Loss of beef during primary production in Sweden: quantities, causes, food potential and carbon footprint and economically assessed measures.

Reduced food loss and waste is one of the UNs sustainable development goals and has been identified as one of three major strategies to keep the food system within the planetary boundaries. There is an urgent need for practical and efficient solutions to tackle the food loss and waste problem.

In addition, food loss data is scarce, but necessary for finding hot spots and monitor progress.The aim of this project is to quantify food loss during primary production at Swedish dairy and beef farms, to investigate root causes for losses by identifying risk factors and test their degree of correlation and by interviewing farmers and experts, to set up scenarios for preventive and valorizing measures and to do life cycle assessments of those scenarios.

The most innovative contribution from the project will be the design of a reintroduced emergency slaughter system based on remote online ante mortem inspection of acutely injured animals for the purpose of harvesting this food potential.On a request from our non-scientific partners we will have several dissemination events.

Seminars will focus on quantified data, risk factors and root causes (1; 2023), the setup and consequences of a reintroduced emergency slaughter system in Sweden (2; 2024) and food potential and environmental impact of preventing animal losses at farms (3; 2025).

The project will work closely with the SLU communication platform Future Food, and present results at scientific conferences, such as LCA Food 2024.