Perspectives

About 13% of Nigeria's tomatoes are lost between farm and retail, but that number doesn't say where the loss happens. Measuring food loss precisely has historically required in-person surveys and physical sampling — thorough, but slow, expensive, and hard to repeat. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a member of Champions 12.3, is testing a faster method: an image recognition model trained to grade tomatoes from video shot in Nigerian wholesale and retail markets.

Carnival Corporation, a member of Champions 12.3, found a way to treat surplus food as a problem with a destination, not a dead end. Instead of routing surplus food straight to the trash, the company built a way to get it into the hands of the communities its ships visit. This meant clearing the customs, safety and regulatory hurdles that usually keep surplus food from ever leaving the ship. Across a global fleet of more than 90 vessels, the approach cut food waste per person by 47% in six years — a year ahead of the company's own interim target.

For years, the playbook for reducing food waste in university canteens looked the same everywhere: a poster on the wall, an announcement over the speakers, a campaign urging students to clean their plates. A member of Champions 12.3, China Agricultural University (CAU), decided to test a new hypothesis — that students don't waste food because they don't care, but because they can't see what they're wasting. By making waste visible, the university cut food waste by 48.5% in two years.

This post originally appeared on WRI.org.