Measuring the Unmeasurable: LIDD and ReFed Uncover Next-Generation Food Waste Solutions

[00:00:00.000] Refed is an environmental advocacy organization, which I’ve known about for a couple of years now. 1

[00:00:00.000] They’re really the leader in addressing food waste in the United States, bringing this issue to the forefront and then leading the effort to bring everyone together—all different sectors: government, nonprofit, for-profit, and science. 2

[00:00:00.000] They want to bring everyone who’s interested in food waste together. 3

[00:00:00.000] I met them a couple of years ago, read their work, and called them up, saying, “I think we should talk.” 4

[00:00:00.000] Lid has something to contribute to this conversation. 5 They were receptive. 6

[00:00:00.000] In 2024, we completed a project with them, involving some research papers. 7

[00:00:00.000] Then, in 2025, we’ve embarked on a very large research project, which we’re all working on. 8

[00:00:00.000] This is what I would call a sprawling project. 9 It has a bunch of different parts to it and addresses a very large question. 10

[00:00:00.000] One of the core pieces is to redo the numbers related to manufacturing and distribution in what they call their food waste monitor. 11

[00:00:00.000] Refed has a very snazzy website with a lot of data, and they are looked to as an authoritative source of information about food waste in the United States. 12

[00:00:00.000] They have a model with five sectors: the farming or agricultural sector, manufacturing, retail (by which they mean grocery stores), food service (by which they mean restaurants), and then home consumption in people’s houses. 13

[00:01:34.280] They’ve asked us to look at that manufacturing sector and to expand it to include distribution, to provide new numbers on the total amount of food that is manufactured and produced in the United States, how much loss there is, and to look at that in each of their different food types. 14 We also need to understand why that loss happens, what the causes are, where the food loss or waste goes, and what solutions could be implemented by manufacturers or distributors to reduce that waste. 15

[00:01:34.280] There are a lot of questions in there. 16

[00:02:11.340] Very easy.

[00:02:12.350] Yeah, exactly. 17

[00:02:12.350] It’s supposed to cover every food type in the United States food market, so it’s a really big question. 18

[00:02:12.350] I sometimes think this is an almost unmeasurable question, but we are challenged just to measure the unmeasurable, to put a number on it, and to boil down a very complicated issue into a couple of key numbers. 19

[00:02:12.350] You guys are really involved in trying to figure out how to do that measurement. 20

[00:02:12.350] I’ll say, Danny, maybe we’ll start. 21 We’ll talk about the denominator, and then we’ll talk about the numerator in this big equation. 22

[00:02:12.350] Danny, maybe we’ll ask you about how you are going about figuring out the total amount of food that is manufactured and distributed in the United States. 23

[00:02:58.840] Absolutely. 24 Just to add to that a little more, we’ve been asked to focus especially on really two food types. 25

[00:02:58.840] One is meat and seafood, and then there’s dairy and eggs. 26

[00:02:58.840] The reason why we’ve been asked to look at these in particular is because these tend to be a bit more expensive and have a much larger impact on climate emissions compared to other food types. 27

[00:02:58.840] So there’s extra focus on that. 28 But then, to answer your question about how we’re approaching the denominator versus the numerator, 29 really, it’s a lot of research. 30 We’re looking for repeatable data sources. 31

[00:02:58.840] And most of what we’re finding is from the USDA, from organizations such as the USDA, NIA, and just other government organizations that are really good at reporting a lot of data on a consistent basis. 32

[00:02:58.840] So it’s been a lot of just trying to wrangle this together, talking with different experts, reaching out to different members of those organizations as well, and trying to understand how to navigate all the different tables they have and all the work they’re reporting. 33

[00:04:07.480] Yes. 34 And how to get those different data sources to accurately, as best we can, represent the manufacturing sector in the U.S., which is a very complicated sector. 35

[00:04:07.480] Gina, you’re focused more on the numerator, I would say, which is the loss and how to measure how much loss there is in every category. 36

[00:04:07.480] How are you going about that? 37 Yes. 38

[00:04:25.840] We’ve been conducting interviews with manufacturers and distributors to try and understand their loss rates, broken down by each stage of their operations. 39

[00:04:25.840] We walk them through from their receiving stage, like inbound goods, and the loss that happens there. 40

[00:04:25.840] Then we go through to the production line for manufacturers. 41 Obviously, it doesn’t apply to distributors. 42

[00:04:25.840] Then the loss that happens in their warehouse, and then their loss rates from their returns. 43

[00:04:25.840] We walk through each stage of those operations, and we also ask them about the causes of loss and waste that happen at each of those stages and the destinations, because we’re going to try and quantify those things as well to understand the largest causes of loss and waste per different food category and how it differs for different companies in different food categories, and then how they’re managing it as well. 44

[00:04:25.840] By asking them about their destinations, whether they donate a lot of food, whether they practice composting or giving it to animal feed, for example, upcycling is becoming popular. 45

[00:04:25.840] Yeah, so it’s a lot of interviewing different companies. 46 We’re also going to be trying to pull from the literature where there are good loss rates as well. 47

[00:06:01.500] Gina, I think you’ve been doing most of the interviews, but not all of them, with the different companies. 48

[00:06:01.500] Have you noticed any interesting trends or patterns across them? 49

[00:06:13.020] For sure, we’ve noticed that the loss rates really depend on the type of product that a company is making. 50

[00:06:13.020] It’s far easier for a company that’s producing a shelf-stable, non-perishable item to rework product or that has a longer shelf life, making it less likely to encounter difficulties managing rotation and expiry dates and things like that. 51

[00:06:13.020] For companies like fresh produce packers, processors, and manufacturers, they’re probably more likely to encounter higher loss rates. 52

[00:06:13.020] Distributors, we’ve seen, often work with really tiny percentages, which is… 53

[00:07:04.500] Yeah, there isn’t a lot of loss. 54

[00:07:04.500] I mean, that’s the thing: I mentioned Refed’s five different sectors earlier. 55

[00:07:04.500] Manufacturing is the sector with the least amount of waste. 56

[00:07:04.500] When you compare it to the other ones they are looking at, that doesn’t mean there’s no waste, but there’s not a ton. 57

[00:07:04.500] Then if you just focus down on distribution, it’s pretty little. 58

[00:07:04.500] But you’re talking about a small percentage, but of a very, very, very large denominator. 59

[00:07:04.500] There’s a lot of food in the United States. 60 With distributors, we found damages as one of the things that a lot of people have cited, just cases dropped, crushed for various reasons. 61

[00:07:04.500] They’ve talked a lot about good warehouse practices and how you take good care of your product in the warehouse and in the trucks and on the transportation side so that it doesn’t get crushed. 62

[00:07:04.500] Then also expiration and the rotation that Gina mentioned—that’s another place that distributors can get tripped up. 63

[00:07:04.500] They’ve talked definitely about the software and the importance of software in tracking inventory to make sure that it gets used appropriately. 64

[00:07:04.500] Yeah, those have been some themes, certainly on the distribution side. 65 Manufacturing is really quite varied, depending on the type. 66

[00:08:24.880] It depends on the size of the manufacturer, too, I think. 67

[00:08:24.880] I’ve been really encouraged to see how many people we’ve spoken to are donating. 68

[00:08:24.880] They often have relationships with local food banks. 69

[00:08:38.280] Yes. 70 I mean, everyone’s very conscientious. 71

[00:08:38.280] No one is wasting food indiscriminately. 72 Everyone is trying not to waste it and to get it to people or maybe animals who could eat it. 73

[00:08:53.960] Something we’ve talked about as well is how often avoiding or reducing food waste aligns with business interests, and we’ve really seen that in the interviews as well. 74

[00:09:08.500] One thing we’ll be doing on the denominator research side is trying to break down different agriculture industries or agricultural supply chains into different phases. 75

[00:09:08.500] We have our farm, primary processors, and secondary processors before we go out to distribution. 76 This has broad categories. 77

[00:09:08.500] Do you, Jean, notice any parallels between different primary processors and different secondary processors, especially when it comes to splitting out maybe some of the causes, some of the common solutions, or the different ones they may be considering? 78

[00:09:08.500] It seems like we have quite a few different causes and solutions, right? 79

[00:09:08.500] Some may be shared, some may be quite different depending on what the specific company is doing, with the specific process they’re working through. 80

[00:09:08.500] But I’m wondering if there are any parallels between the stage these companies are at in the supply chain versus the specific action or the specific product they’re trying to make. 81

[00:10:04.050] We’ve spoken to companies that make shelf-stable bottled goods, for example, from fresh products, from fresh produce. 82

[00:10:04.050] They actually buy everything pre-chopped from suppliers. 83 So you might have thought that they would see a higher loss rate there from processing those raw ingredients. 84

[00:10:04.050] But actually, that occurs higher in the supply chain because they buy everything pre-chopped. 85

[00:10:04.050] So there isn’t a lot of loss that happens in their operations there. 86

[00:10:50.730] The loss is different. 87

[00:10:50.730] Maybe earlier on, there are large amounts of consistent byproduct, whereas later on, it’s maybe more very different things. 88

[00:10:50.730] And maybe there are certain streams of loss that are more suited towards, say, going to animal feed. 89

[00:10:50.730] Or being turned into upcycled back into the human supply chain versus other things that after it’s had more and more processing, it’s maybe harder to recapture it. 90

[00:10:50.730] But we’d have to go back and think about that. 91

[00:11:28.060] Yeah. 92

[00:11:30.640] That will be something hopefully we can answer by the end of this project. 93

[00:11:33.940] Yeah, that’s a good question for us to bear in mind. 94

[00:11:37.540] I know we have quite a few different causes that we’re looking at. 95

[00:11:37.540] Gabriella, you’ve been working on a framework for that. 96 Could you speak a little bit more about it? 97

[00:11:46.880] We have a framework for causes and a framework for solutions. 98 On the solution side, the team did some research. 99

[00:11:46.880] It took dozens and dozens of different solutions that were either from literature that Refed had published, other people had published, or ideas that we had. 100 We dumped them all together, and then we worked through a long process of sorting them and organizing them to get them into about a dozen different categories, which are really aimed at manufacturers and distributors. 101

[00:11:46.880] These are different ways you could approach reducing food loss in your operations, ways you could change your product, the packaging or the product itself, in order to, say, extend the shelf life or avoid edible food going to waste down the line. 102

[00:11:46.880] There are ways you could change your inventory levels so that you better align supply with demand, you make what’s really needed at the right times, at the right places. 103

[00:11:46.880] Ways that you could ensure that the distribution chain has the best quality equipment and keeps things in the best condition. 104

[00:11:46.880] All the way down to the end, when you have product that’s left over or food that cannot be sold through its primary channel, how do you make it available, sell it if you can, donate it if you can’t, and try to keep as much in the human supply chain as possible. 105

[00:13:12.740] In each of those areas, we have different specific ideas that they could play around with or look at. 106

[00:13:12.740] We are going to talk to more and more manufacturers about this and try to see if this resonates with them. 107

[00:13:12.740] But hopefully, it should be a menu of options or tools that Refed could present to manufacturers and distributors and say, “Have you thought about all these different things?” 108

[00:13:12.740] Some of them maybe you’ve thought about, some of them you haven’t, or you do this, but maybe you could do it better. 109

[00:13:12.740] You could tighten it up and use this strategy to drive down waste even more. 110

[00:13:12.740] We’re hoping those resonate with people. 111

[00:13:49.460] What’s the most innovative solution that you’ve come across? 112

[00:13:54.480] There are some cutting-edge packaging things in the material science realm of packaging that’s made out of materials or that has different kinds of compounds that are inserted into the packaging. 113

[00:13:54.480] I think those are maybe some of the more innovative things. 114

[00:13:54.480] Then there are things that are old hat, let’s say they’ve been done, they’re widely done, but they’re very effective. 115

[00:13:54.480] If they could be done better, it would really help. 116 I mean, a classic example there would be refrigeration. 117

[00:13:54.480] Everyone has a cold chain, and we’re pretty good in the United States on that. 118

[00:13:54.480] However, not everyone is fantastic. 119 There’s definitely room for people to improve their buildings, improve their transportation infrastructure, invest more money in better refrigeration, modern equipment, and more sensors and monitors that let you know when the temperature is not holding correctly. 120

[00:13:54.480] We’ve heard that in some of our interviews of people who moved from an old building to a new building and said, “Well, the new refrigeration really helped with the shelf life.” 121

[00:13:54.480] That’s maybe a bit more boring, not cutting edge, but is actually quite helpful. 122

[00:15:03.920] I’m trying to think, have we come across any cool examples of upcycling in our interviews so far? 123

[00:15:03.920] I don’t know if we have, but I know that’s very… 124

[00:15:14.520] Well, the dairy producers talk about what they do with the whey. 125

[00:15:14.520] They turn the whey into whey powder. 126

[00:15:25.160] Yeah, because that’s quite an exciting solution that people are talking about at the moment in terms of the circular economy, trying to take byproduct and make something edible out of it. 127

[00:15:38.860] Yeah, you almost have to engineer the products together so that the byproduct of one becomes the basis of another, and then these things have to be designed together. 128

[00:15:48.540] Yeah, I think the dairy industry is a good example of that with whey. 129

[00:15:48.540] Other byproducts often go to animal feed is what we… 130 Yes, definitely a lot of feed. 131

[00:16:00.440] There’s a lot of animals being fed with manufactured waste. 132 What are some of the biggest challenges? 133

[00:16:00.440] This is a big question. 134 What are some of the biggest challenges in modeling the whole US food system? 135

[00:16:00.440] No small feat, at least the whole US food manufacturing and distribution sector. 136

[00:16:21.920] I think the two biggest challenges, I would say, are, one, finding the right data. 137

[00:16:21.920] Luckily, I think we’ve been fortunate enough that the USDA has been reporting on quite a few different things. 138

[00:16:21.920] Once we understood how to align ourselves against the agricultural supply chains versus, I think, some other categorization, it became much easier to procure the data we needed. 139

[00:16:21.920] Once we had that, what we’re working through right now is trying to figure out if the numbers we have here mean what we think they do. 140 That usually involves going through quite a bit of documentation, sometimes reaching out to the people who may not have written the reports, but are involved in the various agencies and familiar with the work itself. 141

[00:16:21.920] I think those two are probably the biggest challenges, I would say. 142

[00:17:12.420] Yeah. 143

[00:17:12.420] Our strategy here is to say, look, all the food that is manufactured in the United States comes from the agricultural sector or from imports, and that’s what goes into the manufacturing sector. 144

[00:17:12.420] We’re going to measure imports and production in all these different agricultural commodities, and then that’s the volume of food that gets made. 145

[00:17:12.420] Then our challenge is to reflect the complexity of the transformation process that is at the heart of manufacturing, which adds weight and subtracts weight and transforms things from one state into another state and one category into another category. 146

[00:17:12.420] Our model is trying to do that and to identify where that loss is and how much the weight loss is on a national scale. 147

[00:18:02.680] I think the modeling aspect itself isn’t too complex. 148

[00:18:02.680] It’s really just understanding what the values mean, and making sure they’re applied in the right way, even if they may not always be attacking the same envelope with the same numbers or the numbers the same way. 149

[00:18:02.680] And so, trying to stitch all that together in a way that makes sense, that is repeatable and defensible, I think that’s the real challenge. 150

[00:18:26.500] What makes Lid best positioned to tackle this problem? 151

[00:18:33.320] Well, the way I talked to Refed about it last year, when we were discussing this project, was that our clients are manufacturers and distributors, and we’re in touch with the things that make them tick: what are their problems, what are the kinds of solutions they’re investing in, where are they spending their money on digital things like software or physical infrastructure like buildings and equipment? 152 And we could understand the language of manufacturers and distributors and speak to them in a language that resonates. 153

[00:18:33.320] I hope that’s true. 154 The interviews that you’re doing, Gina, are at the center of that strategy, that we’re going to talk to a lot of people who are in this sector and see what they’re doing and figure out how food loss and waste strategies can connect with investment ideas that they already have. 155

[00:18:33.320] We found in our work, based just on our clientele and what they talk about, we do not find that food loss and waste is going to be the primary reason that a company is going to make a big investment in a change in their operation. 156

[00:18:33.320] But it could be a secondary or tertiary reason that really could be compelling. 157

[00:19:50.720] That’s, I think, a lot of what we want to do, especially on the solution side, is figure out how to tie these ideas into investment strategies that companies have to expand capacity, increase productivity, and increase quality. 158

[00:19:50.720] Where is food loss and waste a piece of that puzzle? 159

[00:19:50.720] How do we explain that to the manufacturers and distributors and help them maximize those investments in this regard? 160

[00:19:50.720] We think we have our finger on the pulse of that sector. 161 That’s what we bring to this equation. 162

[00:19:50.720] It’s that insight into the sector. 163

[00:20:29.000] If people want to find out more about this, where do they go? 164

[00:20:33.600] If people want to know, well, our work will eventually be published, I hope, on the Refed website, probably in 2026, I would say. 165

[00:20:33.600] Then we’ll be at the Refed summit in late June. 166 We’ll all be there. 167

[00:20:33.600] We are really excited to talk to lots of people. 168 Our team will spread out and tell everyone about this. 169