Packaging & Food Waste | Post harvest Loss Evidence

Australia wastes around 7.6 million tonnes of food every year — roughly 312 kilograms for every person in the country. The cost sits near $36.6 billion annually, about 1.4% of GDP. Those are national figures, and they get quoted often enough that they’ve lost some of their sting.

Here’s the part that matters to anyone growing, packing or exporting fresh produce: horticulture accounts for roughly half of Australia’s total food waste by volume. Not households. Not restaurants. Fruit and vegetables, lost somewhere between the tree and the shelf.

Where the losses actually happen

The national food waste baseline breaks down by supply chain stage:

Primary production — 22%
Processing and manufacturing — 17%
Distribution — 3%
Wholesale and retail — 7%
Households, hospitality and institutions — the remaining 51%

Add the first four together and almost half of Australia’s food waste occurs before the consumer ever sees the product. That’s the postharvest window — and it’s the window packaging operates in.

CSIRO’s mapping of horticultural loss put it in tonnes: up to 626 kilotonnes lost during production, and up to 830 kilotonnes lost during packing and processing. Overall, Australia loses an estimated 18–22% of its fruit and vegetable production before it ever reaches retail.

At farm level the numbers vary enormously by crop. Growers report anywhere from 14% to 38% of a crop lost on farm, with the average sitting around 20% per farm. In total that’s close to one million tonnes of produce that never reaches market — worth an estimated $2.5 billion a year.

And every kilogram of it carries the full cost of the inputs already spent: water, fertiliser, crop protection, labour, energy, land. The loss isn’t the produce. The loss is everything that went into growing it.

The packaging objection — and the number that answers it

Packaging is an easy target. It’s visible, it’s plastic, and it ends up in a bin. Produce loss, by contrast, is invisible — it happens in a shed, a container, a cold room, a distribution centre. Nobody photographs it.

An RMIT University study prepared for CHEP Australia put the two side by side and measured the energy involved at each stage of the food supply chain. The finding is worth sitting with:

Packaging accounts for around 10% of the total energy in a person’s weekly food. It exists to protect the other 90%.

That’s the whole argument in one line. When packaging fails and produce is dumped, everything upstream — the water, the growing, the harvest, the cold chain, the freight — is written off with it. The environmental impact of the food supply chain vastly exceeds the impact of the packaging protecting it.

Which leads to a conclusion that sounds wrong until you’ve seen the numbers: for highly perishable produce, the lower-impact outcome is sometimes more packaging, not less. Light-weighting a carton until it crushes in transit doesn’t save anything. It just moves the waste from the packaging bin to the produce bin, and multiplies it on the way.

What the research says works

The same report catalogued the primary packaging technologies capable of extending shelf life. Two of them describe exactly what postharvest fresh produce needs:

Modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) — the gas composition inside the pack is controlled and then held there by a high gas-barrier film. The effect is to slow the produce’s respiration rate and suppress microbial growth. Less respiration means slower senescence, which means longer shelf life.
Ethylene scavengers — chemical reagents in sachet or film form that absorb ethylene from the pack atmosphere. Removing ethylene delays ripening and extends the shelf life of fresh produce.

The report’s formal recommendations to industry included the adoption of new packaging materials and technologies — naming modified atmosphere packaging specifically — as a means of extending shelf life and reducing waste in the supply chain.

That’s not a packaging supplier’s marketing claim. That’s a university research centre, commissioned by a global logistics company, telling Australian industry what to do.

The banana case study

The same report examined the Australian banana supply chain in detail, and it’s the closest published parallel to what we do.

Between 10% and 30% of the total banana crop is rejected at the pack house for failing to meet customer specification — around 37,000 tonnes a year. On top of that, NSW Department of Primary Industries trials tracked physical damage through transit and found neck injury occurring mainly between farm and distribution centre, with bruising and skin marking increasing sharply between the distribution centre and the retail store.

Two packaging changes addressed it. Moving to a stronger, taller shipper almost eliminated neck injury in transport. And packing the fruit into bags rather than standard carton liners increased the shelf life of the product.

That second point is the one to notice. A liner contains fruit. A properly engineered bag manages the atmosphere around it. The difference between the two is measured in days of shelf life — and in an export chain, days of shelf life are the difference between a sale and a claim.

The misconception that undoes the work

There’s a final finding worth flagging, because it costs money quietly.

UK consumer research found that people are largely unaware of what packaging does for freshness — and a significant number hold the opposite belief, assuming that keeping produce in its packaging makes it spoil faster. The practical result is that they remove produce from the pack after purchase, or pierce the film to “let it breathe.”

For a MAP bag, that’s catastrophic. The entire function of the bag is the equilibrium atmosphere it establishes inside. Puncture it and the atmosphere equalises with the room, respiration returns to full rate, and the technology stops working. The same thing happens at the retail end when packs are opened for display, and in the shed when a bag is opened to inspect fruit and then not resealed.

Shelf-life technology only performs if the pack stays intact through to the consumer. That’s a training and communication problem as much as a packaging one — and it applies to staff at every handling point, not just shoppers.

What this means for a packing operation

Australia has committed to halving its food waste by 2030, in line with UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3. Whatever happens at policy level, the commercial arithmetic already favours action: for every dollar invested in food waste prevention in Australia, the average return is estimated at $7–10.

For a grower or exporter, the levers in the postharvest window are narrow but effective:

Cool the produce fast and hold the cold chain. Nothing else works if this doesn’t.
Match the packaging to the crop, not to the pallet. Respiration rate, ethylene sensitivity and moisture behaviour differ by species and by variety.
Control ethylene, not just temperature. A cold chain break in an ethylene-loaded container does damage the cold chain alone can’t undo.
Protect pack integrity through to the customer. An opened MAP bag is a plain bag.

Lifepack® MAP bags are engineered per crop and variety, with the oxygen transmission rate, carbon dioxide transmission rate and water vapour transmission rate specified to that produce’s respiration profile — which is why a lychee bag and a broccoli bag are not the same film. Fresh Up® ethylene absorber sachets and filters handle the ethylene load inside the pack, and the two are usually specified together.

The research is clear enough on the principle. Packaging is not the food waste problem in fresh produce. Inadequate packaging is.