Food waste in manufacturing comes from various sources, each offering different challenges and concerns. These issues are unique, given the impact that food products have on health and safety for both workers and consumers.
The first step in controlling and eliminating food waste is determining where and how you generate it. Once you know that, you can improve operational performance in food safety and waste management through your EHS department.
Main Sources of Waste
Waste occurs in three main stages of the food manufacturing process: production, packaging, and distribution. Each stage offers unique challenges with temperature monitoring, inventory management, quality control, and resource optimization.
Production:
- Loss of edible materials during the processing of raw materials (cutting, peeling, trimming, etc.)
- Spoilage of raw ingredients due to improper storage and temperature monitoring
- Overproduction of food items
Packaging:
- Issues with the integrity of the packaging that make the product unsafe for consumers
- Over or underfilled packages that fail quality assurance standards
Distribution:
- Health and safety recalls
- Poor inventory management that causes products to get spoiled or lost in transit
- Product damage (rips, tears, smashed items, etc.)
- Product returns from distributors or customers
- Understanding where food waste occurs within your process is only the first step in preventing it. The next step is to find and address the factors that directly affect the safety and quality of your products.
Factors that Contribute to Waste Generation
These are the top five factors that contribute to food waste in manufacturing. If you want to reduce your company’s waste output, start by tackling these areas of performance.
Production Planning
One of the primary upstream sources of food waste in manufacturing is overproduction. It’s usually the result of poor demand forecasting and production planning. The more accurately you can forecast production volume, the less raw materials and finished goods you’ll waste during this stage of the manufacturing process.
Employee Errors
Workers play a significant role in reducing food waste. This is especially true of processes that involve cutting and trimming raw materials where a heavy hand can create unnecessary scrap.
That’s why everyone who processes food products in your facility should undergo waste reduction training. During this training, you can teach workers strategies to avoid scrap and best practices for managing waste.
Process Efficiency and Standardization
Process efficiency (or lack thereof) can greatly impact waste when perishable goods are involved. If you don’t keep products on a strict schedule and store them properly in the meantime, your risk of losing them increases significantly.
Another factor to consider is whether you have a standard process in place. Standardization lowers risk by eliminating unexpected changes to temperature control, storage, handling, packaging, and more. The less variation, the less likely you’ll run into problems.
Quality Control
A strict quality control process is essential for reducing waste in food manufacturing. Poor quality control exposes workers and customers to all sorts of risks. Checks should be conducted at each stage throughout the product’s journey—from production to delivery. The process should also include an emergency response protocol for product recalls.
Communication
Solid communication is the bedrock of all corporate risk management. Whether it’s in the quality of your employee training, contractor management, vendor relationships, or PR strategy, communication affects performance outcomes in all areas. The better your company communicates internally on food waste, the faster you can reduce it.
To do that, you’ll need to work with distributors to collect data on downstream waste (for better production forecasting). You’ll need to audit employee food waste to develop better training programs. And you’ll need to carefully track returns and recalls to learn how much finished goods go to waste and what you can do to stop it.
The Role of Health and Safety
Continuous improvement and quality control are the two departments that tend to manage and reduce food waste in manufacturing. This makes sense, given that process changes are necessary to achieve a different outcome.
Since food waste directly correlates to food safety issues, don’t discount the role that your EHS department can play.
EHS specialists are skilled at assessing risk and finding ways to eliminate it. Through routine audits, inspections, employee engagements, and assessments of health and safety protocols onsite, your EHS team can greatly contribute to waste reduction strategies.
EHS Initiatives to Reduce Food Waste
Involving the EHS department in process improvements is a great way to reduce food waste and improve health and safety outcomes simultaneously. Start by considering the source of the waste. Here are some questions to ask:
- Do employees make any effort to reduce waste while processing raw materials?
- How do we currently measure and monitor waste at each step in the process?
- What health and safety measures do we have that could also apply to waste?
- What is the environmental impact of the food waste we’re generating?
- What is our current process for auditing waste generation and disposal?
A great way to combine food waste, health, and safety goals into one is by adding new line items to the checklists you use for audits and inspections. The purpose of these EHS activities is not only to verify compliance but also to find improvement opportunities throughout the facility.
Take for example behavioral safety observations. Imagine you’re watching an employee trimming meat with a dull knife. Of course, this is an EHS concern since the dull knife is a safety hazard to the employee. But it’s also a source of waste because the worker can’t effectively trim the meat without creating unnecessary scrap.
Another example is temperature management. The more effectively you maintain and control the temperature of food products, the less likely they are to spoil, which avoids both waste and foodborne illness risks.
Like any area of operational performance, reducing food waste in manufacturing requires a data-driven approach. Once you know how much waste you’re generating and where it’s coming from, you can find reduction strategies. As you implement corrective actions, use your EHS software or reporting system to document everything. That way, you can monitor the effectiveness of your approach over time and make lasting changes to your process.
