No Food Left Behind 2018 Conference Summary Report

The first No Food Left Behind conference was held on March 2nd, 2018 at Santa Clara University (SCU) in Santa Clara, California. The conference was convened by Santa Clara University’s Food and Agribusiness Institute and WWF. The objective of the conference was to present new research findings on post-harvest food utilization to a broad set of interested stakeholders and start a conversation about how to create a produce supply chain in the US that fully utilizes all edible and recoverable grown produce, maximizing the energy, water, and wildlife habitat that was sacrificed during its production.

The primary goal of the conference was to facilitate a dialogue amongst produce supply chain actors, food rescue organizations, growers, technology industry representatives, and nonprofit actors, and build consensus around the vision for an ideal future and the pathways or activities needed to get us there. Although it represents a significant economic and environmental issue, farm-level food loss and under-utilization of specialty and commodity crop production in the US is not well understood and largely unmeasured. Given the data gap and lack of information, measuring and understanding farm-level losses is a step towards corrective actions to recover and fully utilize this edible food.