President’s Word
We definitely can reduce food loss through suitable packaging! Pierre Pienaar* These past few months I have been involved in training forums focussing particularly on the importance of packaging in the cold supply chain. A rather focussed element of packaging but a very important one if one considers that amount of food wasted across the globe. In a typical supply chain management workflow, product packaging safeguards the finished products as they move across the entire process, especially during transport to retailers and the destination. In a cold supply chain environment, this is much more important as one now deals with temperature control across different modes of transport, across different countries and across different geographical zones of the world. Each of these criteria needs to be considered when designing the packaging. To make matters more challenging is that the human population is set to reach 10 billion by 2050, whilst more than half of the world’s population is expected to rely on food sourced from other countries by the year 2050. Therefore, to meet this need, focussed and significant development of cold chain technology will be required as food security continues to be a significant problem in poverty-stricken