East Malling Research (EMR) and the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) are working on a project to reduce fresh produce wastage by consumers.
Details of the study have been released to coincide with WRAP’s Love Food Hate Waste consumer campaign. The project links post-harvest researchers at EMR with representatives of the entire supply chain. Other participants include Sainsbury’s, Mack Multiples, Reading Scientific Services and the University of Bristol’s food refrigeration and process engineering research centre.
Results are due in March or April next year, and should provide information on fresh produce storage and wastage in the home, as well as producing simple methods that can be used to prolong freshness. “Consumers have told us that they need better advice on how to store their fruit and vegetables properly to retain freshness,” said Dr Neil Hipps, project manager at EMR. “Working with our project partners and WRAP, we shall provide this information underpinned by scientific experiments.”
The research team has been concentrating on loose produce and gathering information from consumers on how they store fresh fruit and vegetables and why they reject them. “We are assembling an easy-to-understand scale of relative perishability for different types of fruits and vegetables to aid consumers with best storage practice,” said Dr Hipps. “We are also developing and testing simple methods to prolong the freshness of fruit and vegetables in the home and reviewing the advice given by the major retailers to consumers about the storage of fresh fruit and vegetables, and suggesting improvements.”
Hipps’ team is looking at details such as whether consumers store loose fruit in the polybags they load it into for weighing in store and the impact this has.
“This project is unique, I believe,” said Dr Hipps. “It uses the technical skills from the production end of the supply chain and looks at applying them at the consumer end, it also involves the length of the supply chain.”
All data from the project will be provided to WRAP to enable retailers and WRAP itself to advise consumers about best practice to ensure they consume a higher proportion of the fresh produce they purchase.
About 40 per cent of edible food thrown away is fresh produce.
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