Food For All

It has been well documented that more than 30% of food is wasted where there are no packaging systems in place to pack farm harvest collected food.

Today of course it is sad to report that in modern economies more food is thrown away than eaten.

More than 200 years ago the economist Thomas Malthus worried that population growth would exceed food production. So far it has not.

What suddenly has started to worry the food corporations is that productivity of staple foods has reached a plateau. Yields are at their maximum. Next on the horizon is that the warming of the earth affects farming, thereby causing crop losses to increase.

The solution is going to require a lot of technology in how we manage the crops we plant; for example, genome-based formulas that allow crops to become more nutritious at the same time that crops with heat and drought properties are gaining interest.

Now that we can plan on nutritious high yield crops getting them harvest ready and packed quickly into pouches is essential. Pest prevention is absolutely necessary. So the storage silos have to be designed to be pest-free and packing rooms on site are essential as well as roads to take the crops to market.

The pouch being the perfect partner in all of this, allowing gas flushing, and improved shelf life. More pouches packed per container reduces the number of trucks and keeps all aware of the environmental concerns in the equation.

With predictions from the Food and Agricultural Organization of 10 billion world population by 2050, care should be taken to save as much food as harvested or the Malthusian worry will become a reality. All this augers well for the future of pouch packaging.