Project:Food Rescue/Concept

Motivation

Food waste is a problem for society as a whole, with enormous consequential damage to the environment and the climate. For example, over 12 million tons of food are thrown away every year in Germany alone, and about 40% of that in households. A key factor is the best-before date. If it is exceeded, many throw away even unspoiled food because of uncertainty. The best-before date is an overly carefully date chosen by manufacturers, often even amounting to deception of the consumer: at the request of supermarket chains, manufacturers sometimes provide products that are produced at the same time but carry different best-before dates.

Unspoiled food needs a real chance of being eaten. This is not only climate protection and environmental protection, but ultimately also relevant for the global implementation of the human right to adequate nutrition. Hunger is only a distribution problem!

Background

From a 2019 study "Ernährungsreport" of the German ministry of nutrition and farming (as referred by welt.de), food waste composed of items that are still edible in principle has the following composition in Germany (excluding the farm level):

• fresh fruits and vegetables: 34%
• self-prepared meals: 16%
• bread and baked goods: 14%
• drinks: 11%
• dairy: 9%
• ready-made meals and deep frozen food: 7%
• other: 9%

According to the same study, the reasons given by consumers for throwing away these still edible food items are: concerns about food expiration / edibility after storage (58% of cases), too large portion sizes (21%), bad amount selection at the time of purchase (12%). It can be assumed that, in the majority of cases where consumers were concerned about edibility of edible (!) food after storage, an expired best-before date raised these concerns. When throwing away for example rotten vegetables, it is not counted in this statistic. In a minority of cases, consumers might wrongly assess a food item to be inedible, while in fact it is. For both sources of the edibility concern, better information can help.

With this information and the 40% of food wastage happening in households (also referred in that study), we can calculate the possible maximum impact of an app that properly informs about food expiry: 40% × 58% = 23.2% of all food waste in Germany could be avoided. The same or similar apps could also help with amount planning for cooking and shopping, solving the two other main reasons consumers give for wasting edible food. This project focuses on expiration dates and edibility assessment, as this makes up 58% of the food wastage issue at consumer level.

Approach

The aim of the project is to develop a solution that builds consumer confidence in food, regardless of the best-before date. Specifically, it will be an application on mobile devices (“smartphone app”) that quickly and conveniently informs how long food can actually be kept and how its edibility can be reliably assessed. Consumer protection in the information age means rich information instead of a single date. Among other things, information on the normal behaviour of food during storage and processing should be included. That knowledge can often no longer be assumed among consumers, since many of the more complex processes in domestic food processing (such as canning) have been displaced by industry.

Users will access this information by reading the GTIN barcode that is available on all packaged food into the application, using the camera of their mobile device. This is convenient, fast and practical, and differs from the existing approach of project “Eat By Date”, where this information is presented on a website in the form of an encyclopedia.

This project is non-financially supported by the open source project "Open Food Facts", founded in 2012. Open Food Facts provides a mobile application for displaying data about food products, and also already has a large community of relevant users, documented by over 500,000 installations of the Open Food Facts Android application. Specifically, the collaboration with Open Food Facts aims for the project to be implemented as additional functions in the existing Open Food Facts Android application. If necessary, implementation as a separate application with API connection to Open Food Facts is also possible.

In any case, users will have the opportunity to contribute and update information about the storage life of food items by themselves. This prevents the database from becoming obsolete, and corresponds to the way in which the existing Open Food Facts database is set up and maintained with information about nutrient content, ingredients, allergens, etc.. All information will be provided free of charge and under the same open licenses that are already used in the Open Food Facts project.

Producers and laboratories will also be able to contribute information. Whether the application will explicitly support the publication of shelf life tests depends on how readily manufacturers of food products sold in Germany will respond to our requests to publish the results of these tests. At this point it should be noted that a political requirement for the publication of such shelf life tests would significantly increase the benefits of the application described here. But even without such detailed data for individual products, useful information can be offered at the level of product categories (such as "fruit juice, pasteurized").

Target group

The beneficiaries of the project include everyone who prepares food in private households and would be willing to use a mobile device ("smartphone" or "tablet") - in other words, all citizens who already use such a device regularly and in a variety of ways.

In order to reach this group, the project is being implemented in cooperation with the Open Food Facts community. This is the world's largest open data community in the food sector and consists mainly of consumers. The central tool of this community is a free and open source Android application that has been installed more than 500 000 times. By integrating the software functions developed in this project there, all these users automatically receive these functions with the next update of their Android applications. It can be expected that many users of this application will discover the new functions during normal use of the application, since this functionality is visible immediately after barcode scanning on food packaging (which is the main function of the application). It has to be noted that, while this is the plan, we might discover during the project that our envisaged data are not compatible with the conventions and expectations of the Open Food Facts developers, in which case the software functions would become part of a third-party mobile application that belongs to the Open Food Facts ecosystem.