It's a good question. We do quite a bit of consumer research. We do quite a bit of work with the entire value chain, from production inputs at the farm level, through to retail and food service. As part of that, we do quite a bit of consumer research. For instance, we had a peach study four years ago now, in conjunction with Loblaw, and we asked consumers how they kept their peaches at home. Anecdotally, we'd estimate 60% of the consumers turned around, almost without hesitation, and asked, “Well, how should we store these peaches at home?” Consumers are often their own worst enemy in keeping products. So I fully agree that consumer education piece is voluntary, but it has to be an informed education versus trying to make people feel guilty.
In the U.K., WRAP has done quite a bit of that. It's also fed into encouraging consumers to eat healthy. It's often the same countries. Australia educates consumers quite hard with their Love Food Hate Waste initiative, which is actually stolen—stolen, I say humorously—from the U.K. program, because they have the same name. You have celebrities who are encouraging changes in consumers. A good way is to actually use celebrities, people that consumers look up to. You don't want the CEO of a supermarket telling someone, “You need to do this but also buy our products”. What you need is someone the consumers connect with to say, “A typical family wastes this amount of product. These are the reasons you waste it. Here is a simple way to extend the shelf life, extend the life of the product in your fridge, or wherever you store it”.
Quite a successful initiative that steadily you see in Canada is Green Seal packaging. Green Seal packaging is fairly simple in most circumstances and can go a long way in reducing food waste in the household.
Another solution is having more direct instructions on packaging of how to handle foods. One of the successful processors that's helped to reduce food waste in the home is Warburtons, a baker. One thing that consumers don’t like to do is waste quite a bit of the life of bread, which of course turns into a science experiment very quickly if you don't keep it in the right way. Warburtons championed or actually led the development of a short loaf. It's a full-sized sliced loaf. You get the full slice out of every loaf, but it's about half the length. That alone has led to reductions of food waste in the home.
You see, it's hard to change consumer attitudes and behaviours. It's a long-time project, a long-time opportunity, but doing things in an incremental way plays into how consumers naturally behave in the home.
The other issue you raised was schools. We have—