Unmeasured supply loss: Growers and buyers can't see the food lost between them
Loss happens at the handovers: field to packer, packer to distributor, distributor to shelf. Every party measures only its own side of each one. So each set of numbers looks defensible while the total is enormous, and the interventions that would work are precisely the ones nobody can see, because they sit between two businesses rather than inside one.
Growers and packers · distributors and independent retailers · redistribution charities working the same corridors
Why now
FAO estimates that 13.3% of the world's food was lost in 2023 after harvest and before retail, on farms and in transport, storage, wholesale and processing, up slightly from 13.0% in 2015 when global monitoring began.
Why it matters
Measurement at the handover is the wedge, and it is cheap: the produce is already photographed, weighed and scanned on both sides of every transfer. Nobody is joining those records, because each side owns only its own.
From public reporting
Framed from public reporting. Here is what it was drawn from, so the framing can be checked against it:
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Take it to a hackathon
Use it as a challenge statement: copy it as a brief with who it affects, why now and the evidence to start from, ready for your event page. More hackathon problem statements on the Index.
In the collections
The measurement gap · Problems where the fix is not invention but instrumentation: something important is happening and nobody counts it where it counts.
Cite it
“Growers and buyers can't see the food lost between them.” Ainna Problem Radar, problem 0015, 21 September 2026. https://ainna.ai/problems/growers-and-buyers-cant-see-the-food-lost-between-them
Problem Radar listens to public reporting, from institutions, research and the press, for problems worth solving, and frames each one to the same standard; Ainna's innovation team chooses and edits every problem before it goes on the Index. Every problem says where it came from, so the framing can be checked. Nothing on the Index comes from a user, and what you bring to Ainna is never published. How Problem Radar works.
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Framed by Ainna editorial
Framed 21 Sep · High (Ainna's editorial grade)
For whomSmall e-commerce brands and independent retailers · the freight forwarders serving them · their customers, eventually
