Reducing food waste with the help of tech

For the first time in decades, world hunger is rising. And yet, nearly 30% of the world’s agricultural land produces food that is ultimately never consumed. That same wasted food is responsible for around 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The UN calls for action to address these large quantities of food waste. They stress the risks for climate change, agriculture, human livelihoods, and food supplies.

This mission can and will not be carried out by just one person or entity: everyone needs to step in to address this crucial issue. With the helping hand of technology, we can take essential steps forward. Complex challenges like these need technology’s agility and speed. With the assistance of Google Cloud, food waste solutions can be accelerated. Let’s take a look at how we help our partners to make meaningful change in the face of food waste.

One of the places where food waste happens is in the supermarket - caused by factors like limited shelf life, demand for certain aesthetic standards and the need for a vast variety of products. According to the UN, reductions in food waste downstream in the supply chain are key to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Carrefour, one of the largest grocery retailers in France, is determined to bring innovation to the food industry. They want to make sure that what they do is better for the planet, tackling the complex task of reducing food waste along the way. To do this, Carrefour needed to ensure it had the right products, in front of the right shoppers, at the right store location. They developed an assortment recommendation tool with the help of GCP BigQuery: a data warehouse for business agility and insights. This tool helps the chain support a more personalized selection at the store level, giving store directors the autonomy to influence inventory needs. The tool also gives Carrefour headquarters visibility into the merchandising decisions by each of their franchise stores. 

Please take a look at the video below for their story.

Now that we have seen how Carrefour uses Google Cloud’s services, let’s see how you can use these services to accelerate your sustainable solutions.

BigQuery can help your organization create the most accurate and comprehensive forecasts. Retailers today are increasingly centralizing their user data in Google’s BigQuery data analytics platform. Personalization and recommendation models are then built on top of this data. With Google Cloud Platform, you can create and run machine learning models on one billion data points per day, including the weight, shape and size of your delivery. The insights from that data help your organization to gain information: how to best load vans, how to make more targeted operational adjustments and how to minimize forecast uncertainty. This way you can deliver your orders cheaper and serve your customers in a smarter and more flexible way.

Reducing food waste is not a one-man job: we are in this together. Tackling this complex issue can be made actionable through technology. We recognize that we are on the crossroads of changes in the food industry. By continuing to innovate and provide industry-specific tools, Google Cloud’s technology can help you to accelerate meaningful change.