Reducing food waste through packaging design

Closer to home, it also has harmful effects at the community and household levels. As an environmentally and socially conscious organic food processor, we at Grindstone Bakery are doing our part to decrease food waste by minimizing the loss of our bread products to spoilage.

Reducing spoilage is a significant challenge for food with absolutely no preservatives, like ours. Food spoils due to the growth of naturally occurring microorganisms (bacteria, yeasts, and molds) influenced by moisture, temperature, and the presence of oxygen. While the right amount of moisture is essential for our breads and transport or storage temperature is often out of our control, oxygen, which degrades food through the chemical process of oxidation, can be restricted.

Less oxygen = longer shelf life.

Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) is a technology for altering the environment inside a food package to increase shelf life and maintain quality. We have implemented MAP for our products through a two-step process.

• First, we invested in specialized packaging equipment that removes most of the oxygen from each bag and replaces it with pure nitrogen gas before permanently sealing with heat.
• Second, we selected a high-performance laminated material for our bags that provides a strong barrier against oxygen and water vapor transmission from the outside.

Most plastic packaging for bread is relatively porous to oxygen passing through the bag itself, resulting in decreased shelf life, quality, enjoyment, and correspondingly, increased food waste. By contrast, the combination of our packaging process and bags removes food-decaying oxygen from around the bread and keeps it out until the bag is opened.

Excerpts from USDA “Why Should We Care About Food Waste?”

• In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40% of the food supply. This added up to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010.
• Most people don’t realize how often food is wasted and the negative impacts it can have for food security, the environment, and climate change. Reducing food loss and waste could benefit them, their families, and the world, now and in the future.
• When food is wasted, so too is the land, water, labor, energy, and other inputs that are used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing, and disposing of the discarded food.
• According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in the United States, food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills, where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Want to learn more?

To learn more about the benefits of reducing food waste and how it impacts our planet, please explore these helpful links:

• https://www.usda.gov/foodlossandwaste/why
• https://www.wri.org/insights/reducing-food-loss-and-food-waste
• https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/sustainability/food-waste/