TY - JOUR
T1 - A call for perfectly imperfect fruit and vegetables
T2 - food loss in public procurement
AU - Clausen, Anne
AU - Kristensen, Niels Heine
AU - Hansen, Stine Rosenlund
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - Despite increasing awareness, food loss and waste in food supply chains remains a significant challenge resulting in environmental risks and ethical concerns, shaped by the conflicting logics of abundance and scarcity. Systemic overproduction, driven by high-quality demands and the perishability of fresh food, underscores the need for new approaches to food procurement. This article explores the relationship between public procurement processes and significant loss of fresh fruit and vegetables in Denmark. Two major Danish wholesalers and Copenhagen municipality’s food procurement agency formed the empirical basis for an ethnographic study undertaken between 2020 and 2023. The study involved participant observation at the wholesalers, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations with a broad range of actors across the public food procurement chain. Findings revealed that the food quality requirements that guide everyday practices of quality assessment, both contractually and culturally, are being pushed to the limits of what growing seasons, shelf-life characteristics and distribution systems can accommodate. This results in practices where food produce that is still usable is thrown away. This article emphasizes the need for novel understandings of quality parameters in order to (re)design structures in the public food procurement process so that reducing food loss can be adopted as a regulatory tool within procurement contracts.
AB - Despite increasing awareness, food loss and waste in food supply chains remains a significant challenge resulting in environmental risks and ethical concerns, shaped by the conflicting logics of abundance and scarcity. Systemic overproduction, driven by high-quality demands and the perishability of fresh food, underscores the need for new approaches to food procurement. This article explores the relationship between public procurement processes and significant loss of fresh fruit and vegetables in Denmark. Two major Danish wholesalers and Copenhagen municipality’s food procurement agency formed the empirical basis for an ethnographic study undertaken between 2020 and 2023. The study involved participant observation at the wholesalers, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations with a broad range of actors across the public food procurement chain. Findings revealed that the food quality requirements that guide everyday practices of quality assessment, both contractually and culturally, are being pushed to the limits of what growing seasons, shelf-life characteristics and distribution systems can accommodate. This results in practices where food produce that is still usable is thrown away. This article emphasizes the need for novel understandings of quality parameters in order to (re)design structures in the public food procurement process so that reducing food loss can be adopted as a regulatory tool within procurement contracts.
KW - Food loss
KW - Public procurement
KW - Quality assessment practices
KW - Quality requirements
KW - Food loss
KW - Public procurement
KW - Quality assessment practices
KW - Quality requirements
U2 - 10.1080/07409710.2025.2440973
DO - 10.1080/07409710.2025.2440973
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85215099255
SN - 0740-9710
VL - 33
JO - Food and Foodways
JF - Food and Foodways
IS - 1
ER -