The 1st Annual World Congress of Nutrition & Health was held from October 12th-14th, 2013 at the Dalian World Expo Centre in China. This international event focussed on the foremost research in nutrition and health science. The conference spanned abroad range of topics, including (but not limited to) nano technology, sustainable packaging, nutritional education for kids, sustainable agriculture and fitness apps.
The conference reinforced that food production poses a major global sustainability challenge for the 21st century, with demand for food to increase by 50% by 2050, and demand for meat by 85%, mainly as emerging economies like China and India become richer and adopt Western-style eating habits, rich in meat and dairy products.
Not surprisingly, sustainable food was the central theme of the conference, including all aspects from consumers health, environmental harm, animal welfare, and support and enhancement of rural communities. Not only is the majority of the food we consume today is not sustainable. For the most part, companies are still learning to manage their complex extended supply chains.
Director Jonas Bengtsson presented on Edge’s projects with a major international retailer in Chile, a major international restaurant chain in Australia and a major poultry producer in Australia. The common purpose of these projects was to use a life cycle based Sustainability Index to engage staff and suppliers to:
- Understand the magnitude and nature of impacts of food products with focus on improvement efforts on science-based hotspots in terms of life cycle stage (e.g. raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, packaging, retail, consumption or disposal) and type of impact (e.g. toxic emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, etc.);
- Provide a starting point for industry engagement to begin implementing management practices based on life cycle information.
Edge reported on a number of product category life cycle assessments and social supply chain impact assessments using the recently launched Social Hotspot Database for several food products, including milk, chicken meat, blueberries, apples, grapes, avocados, wine, beer and pasta.
Other interesting life cycle based presentations included Barilla’s double pyramid to enable sustainable food choices and the Baltic FoodWeb which shows you the relationships between food quality, human health and the environmental impact of different lunch choices.
