Reducing food loss: What grocery retailers and manufacturers can do | How coin tosses can lead to better decisions | A Crush Can Teach You a Lot About Yourself

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Reducing food loss: What grocery retailers and manufacturers can do    It’s a dire statistic: 33 to 40 percent of the world’s food is lost or wasted every year. A devastating fact in less desperate times, it takes on even greater urgency today, in light of a looming global food crisis resulting from knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine, COVID-19, and climate change. Already, one in nine people in the world can’t get enough to eat—that’s more than 800 million suffering from hunger. The consequences of food loss and waste will only get worse. (“Food loss” happens at harvest or soon after, while “food waste” happens after the food reaches the retailer or consumer. See sidebar, “Is food loss the same as food waste?”) The two terms are related but distinct. Food waste, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, is “the discard of edible foods at the retail and consumer levels.” In other words, food waste happens downstream, during either the distribution stage (for example, as food makes its way from a retailer’s warehouse to a store shelf) or the consumption stage (such as people throwing out leftovers). Food loss, on the other hand, happens upstream: the FAO defines it as “the decrease in edible food mass at the production, post-harvest, and processing stages of the food chain.” Regulatory bodies and industry groups alike have taken steps to address both food waste and food loss. In fact, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 is to “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses” by 2030. Continued here How coin tosses can lead to better decisions    If you're anything like me then you might experience mild analysis paralysis when choosing what to order from an extensive menu. I am so indecisive that the waiter often has to come back a few minutes after taking everyone else's order to finally hear mine. Many of the choices seem good, but by trying to ensure I select the absolute best, I run the risk of missing out altogether. Even before the internet brought unprecedented consumer options directly into our homes and the phones in the palms of our hands, choice had long been seen as the driving force of capitalism. The ability of consumers to choose between competing providers of products and services dictates which businesses thrive and which bite the dust – or so goes the long-held belief. The competitive environment engendered by consumers' free choice supposedly drives innovation and efficiency, delivering a better overall consumer experience. However, more recent theorists have suggested that increased choice can induce a range of anxieties in consumers – from the fear of missing out (Fomo) on a better opportunity, to loss of presence in a chosen activity (thinking "why am I doing this when I could have been doing something else?") and regret from choosing poorly. The raised expectations presented by a broad range of choices can lead some consumers to feel that no experience is truly satisfactory and others to experience analysis paralysis. That more options provide an inferior consumer experience and make potential customers less likely to complete a purchase is a hypothesis known as the "paradox of choice". Indeed, experiments on consumer behaviour have suggested that excessive choice can leave consumers feeling ill-informed and indecisive when making a purchasing decision. Continued here A Crush Can Teach You a Lot About Yourself    A handful of years ago, some friends and I were all in the midst of a romantic drought. It had been so long since we’d felt excited about anyone that we started to worry that the problem was with us. Had we simply grown incapable of that kind of feeling? We imagined that our jaded little hearts might look like peach pits, shriveled and hard. This was the era, though, when we started using the phrase glimmer of hope. Glimmers came whenever we felt a giddy kick of affection—maybe for a friend of a friend, or the bartender at our favorite place, or the pottery-class buddy at the next wheel over. The hope was that these crushes—which were rarely communicated to their subjects—signaled that our hearts might someday soften up and become, once again, hospitable to life. Anytime we glimpsed a light at the end of our tunnel of romantic numbness, we’d text one another: Glimmer of hope!!!! These glimmers helped us power through the seemingly endless tundra of uneventful singlehood. Whether they were reciprocated wasn’t really the point. It was about the feeling: the sweet, hopeful rush. Continued here

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