FEATURE
Reducing food loss and waste at BLOOM RESTAURANT
Applied research explores ways to identify food waste and how to address it By Nicole Detlor, Director, Food Research and Innovation, and Stephen Thomson, Director, Centre for Supply Chain Innovation, Conestoga College
A CANADIAN FOOD BUSINESS VO L U M E 37, I S S U E 4 • 2 0 2 2 - 2 3
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team of researchers, faculty, and students at Kitchener, ON-based Conestoga College is transforming the campus's Bloom Kitchen restaurant into a climate action living lab. Led by Nicole Detlor, Director of the Conestoga Food Research and Innovation Lab and Stephen Thomson, Director of the Centre for Supply Chain Innovation, the Living Lab team hopes to be able to demonstrate the impact and solutions to greenhouse emissions related to food and packaging choices and food waste. The project
set an ambitious target of reducing waste by 50% and is working with Bloom staff to achieve this goal by early 2023.
Why is reducing food waste important?
A significant amount of food grown for human consumption is not consumed. In fact, according to the 2019 research paper, The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste, nearly 60% of food produced in Canada or approximately 35.5 million tonnes, is wasted annually where 32% or 11.2 million tonnes of that