Our 5 Who’s, Why’s, and So What’s for Food Waste

A first look at the wicked problem

Our Task

Having chosen our topic area of food waste, our next step was to better understand our problem space and the stakeholders who are invested in it. This would require us acquiring a broad contextual understanding of the underlying root causes that contribute to the problem as well as our possible impact by providing a solution to the problem.

To aid in this process, Professor Wynens gave us an exercise called the “5 Who’s, Why’s, and So What’s”. This exercise is meant to make us consider the various aspects of our problem space. The “5 Who’s” are supposed to be our identification of the five key stakeholders in the problem who would have an interest in its reduction. The “5 Why’s” are focused on us looking for five main root causes to the problem that we can further explore in further exercises such as a systems map. The “5 So What’s” are five points that justify research in the field, it is our exploration of the magnitude of our benefit to the world if we can help attack this problem.

The Problem in 3 Parts

• “5 Who’s”- the five key stakeholder groups
• “5 Why’s”- the five major root causes of the problem
• “5 So What’s”- the five key benefits we provide by solving the problem

The Who’s & How We Found Them

As we often do as a team, we started with sticky notes and generated plenty of labels for different groups that contribute to downstream food waste in the U.S. Eventually we narrowed it down to the five groups we thought were most important to our problem space. These are: grocery store management, restaurant management, home cooks (consumers at grocery stores), restaurant patrons (consumers at restaurants) and food wholesalers who sell to grocery stores and restaurants. We then identified the primary reasons each of these groups wastes food, most often this was simply identifying the primary goal of the group, leading to minimizing food waste becoming less and less of a priority. Grocery store management prioritizes keeping fully stocked shelves and maximizing sales. Restaurant management (we focused on the majority mid-lower end restaurants in the U.S) prioritizes satisfying customers with large portions and quick serving time. Home cooks often want to minimize food waste to minimize money wasted on food but this conflicts with high personal demand for fresh food and difficulty navigating promotions and large sales and grocery stores. Restaurant patrons are less likely to worry about food waste as going out to eat is typically considered a luxury event; thus, leftovers are not taken care of and customers tend to over-order. Lastly, food wholesalers prioritize maximizing sales to their clients while being as efficient as possible to maximize profit.

You can see the sort of pattern within our identification of these “5 Who’s,” there are two parallel channels of food waste, one being restaurants to restaurant patrons, and the other being grocery stores to home cooks. You can also see the basic form of a supply chain in that food wholesalers sell to grocery stores and restaurants who sell to the last tier of the supply chain being home cooks and restaurant patrons. At each level, food is wasted, but the decisions of each level also pass on food waste to the next. This way of thinking would translate well into the systems map that we began to develop soon after this exercise.

The Why’s

Our initial brainstorming for our “5 Why’s” followed a similar process to that of our previous discussion surrounding our “5 Who’s.” The five root causes we ultimately identified at this preliminary stage of our research were as follows:

1. Convenience culture cause retailers to buy surplus food to satisfy customer expectations of constant availability, resulting in constant excess.
2. Sale of bulk food can lead to consumers to purchase unnecessary goods because they focus on best value rather than the quantity they need. Customer-facing businesses prioritize this marketing to increase sales volume luring customers to over purchase and result in food waste.
3. A huge demand for fresh food in the current market means that a lot of highly perishable food is produced and distributed. These types of food result in higher waste on average than others. This ties into the fact that food often goes bad on the shelf as people prioritize buying the freshest on the shelf.
4. Unstandardized expiration dates result in end-users throwing out food early or retailers wasting edible food due to fear of safety risks.
5. Leftovers and excess food from home cooking are often thrown out, these sources of food are increasing as portion sizes are difficult to correctly estimate when purchasing. Consumers tend to over-buy and throw out waste.

These five root causes would be our major assumptions that we would seek to validate through subsequent deeper research and interviews with stakeholders in the problem area. They represented our initial understanding of the causes to the problem of downstream food waste in America.

The So What’s

Based on our understanding of the “5 Who’s” and “5 Why’s,” we started to build the “5 So what’s,” which showed why the problem really mattered. At first, the thinking we did here was quite vague, but our facilitator urged us to get more specific and do research to find statistics that backed up our claims about why food waste was such an important issue. We landed on the following five major “so what’s” that show the broad categories of impact that solving this problem would lead to.

1. Resources, including water, labor and fertile land, are waste on food that is thrown out. In 2015, millions of acres of cropland were used to produce food. Meanwhile, 25% of all freshwater and 300 million barrels of oil each year are wasted on the production and distribution of surplus food.
2. Money is wasted on over purchasing food. The United States spends approximately $162 billion per year on wasted food at the retailer-consumer level. That is about 16% of the whole agriculture plus food industry’s share of the national GDP (USDA). Some estimates go so far as to say 1 out of every 5 dollars spent on food are wasted.
3. People are starving while all this food is going to waste. The fact that world hunger and food waste coexist as massive problems illustrate the distribution side of the food waste problem. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, reversing the $1 trillion of global food waste could preserve enough food to feed 2 billion people, more than twice the number of undernourished people across the globe.
4. Mass production and purchasing hurts small farmers and makes it harder to implement sustainable practices such as planting diversity which reduces the strain on soil. The amount of small farms has drastically decreased as the demand for mass produced, high quantity food has gone up. The excessive waste of food demands the increase of unsustainable farming practice by large farming monocultures and the like which harms the environment in numerous ways.
5. Agriculture is a huge cause of greenhouse gas emissions and food waste exacerbates the issue. To tie all the “so what’s” of food waste together, it’s crucial to realize that the production of wasted food is responsible for 135 million tons of greenhouse gases annually (EPA). The reduction of such excessive food waste would mean less greenhouse gases emitted to produce food that is never consumed.

Take Away

The “5 Who’s, Why’s, and So What’s” exercise was a great starting step toward building our understanding of the problem area of food waste. It really helped us focus in on picking apart and understanding the key characteristics of a problem area.

Key Questions:

Who is affected and cares about the problem? (potential market)

Why does the problem occur? (potential intervention points)

So what? Why does solving this problem matter, what difference will solving this problem make? (potential impact)

This neat exercise helped us articulate exactly where we stood as far as our understanding of the problem space. This knowledge would help us decide where we needed to delve in deeper. We now had a set of potential stakeholders to interview (the “Who’s), a general idea of what to ask them (the “Why’s”), and a good idea of the ultimate scale of the problem and the required scale of our intervention to make a noticeable impact (“So What’s). This would set us up well for the next step of the process which would be the building of a systems map and stakeholder interviews.

Works Cited

“8 Facts to Know About Food Waste and Hunger.” World Food Program USA. 2020. https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/8-facts-to-know-about-food-waste-and-hunger/.

“Are Factory Farms Still a Threat to America’s Family Farmers?” Farm Aid. 2009. https://www.farmaid.org/about-us/board-and-staff/.

“Food Waste FAQs.” USDA. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs.

Conrad, Zach, et al. “Relationship between food waste, diet quality, and environmental sustainability.” PLOS One. April 18, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195405

“Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” EPA. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions#agriculture.

“Wasted: How America is Losing up to 40 percent of its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.” National Resource Defense Council. August 2017. https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report.pdf.