. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see a lot of them, but I did get to catch up with a lot of old colleagues. I think a really nice piece for us around Evoke AG was that we brought the four Food CRCs together for the first time and we had a joint display in the trade display area. That was with the high-performing Soil CRC, Food Agility CRC, and Future Food System CRC, and so people could come along and talk to all four CRCs in the one area. And that drives some efficiency as well. Trying to match make who’s best to do their R&D with. So, a very successful couple of days.