Agriculture committee  It's the way we position ourselves.

Agriculture committee  I think that's double-edged. It's partly how do we educate businesses not to focus on that, and also how do we educate consumers not to do it. It's a hard nut to crack. All that comes down to is that we need to make a business case for this. We have very clever retailers.

Agriculture committee  It's not easy. One of the ways is to encourage consumers to take notice of how much they waste and translate that to money. Since I and my family have been involved in the food waste topic for the last three or four years we've changed our habits, not because we're environmental

Agriculture committee  It's both. We reach out to companies we think we can help, and companies come to us. We have a long-standing relationship with organizations, both private and public businesses, and I value our relationship with them greatly. There are a lot of businesses trying to do great thing

Agriculture committee  From the U.K. perspective, Peter Whitehead would be the best person to answer this. I will answer it as a third party and from what I've seen around the world. It's primarily from an economic and environmental perspective. The sums are there. There is a growing body of evidence

Agriculture committee  Part of it is about better planning and encouraging industry to move away from discounting so much. We are a heavy discounter, and heavy discounting encourages consumers to shop differently. It also encourages businesses to behave differently. So we need a greater and more coordi

Agriculture committee  Primarily, yes.

Agriculture committee  I haven't consciously thought this out, so I will do this from memory. One issue would be lack of coordination. There is a lack of coordination along the value chain. Compared with other industries, the agrifood industry has lots of poor organization for various reasons, one of

Agriculture committee  It depends on the product type. In perishable fruits in particular, you will tend to get a higher level of waste than you will in products that aren't quite so time- and temperature-sensitive. I've seen studies where—

Agriculture committee  Commonly, or reasonably commonly, it's 20% to 30%. I've seen it as high as 75%.

Agriculture committee  That's primarily the term of waste from a lean-thinking perspective, which is optimizing the use of all resources. For instance, we know there's a difference in the volume of different types of barley fed to certain breeds of animals, such as certain breeds of cattle, so you're c

Agriculture committee  Yes. One of the projects was, again, with Loblaw and peaches. It was focused on looking at the present situation and what was occurring. This was in Ontario. We've identified that in some years in Ontario a significant percentage of peaches grown in Ontario will actually go to

Agriculture committee  I don't know about that particular project, although I know of some projects such as Food Banks Canada, of course. Also, Loblaw and Target have an initiative that has been operating for over a year now. A number of retailers work with the food banks. One of our challenges is th

Agriculture committee  Yes, there is a need for that to be done. There needs to be effective, objective measurement, not just asking people how much waste they think occurs. Invariably, what we think and what actually happens is different. We see that regularly in our projects. There is a report that

Agriculture committee  Thank you. We held the Cut Waste, Grow Profit forum two years in a row. We are currently working through the process of whether or not to hold it again this year, for a third year, given the number of other initiatives that have since sprung up. The forum had two purposes. One