Transforming Waste into Opportunities

Want new income streams? Look no further than food waste. The problem is most companies don't know the true cost of waste. It's not uncommon to only look at material loss and disposal when accounting for waste, but this limited calculation fails to consider the full impact.

Any procured material that never makes its way into the final product can be considered material loss or waste. From a mass balance perspective, the true cost of waste is significantly higher than wasted materials and the management of their disposal.

New Product Opportunities

Redirecting food materials for higher-value destinations represents a strategic way to offset the cost of waste. Examples include a San Francisco-based food manufacturer using 'spent' grain from local brewers to create upcycled energy bars and snack puffs, and an Ecuadorian company using discarded cacao flesh to manufacture a cacao-based beverage, increasing earnings per pod by over 50%.

New Production Efficiencies

In the US, around two billion pounds of food waste is created during the processing and manufacturing stage. Measuring on-farm has shown that about a third of produce can be lost in the field, far higher than grower estimates. Visibility into material loss helps companies improve planning and staging.

Seeing the True Cost of Waste, DIRECT

DIRECT, developed with RMIT University in Melbourne, is a solution designed to identify the true cost of waste. Aligned to the FLW Standard and ISO-14051, it provides granular attribution to enable consistency in output and flexibility in the analysis of material flows and costs across the food supply chain.