Every year, an estimated $27-billion of Canadian food ends up in landfills and composting, according to a new study titled Food Waste in Canada by independent agri-products think tank The George Morris Centre.

This wasted food represents approximately 40% of all the food produced in Canada — and even exceeds the amount eaten by Canadians in restaurants. In fact, it equals about 2% of this country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is higher than the combined GDP of the 32 poorest countries, says the study.

Consumers are the major culprits when it comes to food that ends up in landfills, “but they’re not the culprit for the majority of waste overall,” says Martin Gooch, one of the study’s authors and director of the Value Chain Management Centre at the George Morris Centre. “In the report, which is based on analysis of known figures that we validated through discussions with processors and retailers, etc., we found there’s a whole lot of hidden waste that could be reduced by greater collaboration between businesses along the value chain.”

In fact, according to the study, improving the management of agri-food value chains would have the greatest long-term impact on reducing food waste and its resulting economic and environmental impacts. For an industry that, says Mr. Gooch, typically has a very slim margin, the food waste amounts to wasted profit and opportunities. What’s more — the world is facing a looming food shortage in the coming decades.

“With three billion extra people by 2050 as predicted, we need to increase food production accordingly, and there’s not a lot of spare land to take over to increase the amount of crop production so the productivity in the existing land is going to have to be increased,” says Bruce Coulman, who heads the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Saskatchewan College of Agriculture and Bioresources,

In the forefront is genome research.

“There are more and more plants that are being sequenced and as we learn about these crops and their genetic makeup, I think this will ultimately pave the way for being able to select plants for productivity or disease resistance or some other quality trait , such as wheat that will lead to better quality or more nutritious bread,” says Prof. Coulman. “I think it opens up a lot of possibilities. The technology and equipment that is available for genomics research now is so much more efficient today than even just a few years ago.”

While plant sciences researchers investigate ways to improve crop heartiness, quality, varieties and productivity, food and opportunities for improvement are literally being thrown away by fragmented, technologically inefficient value chains in the food industry.

“Food is one of the sectors that is lagging in developing close relationships along the chain and in how effectively it is using technology,” says Mr. Gooch. “In the early 1980s, Michael Porter, well-known for Porter's five forces, wrote a paper that said the basis of competition used to be transforming a product into another — such as wheat into flour and flour into bread — but he said then that the basis of being competitive is now looking at the information that comes from that transformation process and using it to improve the process itself. We are way behind that in the food industry. Much of the technology industry, the chemical industry, and some of the automotive industry, they grabbed on to this understanding years ago. In the food industry, we’re still arguing whether we should do it at all.”

Leading the way in change is the retail end of the food industry, says Mr. Gooch. “You have one end of the chain — retail — which is having to adapt to market changes to survive and the other end of the chain — production — where there are elements resisting change. So you get this tension in the middle and that leads to distrust — lack of willingness to share information — and this doesn’t create a can-do attitude.”

Forward thinking agri-food producers and retailers, however, are working on building stronger value chain relationships, which Mr. Gooch believes will be the foundation for improvements in the food industry and lead to a reduction in food waste.

“The more you can use technology to speed up the accuracy and timeliness of orders, the more opportunity you have to reduce the waste,” says Mr. Gooch. “But technology is a tool and you can’t use the tool effectively unless you have the right relationships in place. The right information, when to share it, how to share it, the format you’re sharing it and why you’re sharing it are all critical.”