On 3 May, 2017, the Food Waste Conference organised by the National Food Chain Safety Office and Deák Tibor Szakkollégium took place in Szent István University’s campus of Buda. The program Wasteless – besides householders, and youngsters – considers university students an important target group. In the frame of the workshop, the issue of food waste were examined from several aspects, so that the students could obtain complex knowledge.
The Conference was opened by Zorka Sztilkovics with introducing Redinner application. The aim of the application is to help the restaurants deliver the leftover, but in the aspect of food safety excellent food to the consumers, through which the waste’s amount generated per unit can be reduced. According to Zorka, the usage of the application results a real win-win-win situation: the restaurant owner, the consumer and the environment equally have benefits.
Balázs Cseh, Chairman of Hungarian Food Bank Association described the organisation’s activity in detail. The volunteers of Food Bank collect those packaged food, which are blameless in the aspect of food safety, due to a certain cause they cannot be placed on the market (deformed packaging, mixed flavoured yogurt). They store the collected products in appropriate conditions, and as needed, they send them to needy. In his presentation he highlighted that commercial sector is already really open to the cooperation with Food Bank, but it would improve the situation a lot, if the contributing enterprises were motivated by some tools.
Gyula Kasza PhD, chairman’s representative of NÉBIH, the leader of Wasteless program introduced the existence of multifactorial and complex food waste. He showed the similarities and differences between the national and international situation. He described the participants the most important elements and results of the communicational campaign.
In his presentation, János Mondovics, Executive Director of Bonitat Kft. showed the lack of equilibrium in production, distribution and demand. Often unexpected ordering-cancellations result in throwing out of edible food, so food waste. The lecturer considers that one of the key solutions could be the balancing of the system.