"If food waste were a nation, it would be the third country in the world in terms of CO2 emissions". Every year, more than one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or let expire, accounting for 1.6 billion tons of food and for about $ 2.6 trillion in total costs - meaning economic, environmental and social. For this reason, the EU, followed by the US and many other countries, made a first step towards fighting food waste by signing the 12.3 Sustainable Development Goal aiming at halving domestic food waste per capita within 2030. During these years, a plethora of solutions have been designed to address this problem, but none of them was able to prevent food waste from increasing in size and future forecasts predict an even worse situation, with food waste reaching 2.1 billion tons per year, meaning $3.4 trillion as global cost, by 2030.
As perfectly summarized by the words of Jordon Lazell, a researcher of The International Food Loss and Food Waste Studies Group, the world needs to "ensure that there is not any surplus food produced" if we want to preserve our planet and to ensure the sustainable development of our society; an evidence that was already noticed by Softline in 2017, when PREFE project emerged as an answer to this increasingly urgent issue.
The goal of the project is to create a new consumption paradigm by giving every single person the tools to fight such plague, which can be done by creating a virtuous ecosystem in which final consumers, retailers and waste management companies benefit from co-operating one with the other and thanks to exploiting the possibilities offered by technology.