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The Challenge of Food Waste | Join us at BITE Silicon Valley June 5
IFTF's Food Futures Lab Joins Tom Colicchio, Bon Appetit Management Company, and James Beard Award-Winning DC Central Kitchen Founder at BITE Silicon Valley
In 2013, our food futures team explored the challenge of food waste in our forecast map, Seeds of Disruption: How Technology is Remaking the Future of Food. During our research, it became clear that centralization of shopping experiences over the past decades contributed to an increase in food waste. As of 2009, food waste in the US had increased 50% since 1974, and it's only increased in the years since. Globally, most of the waste in high-income countries occurs at the retail and consumer levels, enough to feed the 870 million people who go hungry around the world.
People are acknowledging that common food practices and environments, even the size of refrigerators, in many ways encourage waste. Yet new technologies for packaging and storage, freshness-detecting sensors, and on-demand food delivery have the potential to help us reduce waste. Beyond technology, a new set of efforts are shifting our social, economic, and political paradigms. Chefs are using their culinary creativity to turn someone else's trash into gastronomical treasures, and organizations like FoodShift in the Bay Area and Feedback Global aim to raise awareness. In France, new legislation requires supermarkets to donate unsold food to charity.
As we pursue environmental and economic sustainability, better human health, and equity in the complex global food system, can we make a future without food waste? Join the discussion with our Food Futures Lab at the inaugural BITE Silicon Valley conference and food and wine festival!
Event Details
The Challenge of Food Waste
Friday, June 5 at 11:30 am (conference from 8:30 am - 5:00 pm)
Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara, California
Panel features:
- Miriam Lueck Avery, IFTF Food Futures Lab (Moderator)
- Tom Colicchio, Chef/Owner Crafted Hospitality, MSNBC Food Correspondent
- Robert Egger, Founder LA Kitchen & DC Central Kitchen
- Maisie Ganzler, Vice President of Strategy, Bon Appetit Management
Our Food Futures Lab will also be at the BITE food and wine festival through the weekend! Come taste the food of renowned chefs from 25 restaurants and the wine of 50 wineries, see 3D food printing and solar cooking, demo food apps, and watch celebrity chef cooking demonstrations.
IFTF’s Food Futures Lab identifies and catalyzes the innovations that have the potential to reinvent our global food system. We seek to understand the motivations, drivers, and impacts of food innovation, and to align the minds and resources shaping the future of food. We impart a shared understanding of how to take the long-term view—one that encompasses multiple scales, uncertainties, and radically different possibilities for the future of food. We develop foresight and insight that help all eaters take action toward a more resilient, equitable, and delicious future of food.
Curious about the Food Futures Lab?
- Follow the program at @iftf
- Find out more about the program
- Check out previous years' research
- Contact Dawn Alva for more about our research ([email protected]) and Rebecca Chesney ([email protected]) for more about our special projects and events