Three main drivers for reducing food waste in Lantmännen Unibake
Food manufacturers not only have to care about their products' taste, shape, and size. They must also work hard to minimize the amount of lost or wasted food in all parts of the food chain. At Lantmännen Unibake the ambition is to reduce food waste by 50% in 2030.
Let’s begin with the global challenge: More than 1/3 of all food produced is either lost or wasted in the value chain. 8% is lost on farms, 14% is lost between the farm gate and customer Delivery, and 17% is wasted in retail, households, or food service providers.
Those are facts, according to a report from Champions 12.3 – a coalition of private and public executives dedicated to accelerating progress toward achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal Target 12.3 by 2030.
Three focus areas
At Lantmännen Unibake, Maria Nelving is the Global Sustainability Manager. She explains that Lantmännen Unibake has set a target to halve bakery waste by 2030 from a 2019 base year.
“We have identified three main drivers for reducing food waste across our business. The first one is to limit the number of breakdowns because breakdowns are one of the most interruptive factors in production. No matter what else you do to reduce food waste, a malfunction in the machinery leading to a full stop on the production line takes away the benefits of other ongoing initiatives because you have to discard a large amount of the products that are in progress, and residence time is critical,” Maria Nelving says.
Trying to avoid production breakdowns is not a new focus area for Lantmännen Unibake. Running an efficient bakery from an equipment, organizational, and financial perspective has always been paramount. The relatively new aspect is adding matters of sustainability to the equation.
“For instance, we now factor the total cost of waste every month, including lost capacity and output, making it a topic that all functional areas need to be aware of and take ownership of.”
Investigating the product specifications
The second driver for reducing food waste in Lantmännen Unibake is engaging in deeper dialogues with customers about the specs that are expected to be delivered on products.
“Every time we produce a product for our customers, there are multiple parameters to live up to. For instance, regarding height and width, but it can also be related to bake coloring, slope, and the number of seeds on top. This is normal. However, as quality production equipment becomes more modern, waste can increase. Why is that, you might wonder? As a camera is more sensitive and quicker than the human eye, we waste perfectly edible and good products based on, for example, one seed too little. So, is the specification doing its real job or just requesting perfection? We are investigating and discussing these topics with customers to ensure we keep the customer promise while not throwing away tons of waste,” Maria Nelving explains.
Decomplexifying the portfolio
The third driver on Lantmännen Unibake’s food waste agenda concerns complexity management and smoother transitions between products on the production line.
“We have a large product portfolio. If you take that portfolio and break it into product characteristics like the recipe and size of a burger bun, you will find a lot of similarities and synergies between products – we call it product families,” Maria Nelving says.
“Looking ahead, firstly, we will continue to decomplexify our product portfolio, optimizing our production with less complicated and wasteful changeovers. Secondly, by ensuring that we create new products that better fit into our product families, we can produce more cost-efficiently with less waste, creating a more sustainable food production while offering flexibility to innovate.
Lead by example
When Maria Nelving is asked how Lantmännen Unibake will reach its ambitious target of reducing food waste by 50% in 2030, she doesn’t have a simple answer. The reality is too faceted.
“We are on a journey of modernizing our equipment at our bakeries and have many local initiatives to reduce waste, and we still have quite many product challenges that make our food waste journey challenging on an overall level. However, I’m optimistic that we will continue to see our bakeries being able to cut down significantly on food waste further and thereby lead by example,” Maria Nelving ends.
