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NATURALLY HEALTHY www.gourmetnews.com n MARCH 2018 n GOURMET NEWS N H 9 0 Organic, Full Fat Yogurt from Bellwether Farms Bellwether Farms offers organic, full fat yo- gurt, made with milk from pastured Jersey cows. Jersey cows have more digestible A2 protein than the Holstein breed. This higher quality milk produces a richer, creamier yogurt, without strain- ing, added thickeners or added cream. Naturally creamier. Nat- urally more protein. Naturally more digestible. This yogurt is the perfect snack. Bell- wether Farms is introducing this delicious snack as a four-pack of 3.75-ounce cups. The yogurt is available in plain, vanilla, straw- berry, blueberry, blackberry and spiced apple. It looks beautiful on the shelf and cus- tomers will love it. Bellwether Farms is a family owned farm and creamery located in western Sonoma County. Since 1990, it has been producing award-winning whole milk dairy products. For more information, visit booth #4961, go to www.bellwetherfarms.com, email info@bellwetherfarms.com or call 707.763.0993. The Profit Potential in Food Waste Reduction By Lorrie Baumann Consumer concern about wasted food pres- ents grocers with an opportunity to join their customers on the right side of the conversa- tion, according to Doug Rauch, Founder of The Daily Table and former Chief Executive Officer of Trader Joe's. "Grocery chains are sometimes accused of having a strong vested interest in consumers wasting food. We fun- damentally disagree with this view," he said. "This is an opportunity to get on the right side and get out in front of your customers." The problem of wasted food is getting a lot of media attention, which means that your cus- tomers have heard about the issue and many of them are concerned about it. A 2015 con- sumer survey found that almost half of respon- dents said they'd heard or seen something about wasted food in the past year. Almost half of the 6,700 adults who were surveyed were aware that it's estimated that about 40 percent of the food produced in the United States is wasted. "It's not just Millennials who care about the environment and all those other val- ues. People are really relating around what they care about," Rauch said. "Thirty nine per- cent of Americans are 'aspirationals,' people who care about doing something good. That's the biggest proportion of the marketplace, and those people are advocates about issues like food waste. ... If we want to keep in front of our customers, we need to be thinking about that, because they're going to be asking about and requiring action on this." According to a 2017 estimate by the Nat- ural Resources Defense Council, the dollar value of food now wasted in the U.S. is $218 billion, which is equal to 1.3 percent of the country's gross domestic product, and equiv- alent to 1,250 calories per person per day, about half the recommended daily intake for adults. That wasted food also accounts for 2.6 percent of all U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions and about one fifth of all the agri- cultural water usage in the U.S., more than the agricultural water usage of Texas, Cali- fornia and Ohio combined. If there is a villain here, supermarkets aren't it -- consumer households are respon- sible for more than three times the food waste that's produced by grocery retailers and distributors, according to ReFED, a non- profit organization of business, nonprofit and government leaders dedicated to reducing food waste through data-driven solutions. Grocers are challenged in their efforts to reduce food waste by consumer demand for a consistently wide variety of food inventory that can strain inventory management and food purchasing. "When you're dealing with an issue like wasted food, it's important to talk about culture and what you stand for. Any strategies are going to run right up against culture. You've got to get in front of this by stepping back and thinking about cul- ture," Rauch said. "Culture starts with lead- ership. People are going to look to you." If you're known for offering the economy sizes that reduce packaging waste, you'll have a harder time avoiding the suspicion that you're encouraging consumers to buy more food than they can use. And of course, consumer demand for freshness and sensitiv- ity to aesthetic values can lead you to discard produce as soon as it's past its peak out of concern for your shoppers' experience. Reducing food waste offers you the oppor- tunity to boost revenues by marketing dis- counted imperfect produce. "Imperfect produce is a great opportunity for retailers. As soon as you call something 'heirloom,' people will pay more for it even if it looks weird," Rauch said. "We can't let perfect be the enemy of the good. We've got to find ways to take this food that's cosmetically blemished but healthy and figure out how to feed the one in seven who are food insecure or how to use it to give our customers a better value." You can give customers a bargain and elim- inate some of their need to dispose of aging product by expanding programs to discount items nearing the end of their shelf life and by allowing prepared foods to run out close to closing. Use signs to explain to customers that allowing items to run out helps curtail food waste. In the produce department and in seafood and meat cases, platforms and other props can help make displays appear fuller without utilizing as much product. Improved inventory management systems can also help. Mining your data can help an- alyze item performance to help identify op- portunities to eliminate items as well as improve forecasting. On a macro scale, you can place greater reliance on products pack- aged to prevent spoilage, and you can collab- orate with manufacturers to improve date labeling on products and to educate con- sumers about the meaning of the dates they see on package labels. Many grocers are already leading the way by finding ways to encourage consumers to buy cosmetically imperfect fruit and veg- etables. The Natural Resources Defense Council, in its 2012 update to its 2012 re- port that started the national discussion, "Wasted: How America is Losing up to 40 Percent of its food from Farm to Fork to Landfill," points to French retailer Inter- marche's periodic promotion called "Inglo- rious Fruits and Vegetables" in which it offers prepared foods such as soups and yo- gurts made from lower-grade produce and sells fresh misshapen fruit and vegetables for a 30 percent discount. The initial rollout in 2014 saw sales of 1.2 tons per store and a 24 percent increase in overall store traffic in the first two days, according to the re- tailer. "Wasted" reports that Hy-Vee, Han- naford, Giant Eagle, Whole Foods and Walmart are among those rolling out full or pilot programs in the U.S. Other efforts to reduce food waste are being greeted enthusiastically by consumers, as evidenced by the 83,000 followers for a Twitter site called @uglyfruitandveg, which posts pictures of oddly shaped produce and United Kingdom startup Oddbox, which de- livers boxes of misshapen produce to Lon- don customers. In the U.S. Imperfect Produce sells boxes of misshapen produce directly to consumers, attracting more than 7,000 customers in its first year after launch- ing in July 2015, according to the company's Chief Executive Officer. Hungry Harvest has a similar business model for "rescued pro- duce" in Washington, D.C. Jody Levy and Harlan Berger are among those who've found a profit in rescuing pro- duce that would otherwise be discarded in the field. They're the co-Founders of WTRMLN WTR, which produces cold-pressed water- melon juice and markets it as an outstanding hydration product that also reduces food waste. At the time they founded the company in 2013, Berger and Levy sourced only res- cued fruit to make Original WTRMLN WTR. With the growth the company has seen, the company now sources other fruit from its na- tionwide network of growers, but, still, 60 per- cent of the fruit that's used to make a line that now includes four other varieties would be otherwise discarded. "We take many melons from growers around the country. There are times when farmers don't get the rains they're expecting, and so they have tons of watermel- ons they can't sell because they're sunburned. These are perfectly good watermelons, and we take them and cold-press them to obtain the water in four facilities around the country," Levy said. "We use everything but the skin." Levy herself is an example of the kind of consumers who seek her products and who connect with businesses who lead the way on the issues they care about. "I personally be- lieve that every business is like an organism and every person connected to and invests in that business is part of the whole. That ap- plies to the consumers as well," she said. "Consumers support our brand because they love our product, and they trust our product. They know we care, and they trust us because it aligns with what's important to them."

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