By Andrew Mikofalvy, Julia Appel, Kalki Seksaria and Kenneth Friedman
The New Food (Waste & Insecurity) Guide Pyramid
The problem The solution
The data say that 40% of food produced in the US is wasted, while almost 50 million Americans are food insecure to some degree. We wanted to share Maria’s Story, because it shows the impact that supermarkets, kitchens, restaurants, food banks, and non profit and community organizations can have when they work together to decrease both food insecurity and food wastage.
Our audience is the decision makers of grocery stores at the Massachusetts Food Association (a non-profit association of grocery stores) annual meeting.
Our call to action is that grocery stores donate excess food, and cash, to food banks to help address the insidious problem of food insecurity in America.
To appropriately convey the message to the grocery store representatives attending the meeting, we evaluated the important factors that employees might look at when considering implementing a food donation program at their own store, and then the costs and the benefits of participating in the food donation process. Costs include monetary and legal barriers to donating food, while benefits include the positive effect on individuals lives and a more positive public perception of the store in question. In addition, many legal worries are alleviated by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, while the benefits are augmented by tax deductions.
We designed a pyramid shaped business card that resembles the shape and structure of the easily-recognizable food guide graphic: food pyramid. The card is two sided, and is a mockup of a give away that we would distribute to people at the annual MA Food Association conference. The front side expresses problems associated with food insecurity and food waste, and the flipside presents solutions: references to programs that can help alleviate and explain the costs associated with entering the food donation arena. The shape allows us to present the data at several levels: national, state and individual. This image also serces to connect Maria’s story with state and national data on food insecurity, to provide an inspiration to act.
The flipside represents a solution, and provides informational resources for how grocery store owners can help address the problem. It starts with reasons and resources for companies to donate their food to help with food security. It concludes with how community programs and store donations have made Maria better off, thereby closing the loop and finishing the story.
We combined quantitative and qualitative data. We found Maria’s story in the Project Bread 2013 Annual Status Report, and our quantitative data from a variety of sources:
- ⅓ of food insecure people in MA are children: Greater Boston Food Bank.
- 860,000 people needed SNAP in MA is from FY 2014: USDA SNAP State Summary.
- SNAP costs $74 billion in FY2015: USDA SNAP National Summary.
- 43 billion pounds of foods wasted, and retail food losses of 10%: National Resources Defense Council, 2008, https://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-ip.pdf.
- 19 days of supply chain food waste is equal to 1 year of donations from the biggest food bank: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/11/start-up-aims-to-fix-this-165-billion-problem-food-waste.html.
- 40% of food in the US is wasted while 50 million people go hungry in the US: https://pingree.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/pingree-concerned-about-shaws-decision-end-donations-food-banks.