5 Companies Tackling Food Waste to Reinforce Global Food Security And Why This Matters Now

Walk into almost any supermarket in a high income country and you’ll see plenty shelves packed tight, produce mounded in perfect pyramids, cold cases arranged like displays in a museum. It gives the impression that food is abundant, predictable, and endlessly replenished. But that picture is misleading. Behind it sits a global food system that is surprisingly fragile, not because the world can’t grow enough food, but because we lose staggering amounts of it before it ever becomes a meal.

Research cited in recent analyses on food waste and security puts the number at nearly one third of all food produced. That’s not an annoying inefficiency; it’s a structural failure that threatens global stability.

Food waste quietly drains three things we don’t have to spare: resources, resilience, and time.

Every shipment discarded, every field lost to nutrient stress, every truckload spoiled in transit represents wasted land, water, fertilizer, fuel, labor and an unnecessary burst of greenhouse gases from decomposition. It also represents lost income for farmers and a direct blow to food importing regions already navigating climate shocks, volatile markets, and geopolitical pressures.

What’s even more sobering and highlighted clearly in the referenced analysis is that food waste isn't something that magically appears in household refrigerators. It starts much earlier: in fields, during harvest, while crops move through storage and logistics, and in the manufacturing and retail stages. These aren’t isolated issues; they’re symptoms of a system with multiple weak points.

The good news: a new wave of companies is addressing those weak points head on. Some work at the farm level, preventing loss before harvest. Others target perishability, infrastructure gaps, or the inefficiencies that creep in along the supply chain. A few are rethinking how surplus food itself can be redirected rather than discarded.

Below are five organizations reshaping what a resilient, waste resistant food system looks like.

1. Apeel Extending Freshness with Plant Based Coatings

Apeel has become one of the most recognizable names in the fight against food waste, largely because the idea behind it is so simple and so powerful: give fruits and vegetables a natural “second skin” that slows moisture loss and oxidation.

It doesn’t sound dramatic, but the impact is enormous.

Fresh produce is one of the most wasted categories in the world especially after harvest and at the retail level. Apeel’s coatings extend shelf life by days or even weeks, which:

• reduces losses during shipping

• cuts shrink for grocery stores

• gives retailers more flexibility in distribution

• helps consumers waste less at home

Importantly, it does all of this without requiring major changes to supply chain infrastructure. It’s a biological fix that fits right into existing systems, which is why it has scaled so rapidly.

2.  ICL Group Strengthening Yields Where Food Waste Starts: In the Field

One of the most overlooked truths in the food waste conversation is that a huge amount of loss happens before harvest. Crops never make it out of the field because soils are depleted, nutrients are imbalanced, temperatures spike, or rainfall patterns collapse. In other words, waste often begins long before supply chains or retailers ever enter the picture.

ICL operates right at that first point of vulnerability.

Its focus is on improving soil health, nutrient availability, and crop resilience, the fundamentals that determine whether a crop thrives or never reaches viability. Several interventions highlighted in the original blog show why these matters:

Reducing Pre Harvest Loss

• Balanced nutrition improves root development and crop consistency, which reduces the portion of harvests downgraded or discarded.

• Specialized fertilizers help crops stay productive through droughts, heat waves, salinity spikes, and other climate driven stresses.

• Controlled and slow release nutrient technologies keep nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium where plants can use them instead of losing them to leaching or volatilization.

Relieving Pressure Further Down the Chain

Once crops leave the field in better condition, everything downstream benefits.
  Less sorting loss. Fewer spoiled shipments. More consistent supply for processors. Less need for “buffer inventory.”

The Larger Ripple Effect

By reducing loss at the very start of the system, ICL helps prevent a cascade of waste throughout storage, transport, distribution, and retail. Saving a kilogram on the farm often prevents several kilograms of loss later.

ICL is not a food waste company in the traditional sense it’s a company reinforcing the agricultural foundation that determines how much food enters the system in the first place.

3. Winnow Using AI to Eliminate Waste in Commercial Kitchens

Commercial kitchens  from hotel buffets to university dining halls throw away huge amounts of food every day. Not out of malice or carelessness, but because most kitchens simply don’t know where their waste is coming from.

Winnow solves that problem with AI powered vision technology.
  Their system tracks everything that ends up in the bin, identifies patterns, and gives chefs real time insights into what’s being wasted and why.

The results speak for themselves:

• less overproduction

• smarter purchasing

• tighter portioning

• lower operating costs

• meaningful carbon reductions
  
  
  
  

And perhaps most interestingly once staff can see the waste happening, kitchen behavior changes almost immediately. Awareness becomes action.

4. ColdHubs Solar Powered Cold Storage for Farmers Who Need It Most

In many low-income regions, post-harvest loss isn’t caused by inefficiency, it’s caused by heat, distance, and lack of electricity. In parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 30-40% of crops can spoil within hours simply because farmers have no way to keep them cool.

ColdHubs offers a practical solution: solar powered cold rooms placed right where farmers bring their produce. No grid connection required. No diesel generators. Just reliable, walk in cold storage built for rural communities.

What that enables:

• produce stays fresh far longer

• farmers no longer must dump crops or sell at fire sale prices

• nutritional quality improves

• local markets stabilize

• communities become more resilient to climate and price shocks

ColdHubs addresses a structural vulnerability in regions where food security is shaped just as much by infrastructure gaps as by agricultural capacity.

5. Too Good to Go Turning Retail Surplus into Everyday Savings

At the retail end of the supply chain, the challenge looks different. Grocery stores, bakeries, and restaurants regularly discard perfectly edible food because of tight expiration windows, over-ordering, or cosmetic standards.

Too Good to Go flips that script.

Their app allows retailers to sell “surprise bags” of surplus food at a deep discount, letting consumers rescue food that would otherwise be thrown out.

The model does several things at once:

• reduces retailer waste

• increases customer traffic

• provides affordable meals for consumers

• normalizes buying surplus rather than wasting it

In the process, it shifts consumer perception: “excess” no longer means “inferior.” It simply means “available.”

Food Waste Isn’t Just Waste It’s a Security Risk

Reducing food waste isn’t about guilt tripping consumers into finishing their leftovers. It’s about strengthening a global system under increasing pressure.

Waste amplifies every major challenge facing food systems today:

• climate volatility

• water scarcity

• fertilizer and energy costs

• geopolitical instability

• supply chain disruptions

• population growth

Every loss along the chain whether in a field, a warehouse, a kitchen, or a grocery store weakens the system’s ability to withstand the next shock.

A resilient food system is one that conserves what it grows.

Conclusion: A Stronger Food System Will Come from System Level Fixes, Not Slogans

Most public conversations about food waste focus on the end consumer what gets tossed from a fridge or left on a plate. But the companies making the biggest dent in the problem are the ones working across the entire chain: improving soil health, extending freshness, tightening kitchen operations, stabilizing cold chain access, and rerouting surplus food.

The five organizations highlighted here operate at different leverage points, but together, they paint a clear picture of what a more secure, less wasteful food future looks like. In a world defined by climate uncertainty and rising demand, these aren’t incremental improvements.

They’re the infrastructure of a food system built to last.