When researching Vancouver’s food system, we noticed a repeating pattern — a lack of attention to measuring wasted food, leading to a lack of transparency across the chain and the hidden magnitude of food waste in the food system. The Measure What Matters prototype invites businesses to pay more attention to unsold food before passing it to other businesses and services for composting or repurposing. It is an effort to collectively measure wasted food, set shared target goals, and collaborate for a more transparent food system.
Fig 1: original feedback loop
The How Might We… Question
How might we utilize existing measurement frameworks and platforms for measuring wasted food so that we can share this information with each other, collectively share efforts and responsibilities, and make more impactful decisions in the sector-wide reduction of wasted food?
We believe the underlying mindsets that led to this lack of transparency include our innate guilt when it comes to wasting food, as well as the public backlash against businesses that have reported the amount of waste they produce — especially in the food industry. This cycle leads businesses to fear threatening their reputation by sharing information about waste; in consequence making it challenging for food businesses to start from where they are currently, set a baseline, and start paying more attention to the amount of waste and where it happens in their location.
Exercising new tasks through familiarity while surfacing new challenges
The first experiment of this prototype aimed to test how businesses could start measuring food waste with what they already have available at their locations, for example, a scale or a container. For the course of a week, the businesses chose a member from their staff to take on the role of Measurer and be responsible for measuring and reporting the collected data, answering prompting questions and sharing insights and potentials of the task. This first activity revealed one of the main issues in Vancouver’s food system: staff shortage.
Staff shortage, along with Covid-19 related economic challenges and the global recession, have made it difficult for business owners to invest time and resources into non-profit-oriented actions to enable a circular food system. The managers were not keen on demanding more of their staff in such hard times when they were already overworked, and we supported their care and concern, and decided to try various approaches for voluntary engagement. We followed the curiosity to create shifts in staff’s values and foster a culture of care around food as a way to motivate them to participate in the extra tasks and gradually change their actions handling food at work. To do that, we interviewed staff members to learn more about their daily activities and what encourages them to work. By better understanding their side of the story, we were hoping to find a promising place to intervene in the cycle.
However,when changing values to change actions we encountered other stuck patterns such as a disinterest among staff to explore new ways of operating in an already demanding working environment, or rapid staff turnovers in positions, often temporarily filled by students. These showed us that there were aspects that needed to be addressed before actually measuring wasted food, and led the prototype in other directions that aligned to the Nourishing Staff Engagement prototype.
Changing our approach and methodology
We realized that for things to start coming out of the paper to become tangible actions, we had to shift from relying on voluntary uptake of interventions to testing other levers for accountability. For this, we decided to incorporate the insights gained in the Co-creating Collaborative Responsibility prototype, and designed a measurement challenge framed as an initiative led by the City to inform municipal-wide policy. The call for increased measurement was coming externally from the City rather than the store manager, which would hopefully demonstrate more clearly the level of impact that staff’s contributions were making. The reframed assumption we were testing would be that positioning this as an undertaking that the store has committed to, rather than something they are volunteering for, would enable more acceptance of the activity.
The challenge — For The Love of Food Challenge — was designed to run for 2 weeks and asked the different departments of a grocery store to record, measure, and report their food handling weekly. The goal was to become more aware of where waste happens and why, and from that, try to decrease that waste by implementing new ways or working and creating a better communication system between the entire business.
The challenge ended up serving as a first baseline to understand the food flow within the business. We learned that until then, our partner business used to only measure the amount of food going to donation; and throughout this challenge, they started to measure the amount of food going to compost as well which was, in their words, “an eye-opening addition to their operations”. As this was the first time they were measuring what was going to waste, the challenge was a first go that will now serve as the baseline for the months to come.
Success + celebration
In addition to the success of the challenge in regards to business operations, the challenge also proved to be a huge success amongst the staff members — a very positive surprise to both us at CFIL as well as the store manager. Framing the challenge as a policy requested by the City and by having a City member introduce the challenge to them, the staff members said they felt heard and empowered, that their jobs and what they do matter, and that their opinions, concerns, and ideas want to be heard.
This is both an amazing example to show governments that policies — if navigated and worked through collaboratively between multiple actors in the system rather than just government members who aren’t familiar with the spaces they are advocating for — can have a positive and effective impact in their communities, as well as show businesses that they can include and give more power and autonomy to their staff as well. A very encouraging action that happened from this realization is that our business partner will be offering one of their staff members — who took the lead in this challenge — a Sustainable Manager position, both a rewarding offer to receive, as well as a new position to be created in their business, illustrating again the potential of this prototype in changing mindsets and cultures.
Through this prototype, we learned that sticking with the problem, no matter how frustrating it can get, pays off. We struggled to test potential solutions and ideas for almost the entire time at the Lab, but right at the end, we were able to run this challenge which resulted in so much positivity, hope, and joy. We learned to be resilient and that giving space for a community to be built is important. Also we cannot solve big complex problems alone; we need designers, researchers, government members, owners, and staff members (amongst many others!) to start shifting actions and care practices.
