Food Loss and Waste Awareness Day: Nutrient-dense foods lost first, driving hidden hunger

A multifaceted approach combining technology, financial support, and women’s economic empowerment is required to cut food loss and waste (FLW), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the NGO Care tell Nutrition Insight.

On this International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, Care calls for special attention to women’s market access and their empowerment, as several solutions fail to meet the needs of women, who play a large role in post-harvest processing. 

Experts at the organizations warn that increasing food production will not ensure better nutrition and discuss whether the world is on track to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3 to cut FLW in half by 2030.

The UN points out that ~13% of food produced globally is lost after harvest, even before it hits the retail shelves. Inside homes, restaurants, and shops, 19% of food is wasted. Even when food was available, 645 million people faced hunger last year.

According to Alan de Brauw, senior research fellow at IFPRI, a combination of technology and financing can help resolve food waste. 

“We need more money flowing to nutrition-oriented entrepreneurs for sure, but how to convince those with money to invest in that message is still an issue. Technology — when well designed and employed — could help bridge that gap.”

Care’s associate VP of Resilient Futures, Ann Vaughan, underlines markets and women’s economic empowerment in keeping households food secure and properly nourished, not just technology.

“Even if we increase access to FLW technologies, it doesn’t mean that women will get a fair market price for the food they sell or control how that money is used in the home.”

Vaughan warns that producing more does not necessarily mean an increase in nutritious diets if one-third of the produce never reaches the plate.“And it won’t shape the decisions vendors make in terms of what foods to sell and what households might buy and feed their children. And that is why it’s critical to look beyond technology — at market access and behavior, and women’s access to markets and finance when trying to improve nutrition and food security.”

According to the UN, reducing FLW can address climate change, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and rising living costs simultaneously. FLW accounted for approximately 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2016.

Increasing food production is not an answer

Vaughan warns that producing more does not necessarily mean an increase in nutritious diets if one-third of the produce never reaches the plate.

“What is lost is disproportionately the fruit, vegetables, dairy, and fish that supply the critical vitamins and minerals needed for development. From a nutrition standpoint, boosting calories doesn’t address the problem of diet quality.”

“Communities and businesses that reduce post-harvest loss, convert agricultural and livestock waste into biofertilizer like bioslurry or biochar, and store grain safely are partially insulated from global price shocks — but technological approaches alone aren’t enough,” she states. 

According to Vaughan, FLW solutions can become more resilient when built from the ground up, employing circular economy approaches.

Hidden hunger risk

In FLW discussions, hidden hunger becomes essential to address, says Vaughan, since malnourishment can exist despite fulfilling the body’s caloric needs.

Hidden hunger becomes essential to address since malnourishment can exist despite fulfilling the body’s caloric needs, says Vaughan.“As a result, we would broaden ‘nutrient-dense’ to capture fresh, locally available foods more generally: fruit, vegetables, dairy, and fish. These are the foods most likely to be lost early, between harvest and market, in places where storage and cold chain infrastructure are weakest.”

“They’re also the foods women are most often responsible for processing and selling,” underscores Vaughan. “These foods are fragile, hard to store, and require specialized processing or storage equipment; they lose nutritional value without it, and they’re price-volatile, so they’re often sold quickly to avoid loss.”

These factors limit access to safe, nutritious food, driving micronutrient deficiency in households that appear to be food secure, says Vaughan.

FLW tech often fails for women

Earlier this year, Care released a report on why waste-reduction technologies often fail when they ignore smallholder realities, especially for women.

“We kept finding that technically sound FLW solutions — solar dryers, hermetic storage, biodigesters — would work in pilots but fail to scale or stick once a project ended. The deeper issue becomes clear once you look at who actually handles food after harvest: women do up to 50% of post-harvest processing, yet they’re consistently less likely to adopt these technologies,” says Vaughan.

De Brauw believes that logistics innovations could lead to the biggest nutrition returns in low- and middle-income countries.“That’s not for lack of desire or ability — it’s because the technologies are rarely designed for the realities women face: limited control over land, income, and credit; mobility constraints; and unpaid labor that measurement systems don’t count,” she explains. “Technologies designed without women’s input usually don’t work for women, so women don’t adopt them.”

Furthermore, Vaughan points out that since many women do not possess formal land titles, financing systems can exclude them, as they require land as collateral. Several technologies are not designed to factor in women’s time, often adding hours of labor rather than reducing it.

“What separates the interventions that scale is proof of long-term viability: the technology doesn’t increase women’s time burden (or if it does, it generates more income than the added time costs), and it beats the alternative of not adopting it at all,” details Vaughan.

“Interventions that scale also ensure market access — offtake agreements, purchasing contracts — rather than just distributing equipment. High-cost refrigeration and advanced cold chains are valuable but often inaccessible for smallholders without supporting infrastructure or financing, especially where electricity or roads are limited, and their operating costs can undercut their efficiency.”

Meanwhile, IFPRI’s De Brauw believes that logistics innovations could lead to the biggest nutrition returns in low- and middle-income countries, now that their venture capital phase has passed. 

“These can easily be combined with contracts and finance, if platforms are designed properly, and add real value to everyone involved. They seem to require some vertical integration in value chains to make them work well,” he argues.

Call for better FLW tech

According to de Brauw, it is not known how far off track the world is in meeting SDG 12.3. He says that to understand where the world stands on reducing FLW, we need to know how bad FLW was at the beginning of that period, for which the numbers are often poor.

De Brauw points out that the EAT-Lancet commission assumes a higher level of FLW than IFPRI data.“Moreover, there are far fewer estimates of FLW among fruits, vegetables, and animal-source foods (or more nutrient-dense foods) than there are estimates for major grains. We need to know more about where losses occur within value chains so we can come up with better innovations to reduce them.”

“That said, I think it’s safe to say that we haven’t seen enough innovation adopted at scale to reduce FLW by half in the past eleven years,” he flags. “I think of this reduction as a win-win — reducing FLW could help reduce prices for consumers (through increased supply, effectively) without reducing the prices producers receive for nutrient-dense foods.”

Is the FLW target achievable?

The EAT-Lancet Commission has said that food waste needs to be cut to achieve a sustainable, healthy, and equitable food system by 2050. 

De Brauw, who was not involved in that modeling, points out that the commission is assuming a higher level of FLW to begin with. “It seems like they are using a baseline of 40–50% for root crops and vegetables, which is probably too high to begin with. 

“Our research shows that when we examine losses within value chains (only post-harvest losses) among vegetables, losses are more like 10–15% on average, without including waste, which occurs at the consumer level or farm level.” 

“So I suspect that they will miss the target because they are overestimating losses, so some of the nutrition and food security benefit is realistically achievable — let’s say somewhere between 25–50%,” concludes De Brauw.