麻豆传媒

FORGET the dull trudge down the supermarket aisle, and keep your thumb away from that takeaway app 鈥� there is a third option for dinner. The growing food trend is meal delivery kit services, where pre-portioned ingredients arrive in the post, ready for you to whip up into a meal at home without having to go shopping.

As well as being more convenient, firms like Blue Apron and HelloFresh make cutting down on food waste a selling point, as they only send exactly what you need for each meal. That is appealing, as reducing the amount of food we throw away uneaten 鈥� and the waste of water, land and fertiliser that comes with it, alongside the unnecessary production of greenhouse gases 鈥� is one of the best ways to limit our impact on the planet. Annual carbon emissions from food waste are nearly half that of transport. Up to a third of food produced doesn鈥檛 make it to someone鈥檚 mouth, and most of that waste happens in the store or home.

But are these services really a green choice? The flipside of convenience is that everything comes in tiny packets. Rather than buying a tube of tomato paste, say, and keeping it in the fridge until you use it again, you receive single servings for each recipe. For people trying to cut plastic packaging out of their life, that might be hard to stomach.

鈥淯S consumers waste 3 kilograms of food per person per week, mostly fruits and vegetables鈥�

Actually, the picture isn鈥檛 so bad, says Nina Goodrich of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition in Charlottesville, Virginia. 鈥淭he inner packaging is pretty insignificant, when you compare it with the environmental footprint of food waste,鈥� she says. Many kits use polyethylene bags, which can be recycled at specific collection points. 鈥淭he footprint of food is always bigger than the footprint of packaging,鈥� says Goodrich.

In fact, small packets can be a significant plus, particularly when it comes to ingredients you rarely use. 鈥淪pecialty items like spices and herbs tend to be the biggest areas of potential waste related to making a specific recipe at home,鈥� says Jeff Yorzyk, who works in sustainability at HelloFresh, the largest of the hundreds of meal kit services on the market today.

Farm to bin

The numbers on food waste truly are shocking. In a , the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that from 2007 to 2014, discarded food in the US corresponded to the yearly use of about 12 million hectares of land, 35,000 tonnes of pesticide, 800,000 tonnes of nitrogen fertiliser and 19 trillion litres of water. It also found that US consumers waste almost 3 kilograms of food per person per week, mostly fruits and vegetables.

鈥淓verybody probably thinks food waste happens at the farm. But in a country like the US, food waste happens at the grocery stores and in our houses,鈥� says Goodrich. And supermarkets have a lot of hidden packaging, she says: 鈥淚n order to compare apples to apples, you have to remember that the food on a grocery store shelf probably came in a big cardboard shipper and may have been wrapped in plastic film.鈥�

Tristram Stuart, the founder of Feedback, a UK organisation that aims to reduce food waste, says that meal kit services could help by disrupting the way we shop. 鈥淭hey contrast to the existing, dominant grocery supply system run by supermarkets, which has waste entrenched almost unavoidably,鈥� he says.

Fully packed shelves prompt us to put more food in our trolleys at the grocery store, says Stuart. 鈥淲hen we鈥檙e confronted with abundance, we鈥檙e hardwired to take what we can, and it鈥檚 difficult to overcome that impulse. That鈥檚 why people go to supermarkets day after day and buy 30 per cent more food than they need. And it ends up in the bin,鈥� he says.

Meal kits eliminate this purchasing impulse, says Yorzyk. 鈥淭he portioning aspect of meal kits also reduces overall food volume and leftovers that often go to waste,鈥� he says.

The kits can save you money, too, despite the pricey subscription. 鈥淓ven if per unit of grocery the meal kit is more expensive than your grocery store, if you are not wasting 30 per cent of what you buy, then effectively you鈥檙e spending less money than you would otherwise,鈥� says Stuart.

Beyond just food waste, some meal kit services are limiting the amount of packaging involved. 鈥淭he initial response from a lot of my friends in the environmental movement was, 鈥榃hy would I want to do recipe kits? Look at all the plastic they create鈥�,鈥� says Stephen Wilson, founder of UK-based meal kit service MakeKit.

鈥淲hen we are confronted with abundance, we are hardwired to take what we can鈥�

To tackle this, MakeKit first used industrially compostable packaging, but the firm found just 60 per cent of customers were composting it. So they switched to seaweed-based plastics that break down in a few years even in general waste.

鈥淭hey鈥檙e more expensive and sometimes they aren鈥檛 as strong as other plastics,鈥� says Wilson. 鈥淪o we鈥檝e had to be quite creative and create the recipes to respond to the packaging, instead of the other way around.鈥� MakeKit has also reduced the use of ingredients that require chilled packaging, to cut down on the freezer packs.

So are meal kits actually reducing food waste? It isn鈥檛 clear. 鈥淚 have not heard of anyone doing that type of research, but someone should,鈥� says Lisa Jahns at the USDA鈥檚 Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center in North Dakota.

The industry鈥檚 own figures are optimistic. A report commissioned by Blue Apron in 2016 found that, in total, the company鈥檚 food preparation facilities and its customers compared with making the same meals with grocery store ingredients. These statistics haven鈥檛 been independently verified.

Companies also need to manage any unsold meal kits. HelloFresh, for example, partners with a firm called Spoiler Alert to do so. 鈥淭here is inevitably a small amount left over, and that we donate to food banks or send it for composting,鈥� says Yorzyk. 鈥淥ur business model strives to optimise the per cent of food that ends up anywhere but in a landfill 鈥� in your dinner, off to a food bank or back in the ground where it belongs.鈥�

Composting food waste lets oxygen break down the organic matter, unlike in landfill where the anaerobic breakdown processes result in the production of methane. The material can then be returned to the soil to grow new food.

Wilson says there is potential for meal kit companies to do more to reduce food waste, including using so-called ugly food: fruits and vegetables that are fine to eat but don鈥檛 meet the high cosmetic standards usually required by grocery stores and consumers. HelloFresh doesn鈥檛 send whole foods to customers that are considered ugly, says Yorzyk. But it does purchase many items semi-processed, such as crushed tomatoes, that don鈥檛 need to meet pretty produce requirements.

All things considered, meal delivery kits are currently a decent option for cutting down food waste where it happens most: in your home. But that may change as the firms that sell them struggle to remain profitable, which hasn鈥檛 been easy. A survey by Market Force found that 83 per cent of people in the US who tried a meal delivery service stopped using it because they considered it poor value, based on cost and portion size. To entice returning or new customers, companies may have to expand their offerings, says Stuart.

鈥淭hey鈥檙e going much more towards providing you infinite choice and the logistics required to make sure you鈥檝e always got everything people want that week,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 discouraging, in terms of limiting food waste.鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲ant not, waste not鈥�