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The Mayor's Food Strategy, Healthy and Sustainable Food for London, published in May 2006, highlights the importance of the storage and movement of food between producers, processors and retailers, and the removal and processing of all unconsumed food and drink.
The Olympic Games, and other similar large-scale events, create huge demands on fresh and seasonal food supply chains and present significant logistical issues around traceability, product life and waste management.
This Challenge seeks to generate ideas and innovations that can begin to meet the specific needs of food retailers around the effective transportation and storage of fresh food: how can food be transported and stored as efficently as possible without compromising quality.
There are many features of London's food system that need to be improved if we are to meet the Mayor's vision of a sustainable world city. For example, however much energy has been used to make food and its packaging, all of it is wasted when it is thrown away. In the UK we throw away an estimated 6.7 million tonnes of food every year, accounting for around a third of all of the food we buy.
About half of this is edible, with the rest comprising of peelings, meat bones, and so on. Food also makes up a high proportion of the waste from manufacturing, catering and retail outlets. Artificially high cosmetic standards stipulated by supermarkets and caterers can also result in large amounts of a fruit crop going to waste.
This unsustainable volume of waste going to landfill is the focus of the Mayor's Draft Business Waste Management Strategy, Making Waste Work in London. One of the main concerns is the amount of fresh produce ending up in landfills. The Strategy sets new targets to reduce landfill waste and provide assistance to companies looking to address the issue.
London is fortunate to host many large-scale events, such as Notting Hill Carnival and the Thames Festival. However, these events generate huge amounts of food waste from its preparation and from consumers. For an event like the Olympics, practical measures are needed to tackle the potential scale of this problem.
It is important that foodservice businesses are supported in their efforts to manage waste more sustainably by providing them with technologically advanced, scientific solutions that minimise waste from inefficient food storage and transport, and provides sustainable solutions to offering fresh & healthy food-to-go.
