Wasteful Figures The UK is challenging a European Commission goal of halving food waste by 2020, which is claimed to be 89 million tons annually. Part of the British query is why this is a significant issue. A WPI curiosity is why the European waste number is so much larger than the estimate for their American counterparts. The latest U.S. estimate is 1.8 million tons wasted in processing and retail (excluding waste in home kitchens). Moreover, U.S. industry says that 73 percent of its waste goes to animal feed and 20 percent to fertilizer use. In the end, it is all about economics. There is less waste where food is precious and consequently costs take a larger share of income. That is hardly a desirable policy solution. Precious Meat...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.