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welcome everyone to auri connects webinar wednesday part of auri connect's monthly online series featuring updates on the work that auri is doing to foster long-term economic benefit for minnesota through value-added agricultural products i'm dan skogen the auri director of government operations and your host to webinar wednesdays the auri connects program is hosted by the agricultural utilization research institute in minnesota this program aims to actively engage all participants in the food and egg industry to improve competitiveness of producers businesses and entrepreneurs through ongoing purposeful connection of resources and partners along the value chain and increase knowledge of opportunities technologies and trends remember that this event is being recorded and archived and can be found at euri.org today we'll be hearing from food loss expert dr claire sand packaging technology and research as we look for ways to reduce food loss and waste of minnesota food processing while exploring new uses for the remaining food waste remember you are and will remain muted but we will be answering your questions at the end of our presentation so send us your questions through the q a portal before we hear from dr sam today jason robinson auri's business development director of food will offer some perspective on how we got to this point in the food loss and waste discussion here in minnesota jason thanks so much dan this project work that dan has just referenced was funded through auris competitive ag innovation partnership program which is meant to catalyze innovation generate new ideas and support partnerships in value-added agriculture every year auri puts forth a number of challenges to solicit work in areas that we consider dormant or that may be needing additional research the project dr sand will discuss was built around a mapping and analysis of new value chain opportunities in minnesota food loss and waste claire will dive into significantly more detail but i wanted to take a moment to highlight the two key takeaways that we as an organization discovered from this work the first is that since its inception in 1989 auri has been working in the food loss and waste space through our co-products focus area in essence we just haven't been using this terminology the aha moment for auri was when we really and truly recognized the impact of our 30 years in existence in the flw space the second key takeaway was that opportunities to reduce food lace food loss and waste exist up and down the value chain but they need a sponsor to bring them to fruition auri through this work has a well-defined role in the food loss and waste space and can support commercialization of these ideas but we can't draw drive those ideas to commercialization that's where we need a sponsor to come in and provide the support so with that i will turn it over to dr claire sand to walk us through the research project that she conducted on our behalf for the remainder of this webinar thank you thanks jason and boy i really like you like how you set the stage there and uh this project really focused on building the business case for food loss and waste and really focusing on what's needed for stakeholder engagement so thanks for your time and thank you to auri for funding this project it was a part of an ai aip project as jason mentioned and it's been fun and we love to do this type of thing so this is a little bit about me basically i've been passionate about food loss and waste since the mid 1980s and i focus on food loss and waste prevention via packaging as well as food science and processing this is uh some of the projects that my company works on this is our project team and boy they were amazing uh the as you can see it was a blend of auri expertise as well as ptr so in particular with auri it was alan and ashley jason and michael in alphabetical order here not an order of importance so this is the agenda that we're going to be covering today i'm going to talk through food loss and waste as a concept and why it was so important to auri with this aip aip project a project summary some at a glance results when i go through these at a glance results it's important to realize that boy there was a lot of information spreadsheet upon spreadsheet and we've condensed it here for you so if you do have any questions please reach out to auri and though i'm just going to wrap up by the potential to reduce food loss and waste in minnesota so let's talk through um why why food loss and waste and why is it why is it even relevant well we lose about 30 to 40 percent of what's produced uh it's either wasted or it's lost and we'll talk about the difference in a few minutes but it has a tremendous dollar impact for stakeholders such as brands and like big brands in minnesota's but also for farms consumers and retailers and we'll talk about the value chain and how the value chain can be used to really identify stakeholders but also to build the business case and it is very different from one project to another so one of the big takeaways of this is food loss and waste is avoidable and it also relates to food access which many of you may be in the policy area and that relates to a lot of food access issues so when we talk through solutions for food waste uh it's time we we need to engage uh or think about where food loss is and where food waste is so if we look at the bottom here we basically have agricultural production so if you think of that as farms and harvesting processing which may be likely done it could be ingredient processing but it could be very well done by a brand who combines a bunch of different ingredients and there's food loss there and then in the food waste realm we think of that as distribution and retail restaurants catering and that could include fast food restaurants and then consumption so that's consumers and the supply chain solutions are actually different as you may think to decrease food waste and loss and each solution actually needs its own business case because we can we can motivate uh differently within the entire value chain sorry i'm trouble advancing slides here uh this is the epa diagram and this diagram is something something that we focus a lot on in the food loss and waste spectrum and we're going to take just a minute and explore what what this is in the auri context and what it means for us who are concerned about food loss and waste so at the top we have more opportunities and more environmental impact when we reduce food loss and waste and that's source reduction you can also think of this as food waste prevention so auri thinks about this in the context of co-products for human consumption and aori focuses a lot on farms and processors so that's the aoi component in terms of food waste prevention as we move down we also see a lot of food waste diversion and so we're lowering the the the difference we can make and in terms of the lowering the the difference in the environmental impact of food waste as we go down the pyramid so by preventing food waste at the top we can make more of an environmental impact as we go down to the bottom we make less of one so by diverting food weights into animal feed as opposed to preventing food waste for human consumption it's farther on down the the pyramid but it's still extremely relevant pt or auri uses this for co-products for animal consumption and we did identify some some solutions in that area the other thing that aui works on in the space is industrial uses so aui does work in the bioderived energy phase and we did identify some waste to energy solutions this is some examples of some projects and recently there was some quotations and where ari basically steps in to add value to prevent food processing waste from occurring so these are some of the recent projects that aori has worked on in the co-products realm picking up on the thoughts that jason shared that aura has been working in this space and under go co-products for animal consumption but also in the waste to energy space this project really focused on um identifying food loss and waste solutions for selected products in minnesota and we partnered with aor auri to assist in developing the focus for auri and developing a path forward on how they could really begin to expand and begin to understand their context within reducing food loss and waste in minnesota so we explored the traditional role of source reduction animal feed and industrial reuses and then also explored expanding that for auri let's talk through the projects in more detail now basically there was three steps the first step was we determined what products to explore and we did this using a rubric that we developed with the auri team as you can imagine there's oh boy a lot of products in minnesota to choose from and so what we wanted to do was show a healthy variety of projects products but we also wanted to show differences in the value chain so the products are very different and we'll talk through some of them but then we also wanted to make sure they had significant production in minnesota for example we didn't do pineapples because we tend not to grow pineapples in minnesota unless it's in a greenhouse the second thing we did was quantify food loss and waste throughout the value chain to derive co-product packaging processing and system solutions so we identified and then quantified in terms of the dollar impact of about 280 viable process product and packaging and systems solutions in the value chain and boy this resulted in a lot of a lot of pounds for just seven minnesota products then what we did as a team is we said well let's talk through all of these solutions and we didn't do it all in one day because that would have been a major conversation so we did it in a couple days and 12 of the 287 solutions were explored for a deep dive by the team to really assess feasibility and refine solutions so we'll be talking through those solutions with you today so here is the net that jason has highlighted a little bit this is a little bit more detail there is a lot of opportunity and auri does have the potential to expand food loss and waste but need a sponsor to commercial commercialize it and the next steps with many of these are really to get people who are and who want to engage with it could be a new business entrepreneur or it could be an existing stakeholder so let's go through a summary of this so we're going to uh go through some of the products in in a minute but the first thing that people look at with this and they say oh boy look at look at all these these colors here but we're going to be talking about the seven products listed on the bottom here from canned corn to unsellable milk at retail we'll talk through those in detail so basically we have a couple different sections uh there are four different sections really we'll talk about cider and then we'll talk about canned corn and then we'll talk about unsealable milk at retail and cheese at retail and then we'll talk about small small cheese processors but as you can see with these the amount of food waste is very different within each area for example in cider we have a lot of food waste really happening at the farm so that's apples right we also when you look at canned kidney beans well boy we only have about nine or ten percent food waste occurring at uh at the farms and most of the food waste actually occurs in the hands of the consumer for canned kidney beans not true for cider the first thing that people look at when they look at this is they get all excited what are these consumers doing this is the the food waste that we found when we looked at these products excluded in here though are unsalable milk and cheese and sugar beets because that would skew the results because we just looked at uh retail with unsealable milk and cheese and with sugar beets we just looked at the farm so those are excluded but in general we do see high amounts of food waste associated with consumers and when we take a step back and we think about that and we think about wanting to achieve a more sustainable food system well that product has already gone through distribution it's been grown by farms it's been manufactured and the consumers have paid for it and then it goes to waste so that's a real tragedy so let's go through the products in more detail this is uh an eye chart in my experience every presentation needs needs one these are the details we're going to be talking through when i talk about food loss and waste numbers we base that on minnesota of course so we use the minnesota department of agriculture and usda data on the actual volumes of products grown in minnesota and then we juxtaposed that with the refed food loss and waste values which were also based on epa data and so you can see in this chart here varying amounts of food loss and waste and we'll talk through some of those and then we also see in the third column on the right uh we see the number of solutions so we did one deep dive out of 67 solutions for canned corn we did two deep dives for canned candy beans per wine no deed dives but 81 solutions were identified let's talk through cider i'm going to spend a little bit more time talking through cider because the rest of the charts are really follow the same type of format so what you see here in the upper right is the epa hierarchy i love that so much easier to so easy so easy to explain so we have most preferred on the top and least preferred on the bottom but all reduce food loss and waste so all are good so right here in cider we're going to be focusing on one solution which is vision sorting of bad apples so you can see that in the upper left and so that is actually preventing food waste so that's a really good one in terms of environmental impact and so we'll talk about that one in more detail for each one of these we have different categories we have different um uh things explained like opportunity size alignment feasibility in the lower right hand corner and the categories are arranged in the same order the interesting thing to think about with apples and with cider in general is we started with 42 solutions and we narrowed it down to this one which is vision sorting of bad apples and the next one related to petulant and um with apples what's really interesting about them is in some seasons uh let's say for some years for example 2012 we had unusually warm weather in march followed by a hard frost in april killed a lot of apple blossoms a few months later thousands of apples were left on the trees they were damaged from summertime hail drought and it was a loss of about 40 percent of the apple crop not a great year right for the apple uh for the apple business and some of the solutions then need to be resilient because one year we could have really good apple season but then the next year it wouldn't be that good sorry i need to go back here so let's talk about this in in more detail so the opportunity here is 20 to 30 percent loss of loss of or addressing 20 to 30 percent of food waste for apples we can implement vision systems to rapidly sort apples to control mold spreading and petulant development which we'll talk about in a second and we can link this with the patulin removal patulin is actually a toxin and apples with petulant are not consumable however they can be isolated with vision sorting and used in apple cider and alcoholic product alcoholic production since fermentation actually destroys the petulant what's interesting is the vision sorting actually reduces a lot of food waste 20 to 30 percent is is very high and one of the reasons is that the the old adage of one bad apple spoils the whole bunch is actually true because patulin will spread from one apple to another so if we vision sort out the bad apples then they can't actually spread to the other apples the graphs on the lower right here are really in a relative scale so when we look at feasibility it's easy to achieve vision sorting has been used in the food industry for a long time and it has been applied to apples but applying it in a higher amount is actually what's needed here to reduce food waste uh the second area is aur alignment auri you know this this is uh within their capabilities uh they wouldn't necessarily develop the division syst ms they would help farmers apply those vision systems the opportunity size is also medium size and then we can also see the stakeholders and funding sources when we look at patulent removal which we talked a little bit about it's also source reduction somewhere between the the farm and the manufacturing because it's you know the petulant removal is actually facilitated by processing the same type of format on this this slide again massive amounts of food waste reduction the reason that feasibility is low in the lower right hand corner is that it's really not something that auri would be able to do they're not in the alcoholic cider production area and there's also complications to implement petulant removal fermentation technology there's food processing management there's hassip or hazard analysis critical control points that would have to be implemented and we would really need to make sure that there's a separate stream that is if we are going to have apples containing petulant going to be made into cider we would need to ensure that apples that cytosider for fermentation we would need to make sure that that stream does not contaminate another stream that is not slated for fermentation so feasibility uh is low for those reasons uh we're gonna shift then a little bit uh into one that's uh quite different and this is canned kidney beans and then we're going to talk about canned cans in general after that so when we look at food loss and waste product prevention we see where the opportunity lies in this specific case and this one is quite interesting because food loss and waste prevention can be done by making co-products from broken and uncannible solids and from waste water screening and ultra filtration the interesting thing about this in terms of the business case is it's built by reducing the bod or the um the aerobic bacteria within the water and so bod is a measure of the amount of oxygen required to remove waste and organic matter from water it's in the in the process of decomposition by an aerobic bacteria bod is actually used and so often wastewater treatment plants use this index as a degree of organic quote unquote pollution in the water so right now disposal of bod and water that's quote unquote polluted from food manufacturing is very expensive and has a big environmental impact so by combining and straining and screening and using ultrafiltration of that bod we can actually just have water that's more clean released less of environmental impact and less costs so this disposal savings was not captured within these food loss and waste values but can be used to build the business case and we need an economic analysis as noted here in the next steps to uh really assess the viability of wastewater disposal the bod load the tipping fees or the disposal fees and the amount of solids and wastewater and the bean pieces available the graph in the lower right shows high alignment with auri and a higher degree of opportunity uh we're still in canned food and so this is canned food in general uh this is an example of how with these with this presentation we want to to explore different areas of the value chain so if you reflect back on that oh boy look at that big high number with consumer food waste we see a similar uh profile here with canned foods and so this particular solution was to specifically address consumer-derived food waste and it was a resealable lid for this so um it's not it's way up the value chain a resealable kind of made in minnesota reusable lid for cans it's not uncommon it's out there in industry so feasibility is very high those of you with who have cats may have seen this for cat food and it's used as a promotion from some of the brands but it's really very low alignment with auri auri does have expertise with packaging but not really in this realm the opportunity size is very high but this is an example of it's not really within auris core competency but if there was a stakeholder interested they would be able to engage and the opportunity is extremely high because we do have a lot of canned foods in minnesota so we're going to shift gears again so we've talked about cider and we've talked about canning and now we're going to deal with unsalable milk and cheese at retail so i group both of these together because the solutions are really very similar so retail is an area that we haven't really discussed so far in this presentation what's really interesting about retail food waste is that it's quite sad right because we often throw out the package as well as the product there is separation technology which we'll talk about but uh we really when we think about the world and what we're trying to do with decreasing plastic or packaging waste uh and food waste the two are really combined here and that's why it's quite sad we'll be talking through three options the first chopped option deals with in code cheese or milk used as a food so it's higher up on the food loss waste pyramid the epa pyramid and so it's food waste prevention the second option we'll talk about is out of code cheese or milk and we'll be separating the food from the package and disposing or recycling of the packaging and using the cheese as animal feed as opposed to option one where we would use it as human feed or human human food so it's this this second option is diversion and we'll talk through these in a second the third option then is uh is really waste to energy and this is something that aori does have a core competency and experience and well and we'll talk through that what's really interesting about these is they all have very different business cases because they are they deal with different stakeholders throughout the value chain so let's talk through option number one uh this is the highest business case and well you know it's kind of the most work too so basically it's human food products recovered that are not past code right so the they're still within their shelf life and this includes fat recapture cottage cheese paneer and milk powder co-products that can be made we can use existing equipment to remove the milk in this case from the recyclable or non-recyclable packaging so the packaging could be disposed of separately it could be waste to energy it could be landfill could be compostable but the key then is to remove the milk from the package in an economically desirable way the next steps on this is really an economic analysis of the viability of capturing out of code unsealable milk or sorry encode unsellable milk for human food ingredients we also need to assess the existing machinery and make sure it's adapted for fisma and hassep and general food safety and aui co-products expertise can be used and there's a lot of funding available with aip and rcdg the next section here is to produce animal feed so we're going down on the epa hierarchy this is very high aori alignment it's very similar to the previous example previous solution we talked about the only difference is that this is out of code it's unsellable milk because it is out of code the interesting thing is here is that the animal feed industry is highly involved obviously as a key stakeholder and we also have key stakeholders in terms of equipment developers and engineering firms to separate out that packaging from the from the product and likewise next steps same type of thing related to food safety so again high opportunity size high aori alignment and high feasibility uh this addresses about five percent food loss and waste so when you think about um the other food loss and waste percentages we talked about it's important to keep that in perspective the last section that we can talk about and all three of these options the human co-products animal feed co-products and waste energy are also for unsellable cheese with very similar numbers waste energy of packaging and milk boy that sounds kind of strange but actually milk is packaged in high density polyethylene jugs and plastic has a lot of btus in it and so if it is not economically divi desirable or possible or if those co-products cannot be actually developed because of fisma or hassob constraints we can actually gain energy from the combined packaging in milk and auri does have core competency in this area bio bioreactors would be the key stakeholder holders as would land fillers and municipal solid waste handlers who want to decrease the amount of food that goes into landfills so those are the three examples with unsalable milk and cheese the third example or the the last area that we want to go through as an example of the value chain and and the areas we addressed is small scale dairies and boy that's pretty interesting um we do have a lot of differences in the value chain for small-scale dairies versus large-scale dairies large-scale dairies have set ups for handling a lot of a lot of their co-products and things for example whey protein isolates are used heavily in the industry from byproducts of cheese production or whey but small scale dairies may not have the volume of whey to facilitate sending it to a large whey protein isolate manufacturer or it would not be economically desirable better to have a small scale value chain for these small scale dairies so we explored this and there's a the interesting analogy or thing to think about is we do have a lot of small scale value chains within the syst within the food processing system that really need their own value chain separate from the large scale systems that we have highly developed so production of human way-based co-products is an obvious one we did capture some research that was done in spain on this addressing these specific issues when we look at all the different co-products under there when we look at the details of the solutions we can see them all and uh some of them i guess i haven't had lunch yet and some of them sound something pretty good but the auri co-products expertise can really help out here it's a high alignment with auri high opportunity size just simply because we produce so much way when we make cheese the long timeline is associated with that is because building this infrastructure and really identifying the key equipment and engineering firms to to refine this is needed and that just simply takes time so i wanted to talk just a bit because i wanted to make sure i conveyed that there's a lot of potential to reduce food loss and waste in minnesota we just addressed seven products throughout the value chain and really expo explored where uh where we can have solutions that are auri adaptable like with co-products and waste to energy and ones that don't really align with aori's core competencies such as lids on cans and so it's not doom and gloom the prospects are very high for minnesota aur is an excellent partner and there are also other initiatives for example the recent embold initiatives that relate to reducing food waste and increasing shelf life i'm not saying that we won't have food waste in the future when i got into the food waste realm i was fascinated that we lost 30 percent of the food that we produced on the planet and well that number is about the same there was a recent eu study uh done on that uh however where we lose it and how we lose it and the environmental impact of its loss is actually changing so there's a lot of opportunity to reduce food waste in the future there's also a lot of opportunity to combine that with food access for example there's a lot of innovations going on with designing food and packaging to meet specific needs such as the needs of food shelves or the needs of rural versus urban environments and again we were talking about small small value chains small scale value chains versus large scale values value chains so i do believe that a more sustainable food system is really on its way the future is bright we have food really excellent food policy taking shape and excellent food science and packaging science that we can capture so please reach out to auri and i'd like to thank the auri aip program for supporting this work and to the aari team again in alphabetical order al ashley jason and michael and the ptr team of zenet and katie thank you for your time thank you dr sand and if you'll hang around we'll see if there are some questions if you are in your zoom room you should have access to a q a portal or tab and you can ask questions there dr sand i think in one of your early slides there was 280 some uh products growing processed in minnesota you picked six or seven how did you how did you come to those six or seven was there a method there that that you guys used to to get there that's a good question uh we did have a very extensive rubric i think on the rubric there were at least 15 or so different rows with the with and and columns and things like that too to analyze it some of it was based on wanting to do variety right so we had apples and then we also had milk we had sugar beets in there just peripherally but you know some of some products were screened out such as sugar beets because frankly the sugar beets industry has done such a great job at reducing food waste so some of them we screened out because the opportunity wasn't really there the food loss and waste was quite low but we also wanted to explore products with a healthy variety so we did beans and then we did apples and and corn and milk and cheese and things like that and then we also wanted to explore when we did the deep dive we wanted to explore different areas of the value chain to give auri a pretty healthy perspective of how they can relate to different stakeholders in the value chain dr sand are you aware of the upcycling food movement or more specifically the upcycled food association oh great people yeah love the name right i mean what you know is fantastic and uh you know because i i one of the things that when i saw that name uh i said boy people know exactly what that is so they did a great job with the name selection uh yes i am um not involved with it specifically it's my understanding they're working on the definition of upcycled food which i think is extremely important uh there's a lot of noise there's a lot of interest in really decreasing food waste but we all need to say what is it right and then we can and and agree on the definition of what is upcycling uh and what is an actual upcycled food for example in the epa pyramid upcycled foods for human consumption at the top as we move down the pyramid are upcycled foods for animal consumption are they upcycled foods i'm not sure and then we also have diversion in there which is um as we have as we've talked about less of uh less environmentally friendly but if we can't up cycle the food either to human or to animal feed then those are excellent solutions to reduce the environmental impact of food waste and it looks like we had a follow-up there that the definition is complete they're now working on a certification apparently another question says has any thought has any thought to agricultural over production be been evaluated uh that was not within the scope of this project but that is interesting um that yeah i i have worked on that in the past but that was not within the scope of this project that is a fascinating area uh because it also involves food policy as as many of you in agriculture know and i know you talked some on the milk and cheese that was unsalable at retail is anyone right now separating that packaging and product uh i don't know specifically for milk and cheese but there was um in my packaging news i don't remember the actual source but in western michigan they are dividing up they are they are opening up packet they have machinery that's installed to actually open up packaging and separate it out and that is done at a material recycling facility or like a murph and the express purpose is to decrease the amount of food waste that goes into landfills and and i believe they're actually diverting that to more of a waste to energy uh or composting uh that that food waste and then the packaging is disposed of in a landfill or is recycled but yes it's um i'm sure there are other examples throughout the united states and throughout the world but that one is a recent uh example also um dr sand can you elaborate on hurdles that reduce the ease of upcycling is it packaging transportation logistics can you put your finger on it um to increase the ease of upcycling elaborate on hurdles that reduce the ease of upcycling i'm going to go ahead and say it's increased the ease which i hope is you know the intent um that's a that's a good question uh i think one of the things which is really hard to get our heads around and and uh the aori team brought it up uh specifically related to the apples is that uh boy we can't always count on losing 40 of our apples every year nor do we want to right so when you if you want a co-product that's reliable which the food industry needs that they can source that's consistent and and all those other types of things because that's how our food system is set up as for consistency not for agility that's really hard if you're if you're relying on food waste from farms to always be 40 because again we don't want that and we can't rely on the weather to always be bad right so that's that's hard and so for that reason we need to build in agility uh within our food systems and we did see that when when companies uh companies some companies now depending on the price uh of things they will switch from high fructose corn syrup to sugar uh formulas based on prices and so we do have that ability to have agility but i think if we want to use upcycled foods then we need to build that agility into the system and they they said yes you understood the question correctly even if it wasn't worded uh quite correctly very good a couple more here before we turn you lose today could you elaborate on waste to energy as an flw mitigation strategy especially through anaerobic digestion yeah um that um again is at the bottom of the pyramid or right above landfill right so not a great option uh there's a there's a lot of people in the packaging industry specifically working on this and that specific example of waste to energy was actually disposing of the packaging at the same time as the product so it was not actually separating it out uh but that that could very well be done and then you could get into you know digestion of you know the the food itself um that example was provided because uh that would be used if it was not economically desirable to separate the product in the package so basically we're talking about getting the btus um out of out of it waste to energy incineration as opposed to what most people would think of as uh composting and you showed a couple of slides where uh consumers uh were uh part of the a big part of the food waste did you were able to come to some conclusions on why that was why are we losing so much at the consumer level yeah that that number has unfortunately stayed the same and for for quite a while quite well since since the 1980s um uh that that's a very hard question to answer i i wish i could get into the minds of consumers one of the reasons though is i i think we need to take a step back and think about how we package for consumers we talk a lot about at least in packaging we talk a lot about consumer convenience portability shareability open ability all that type of stuff but we don't talk uh very much about well capability you know like let's make sure that thing lasts a long let's make sure that product whatever it is lasts a long time once the consumer opens the package or um a major initiative with uh you know save food and the national resource defense council with uh you know the the changing and the dating systems uh about so consumers don't know the difference between use buy sell buy uh best diffused buy you know things like that so clearing up those dating systems i think will really help a lot and it's my understanding that industry is voluntarily moving uh in the right direction there so that should help quite a bit so one of the big causes is uh the dating the open the open it's called open dating of foods so that will hopefully change but i also think we need to look at uh really cool technologies that we can use to extend the shelf life of foods once the package has been opened for example can lids well that's a simple solution but there are other really high-tech ones that are out there well and maybe piggybacking on that we have a question here that asks if there was any alternative packaging considered during the study like maybe hemp to help reduce flw oh that's interesting um that's interesting because when we back up and we think of what we're trying to achieve why we by reducing food waste we want to achieve a more sustainable food system which also involves more sustainable packaging so less food waste with more sustainable packaging would be the ideal hemp you know is is bioderived just like uh trees are bioderived and some bioplastics or bio biodirect plastics are bioderived and so the use of hemp wouldn't necessarily decrease food waste right but we may be able to use a better barrier technology which may include include hemp or a layer of hemp to protect the food and then we would have less food waste or in the example that somebody just brought up with the waste to energy incineration if the hemp was used to package uh the say cheese or milk i'm not sure what a hemp based plastic jug would look like but that could be interesting um and then uh we could actually perhaps put that in a bio you know digester and and things like that that based on the technology that's available now would be a stretch to to package milk that way and things like that but we have to be very careful though when we try to reduce packaging waste and reduce food waste at the same time both are really distinct and in some cases we can reduce packaging waste but oh boy and food waste goes up really high sometimes we can reduce food waste but then we have to use a lot more packaging so it's a balance in in there it does appear there are a lot of opportunities and if you'll forgive the pun uh what's some of the low hanging fruit or what are some of the next steps that you envision coming out of this study one of the big next steps is shareholders getting interest or sorry stakeholders getting interested and realizing that there are opportunities somebody famous i'm actually not sure who it was said there's a lot of money in waste you know and so uh these are these could be entrepreneurs that are willing to uh you know for example develop machinery that can separate plastic jugs milk jugs from from from milk uh in a safe manner using um you know fisma guidelines and hassob guidelines so that we could go ahead and use that milk to make other products and then repackage it and then use the packaging and dispose of the packaging properly so there's a lot of opportunities for stakeholders including retailers and and things like that to really engage in the food ware space and so i'm a firm believer in many ideas and many many people and many value chain stakeholders make light work so the next step is to really uh you know try to try to fuel uh people getting engaged and realize that uh you know businesses can actually be created from food waste and a done a great job in leading in that area with co-products our guest today has been dr claire sand and dr sand i want to thank you for your time today in a very informative presentation thank you that concludes auri connects webinar wednesday for today presented by the agricultural utilization research institute of minnesota auri's mission is to foster long-term economic benefit for minnesota through value-added agricultural products now in october we will have another look at the hemp report that came out nearly a year ago this presentation is also part of the auri connects fields of innovation this platform focuses on bringing together minnesota's ag and food value chains around new and emerging crops events focus on highlighting promising new crops examining market opportunities for emerging crops and highlighting new technologies in existing crops please join auri business development director harold stanislawski and auri engineer riley gordon on october 14th for a presentation on the current state of the industrial hemp industry in minnesota and opportunities surrounding hemp fiber food and feed we will also briefly touch on auri's ongoing involvement with a research study on cannabinoid levels and crops around the state that's october 14th from noon till one and you can register right now at auri.org webinar dash wednesday