Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
Barb Stuckey: Okay. Now. Thank you guys so much. Really quickly, I would love to record this call. If you guys are okay, but I just want to make sure that I have your permission to do so. Are you all right if I record it?
Shelie: Absolutely.
Brent: Absolutely.
Barb Stuckey: Great. Okay. Thank you so much. All right, so let me just introduce myself and if you guys would do the same, that would be great. This is Barb Stuckey I'm as you probably saw, I'm the President and Chief Innovation Officer here at Mattson. I'm sure Maddison has told you we're a food and beverage product innovation firm located in Silicon Valley.
Barb Stuckey: I also write for Forbes.com and I write about food innovation, consumer trends around food and beverage, and I've been fascinated with this whole meal kit thing for about 12 years, believe it or not. I probably subscribed to the first meal kit subscription that ever was, which was a local woman here in San Francisco named Nona Lim who still has a line of food on the market, but got really, really fascinated with meal kits and have been tracking the category ever since.
Barb Stuckey: So, I know a lot about this category, and I have to say that I have heard from consumers and from the press in the industry that everyone says that there's so
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
much solid waste and it can't possibly be efficient to send these ingredients direct to the consumer's home. So I've heard that ad nauseam and I guess, my first question is just, did the results of your study surprise even you?
Shelie: So, they definitely surprised a lot of people. I actually think we went into the study though with the hypothesis that meal kits were going to be better because of exactly what you're saying. We were hearing from people that they were hesitant to use meal kits because it's so much packaging and waste left over and it was actually with a conversation with a friend of mine who was saying that she really enjoyed meal kits, but she just couldn't handle their environmental impact where I started thinking, this is potentially not as bad for the environment as you might think it would be.
Shelie: And that's as far as introductions of sort of our research, we take big picture life cycle approaches to problems and try to undercover unintended consequences. So, that's really where we're coming at if from where it's like, I think the food waste is probably a bigger deal, and so you're really swapping in a food waste problem for a packaging waste problem.
Barb Stuckey: Great. Shelie, just because you're starting the conversation, would you mind just introducing yourself and your background?
Shelie: Absolutely, so I'm Shelie Miller. I'm an associate professor at the school for environment and sustainability. And so I'm a faculty here at the school and one of the things that we do, is look at life cycle assessment research and that's really just looking at products throughout the supply chain. My particular areas of interest are emerging technologies, so things that are new to the market, things that might cause major disruptions in new markets, trying to figure out unintended consequences of potential new products. And so the food space has been very interesting to me for quite some time and trying to think through sort of how to reduce environmental impacts on food systems, which end up being a pretty big environmental burden overall and so end up having lots of really interesting research questions.
Barb Stuckey: Awesome. Thank you. And Brent, if you could introduce yourself, that would be great too.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Brent Heard, I'm a PHD candidate affiliated with the center for sustainable systems, which is housed in the School for Environment and Sustainability. Shelie's my PHD advisor and my research looks at the effects of the emerging technologies in the food supply chain and I have a particular interest in identifying effective consumption or production side interventions that can reduce the environmental impacts associated with getting our food. Before I was here, I got a BS in economics in environmental policy from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And I think, the way we look at problems in our
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
research through thinking about a full life cycle of products. So everything from its initial production to where waste ends up at the end is really valuable.
Barb Stuckey: I am so glad that we found your paper, that is thanks to Maddison. So thank you, Maddison.
Barb Stuckey: So, number two then, question is ... How do meal kits get onto your radar? It sounds like you're both looking at emerging technologies. Why meal kits and why this study?
Brent: I think meal kits are particularly fascinating. I've always had an interest in them, though maybe not quite to the depth and background as you have had because not only are they just a different way of cooking and preparing a meal, but to create a meal kit really requires making substantial changes throughout the food supply chain and so meal kits aren't just a different type of meal you can prepare, they really are a fundamentally different way of supplying food to a consumer. And I think when you study an entire supply chain and think about the life cycle of a product, that can create some really fascinating differences compared to the typical grocery store supply chain.
Barb Stuckey: Yeah, I actually love that part of your study that you looked at what we've been doing as a culture for the last 50, 60 years. And comparing it to that. That was so interesting. [crosstalk 00:06:37]
Shelie: And I think that's part of it too because when we talk about the emerging product and emerging technologies, we often think of the emerging product as all of the environmental impact associated with that. We rarely sort of step back and say, "Well, what's the current waste products with the current system?"
Barb Stuckey: Yeah, that's great.
Brent: To be honest, that was what surprised me the most about our study actually. We had to critically think about the environmental impacts associated with the conventional supply chain compared to an alternative model and there's some really, really interesting differences and the amount of food loss that's involved in a typical grocery supply chain process is why I was thinking about transportation structure which is something I hadn't had to critically consider until this study and it really creates some interesting differences.
Barb Stuckey: So, okay now I'm gonna veer off the script. What was most surprising to each of you in terms of where loss, waste, and inefficiency is happening?
Shelie: So I think one of the things that for me was one of the standout pieces was what we call last mile transportation. So this is how you actually get groceries to your house. And this is another category where the meal kits were actually better than the grocery store meals, which is again a counter intuitive result for most
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
people because you think, okay, there's these big diesel trucks driving around, how is that possibly environmentally better?
Shelie: It's not saying that it's good, it's just better than the alternative, but it's because if you have one package, one meal kit a month, among many packages on that truck, and so it just gets one small fraction of the overall burden of that truck. Meanwhile, most people do roundtrip dedicated trips to grocery stores. So t hat's all the miles there, all the miles back. Even if they're shopping for a week, it ends up being more miles per meal than the trucks.
Barb Stuckey: And I think we have a question, number seven, which was Maddison's question, which I think is appropriate here. So if that last mile is surprising and there's that roundtrip dedicated voyage that the consumer takes in their car, how do you think that would differ if it were a shopping service like Instacart or Shipt where you're ordering online and then someone is bringing the groceries to your house? Does that change things significantly or no?
Shelie: It's a little hard to say, so we'd actually have to run the numbers on the assumption because some things would be more like the meal kit and some things would be more like the grocery store. The sort of being able to predict, "Okay, which one has more of an impact on the overall results?" It's tough to do and we didn't do it in the study, but certainly, I think the general principles of food waste packaging, last mile transportation are all the same, but the actual numbers would vary a bit.
Barb Stuckey: Mm-hmm (affirmative). In the paper, you mention a local grocery store. Was that a chain or an independent and do you think there may be any differences if it were the other one?
Brent: We went to a chain grocery store. We picked one that was just largely representative of the grocery stores in the Ann Arbor area because we wanted these results to be as generalizable as possible. Unfortunately, I don't think we can speak to whether an independent or a chain grocery store would be more or less efficient with the current study set up we have. That's another case where we'd probably have to run the numbers and look a little more critically at the supply chain structure.
Shelie: Yeah and I think to add to that, one of the key assumptions that we had, was that the grocery store and the meal kit company sourced from the exact same agriculture supply chain. The reason we did that was to look specifically at the two different delivery mechanisms of meal kit grocery stores. You can get into a lot of variations and what if scenarios on, "Well, what if you're talking about organic agriculture versus non-organic agriculture?" We were specifically just saying, all things being equal, is this supply chain mechanism a better supply chain mechanism? Because certainly there are some meal kit services that have very proactive environmental policies, there are certainly grocery store chains
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
that have proactive environmental polices. The purpose of this study was really saying, all of those things canceling out, are meal kits actually a more effective delivery method overall?
Barb Stuckey: Yeah, sure. To use our lab terminology, you had to hold some variables constant, right?
Shelie: Absolutely.
Barb Stuckey: Yeah. Okay, so, I am very intrigued by Blue Apron. I've been following them for a long time. I know the folks there. They're, as you know, they have struggled mightily lately.
Shelie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Barb Stuckey: Did you talk to anyone? Did you approach them? Did you visit? I think you said in your paper, you didn't look at their production facilities, but could you just comment on your interaction with Blue Apron or not?
Shelie: Oh sure. So we reached out to them largely to help verify some of the data assumptions that we had. There's a lot of literature on grocery store supply chains, there's less on meal kit services. So we did want someone to ground truth some of the data and assumptions that we were putting into the study.
Shelie: And so while we did not specifically I'd say partner with them, they didn't provide funding for the study or anything like that, we did have a number of phone calls with them, just making sure that some of our assumptions regarding number of meals per docs and some of their supply chain type things were at least valid to be able to put into the model. So they did help support us in the sense of they reviewed some of our data, but we were not, I would say a close partner with them.
Barb Stuckey: Got it. I cannot believe they're not shouting this at the top of their lungs.
Shelie: I was actually surprised. I mean, they have been tweeting it out, but I think it came at a tough time for them.
Barb Stuckey: Yeah.
Shelie: They had a couple of news things going on at that moment, I think.
Barb Stuckey: Yup. Well, I'm just happy that I'm the one that gets to write about it for Forbes, it's so exciting. So, the original model, which is the model you studied for meal kits was the direct to consumer and because of the economics of that not necessarily the environmental impact, but just the economics of making a profit.
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
A lot of these meal kit companies seem to be moving into retail environments or club environments.
Barb Stuckey: So for example, we know that Blue Apron was testing some kits here in Costco in Northern California. We know that some of the larger grocery store chains have bought some of the struggling direct to consumer meal kit companies. So what do you think? If blue Apron were to take what they're doing with their meal kit and sell that through the grocery store channel, how do you think that would impact the sustainability results versus typical grocery store shopping for the whole head of broccoli? The whole whatever.
Shelie: I think again, this is one of those that's difficult to say 'cause we don't have the actual data, but we can make some generalized observations, which is one of the big drivers of the study was that meal kits do have improvements because they are pre-portioned as far as they actually do have reduced less overall food waste, but the big trade off there is there's potentially still more food waste in the retail store itself. And so you don't have that direct to consumer sort of being able to have more control over supply chain and having grocery stores being able to stock the exact number and the potential food loss of when people don't purchase meals, what happens? So it's hard to say which one would weigh out and we just did not actually run those data in our study.
Barb Stuckey: What's your gut? Are you willing to say that?
Shelie: Honestly, I don't know.
Barb Stuckey: Okay.
Brent: I think it's really one of those cases where it takes on both positive and negative aspects of the different supply chain models. So a meal kit in a grocery store, you gain the advantage of them being pre-portioned which can reduce your consumer food waste at home. However, you're taking on the problems of retail stocking and potential overstocking and losses through that. Also, then you end up with another last mile problem where some consumers may be driving roundtrip to the store to pick up the meal kit. However, grocery stores may also be delivering to homes via e-commerce so it gets into one of those situations I think where we really have to sit down with the data and piece out another model and look at what the results would be.
Barb Stuckey: Yeah. I'm just thinking when I read the study, I thought, "Wow, refrigeration in the grocery store." That's something I just have never thought about. It's just there. I mean there's freezers too, right? It just never would have occurred to me to think about environmental impact.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. So actually one of the things our group is really interested in is refrigeration, which is one of those research topics that seems incredibly boring
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
until you get into it. And as it turns out, refrigeration globally is incredibly environmental impactful. So I think the numbers are 1% of overall greenhouse gas emissions are due to worldwide refrigeration.
Barb Stuckey: Whoa!
Shelie: And if you talk about developed economies, I believe is where we actually had data from was the UK, it can be up to 3 to 5% of overall GHG emissions for the country. So, I mean, refrigeration as an entity, it requires a lot of energy to run, and the actual refrigerators themselves, they leak. They can actually have a pretty large climate change impact.
Barb Stuckey: Oh wow. Yeah. Was there anything where I would assume you went into the study, these are going to be the points of impact, and you got into the study. Was there anything that all of a sudden you discovered that, "Oh, wow! We're not thinking about this."
Shelie: Oh, I think there's a lot of things in the study that don't necessarily always capture human behavior so one of the things that we didn't take into account is any sort of impulse purchasing at all. So, the way we designed the study, we sent some undergrads, they had a lot of fun, but with the way we designed the study is we ordered the meal kit service, we got the meals and the recipes from them, and then we put the undergrads out to a grocery store saying, "Here's your list. Buy exactly what's on the list in the smallest ingredients that will best serve this recipe."
Shelie: So they were sticking entirely to a grocery shopping list. There was no, "Oh, those raspberries look good. I'm going to grab raspberries and not necessarily eat them throughout the week." Or whatever it happens to be, I'm shopping hungry. And so what this really was is sort of an artificial environment of how people purchase and buy food.
Barb Stuckey: Interesting, yep. Yeah, it's hard to shop without those impact, impulse purchases.
Shelie: Yes.
Barb Stuckey: So in your opinion, what's the best way that we can improve consumers impact in that last mile given that was so important in the difference between the two methods?
Brent: Yeah, well, I'd say first thing is meal planning. So consumer food waste really ends up driving a whole lot of the difference between meal kits and grocery stores. So planning out what you're going to eat for the week, how you're going to use your leftovers, and sticking to it when you're at the store is really critical. In conjunction with that, planning your last mile trips. So, if you can chain
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
multiple store trips together that you would have otherwise taken separately, you can create some environmental improvements in your own environmental footprint. Being sure to buy as many ingredients as you think you're going to be able to reasonably use in a certain grocery store trip as opposed to taking multiple trips could also help.
Shelie: And I think, the other thing that Brent sort of alluded to and it sounds so simply, but it's only buy what you're going to eat.
Barb Stuckey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shelie: Which seems like a very reasonable approach, but actually household food waste ends up being a pretty massive environmental problem. When you look at agriculture systems, we actually end up wasting 30 to 40% of the food we produce. And some of that happens pre-consumer before we ever see the food, but actually a lot happens at the household level. So really thinking through what your household can reasonable consume in the time period before it spoils is really key.
Barb Stuckey: So the second part of that question is something that Maddison and a couple others here at Mattson are working on which is this consumer study where we ask people, "What's concerning to you about food waste?" And this data shows that they're not even concerned about the food that they waste at home. And Maddison, if you want to chime in here, I'd love to hear your opinion on that, but that to me is an, "Ah ha."
Shelie: And actually, maybe that's one of the things that surprised me the most about the study is peoples' reaction to the study and how seemingly blind we are to food waste.
Barb Stuckey: Yes.
Shelie: Folks focus on plastics and packaging as environmental impact and that's visible as far as having to throw out all of that cardboard, all of that plastic, people get very concerned about that element of things, but somehow, the food waste part of it doesn't quite have the same emotional response, and also since there's so much more environmental impact [inaudible 00:22:02] in that food, it's really interesting that those invisible environmental impacts don't seem to have the same reaction in people as plastic and packaging.
Maddison: I was really surprised, this is Maddison, that I get so immersed in this kind of field for the last two years. For me, I've learned quickly industrialized countries, home consumers produce the most waste, whereas in third world countries, you have the supply chain producing more waste, and from our study we're still seeing that a lot of consumers think the least significant of waste is in their own household and that the most are from restaurants and hotels. And the food
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
manufacturing stays pretty constant. That one's up in the air for people thinking whether it's the most or the least significant, but those numbers surprised me.
Maddison: I think just kind of being in the space, I feel like I'm very exposed to messaging I guess points out that individual households waste the most, but grocery stores have maintained that a lot of people don't really see food waste coming as much from grocery stores. I think about a quarter of people think that's the most significant contributor, but that whole area is so very shocking to me. As we see large companies like Kroger getting involved in kind of these messaging initiatives that they're doing, so I was really shocked and just kind of sharing this even internally, I think all of us had a big surprise that people still don't realize that a lot of this is from their own home and post store waste.
Barb Stuckey: Yeah.
Brent: It always surprises me too because reducing food waste is one of those things that's both good for the planet and good for your wallet as a consumer too because when you're wasting less food, in theory you're buying less food to replace that. And so, it's continually surprising. Yeah.
Shelie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Barb Stuckey: Yeah.
Shelie: I think the consumer perception piece is really interesting. Brent, you probably know the actual statistic, but I believe it's about three quarters of Americans believe they are better than average as far as food waste goes. So most of always think we're better than average and I think there really is sort of a misperception about how much we waste and what the impacts are.
Barb Stuckey: Yep. It's like Lake Wobegon.
Maddison: I was also wondering if there's ... And I don't know if there's data or anything to support this, but how it seems like it's always easier to put the blame on someone else. So it's a lot easier to say, "Well, the grocery store! They're throwing out the imperfect produce rather than well I bought five pounds of carrots and I only ate one pound and now they're all rotting."
Barb Stuckey: Right. So this brings up a good question so, the study that you did was based on fresh food. And I'm curious. Did you consider or what is your opinion if anything would change if it was frozen food?
Brent: So that's a really interesting question. Yeah, so in order to do a fair comparison between both meal types, we took the recipe cards that Blue Apron sent us, and then we went out to the grocery store, and bought as closely as we could to replicate those ingredients, because meal kits are sending fresh ingredients. We
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
then bought fresh ingredients at the grocery store. You raise and interesting points, 'cause frozen foods have a longer storage life. So leftover food would not spoil at the same rate. So there is potential for that to result in less food waste from a consumer and because you can store frozen food and keep it for longer. However, when we're comparing from the study's perspective, meal kits and grocery store meals, we wanted to compare fresh ingredients versus fresh ingredients. And so, you want to get the exact same meal out of that, but ...
Barb Stuckey: Right, sure. We're in the business of coming up with new ideas for our clients and I do think there's a huge opportunity for frozen meal kits and just interesting to think about that as whether or not that would be better or worse and it sounds like it could be better, but of course you can't do the same meal kits.
Maddison: And then, I'm just curious. I don't know if you have any information on this. Is the process to get that fresh food to the frozen state and then distributed, is that high energy intensity? Do you think that would affect the free getting to the store emissions ratings significantly?
Brent: That's one of those cases I think where we have to look at the data and from my knowledge of [inaudible 00:27:12] that'd probably depend on the product type as well. So first we'd have to look at the data, but also my instincts tell me that might vary notably depending on which types of products you're looking at as well.
Barb Stuckey: So, you looked at the typical grocery store method of shopping for ingredients and cooking at home and then the direct to consumer meal kit where consumers order online, meals are delivered, or ingredients are delivered to their home. Is there a better way to eat than either of those?
Shelie: So, I mean, I think it's one of those things that we didn't look at every single possibility, but I think it highlights a couple key points. One of course is that food waste ends up being the most impactful part of things. When you look at the meals themselves, it's the food that ends up having the most environmental impact. And so thinking through how to reduce the environmental impact of the food itself is key.
Shelie: Things like making sure we reduce food waste regardless of delivery mechanism is one of the things that we want to highlight. Thinking about different food choices. So unsurprisingly in our study the meal with beef in it has the highest environmental impact which has been shown again and again that red meat tends to be much more environmentally intensive than other types of proteins. And so, I think what it really highlights is this need of thinking more mindfully about food consumption and if meal kits happen to be part of that solution great, but I think overall thinking about reducing food loss and the types of food we eat are going to be key.
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
Barb Stuckey: Okay, I skipped question number three 'cause I wanted to see if you referenced this in talking. I recognized a lot of the steps that you quoted because I've used them in my own presentations about what percent of consumers have tried meal kits and the growth projections, but so much has happened in the last couple of years that really that whole segment is in flux and I'm curious if you guys have seen any fresh numbers.
Brent: Two statistics that have occurred since then that have at least stood out to me, although you may have also seen them. One was from the research firm package facts. They estimated sales of meal kits to total $3.1 billion by the conclusion of 2018 with a growth rate of almost 22% they estimated in that report. However, as we alluded to earlier, the meal kit business might be shifting and so I thought there was a very illustrative survey done which shows that at least of the surveyed 39% have tried meal kits, but only tried them once, and 26% of them people surveyed tried meal kits, but stopped after less than a month. And I'd be happy to send the urls to those if those are useful or new statistics, but as you've sort of mentioned, it's a quickly changing industry.
Barb Stuckey: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I would love to see those. That'd be great if you could follow up with that.
Brent: Absolutely. I'll send those right after the call.
The research firm Packaged Facts estimated the sales of meal kits to total $3.1 billion by the conclusion of 2018, with a growth rate of nearly 22% (https://www.supermarketnews.com/online-retail/meal-kit-players-adapt- changing-market)
39% surveyed here tried meal kits just one, 26% for less than a month: https://morningconsult.com/2017/07/17/price-obstacle-meal-kit- popularity-poll-shows/)
Barb Stuckey: Yep. Is there anything else you would like readers of your paper to take away and keep in mind that I'm writing for the general public. So anything you would like to tell them.
Shelie: Yeah, I think it really comes down to this need for a big picture approach and not necessarily taking your initial gut instincts on what is better environmentally. I think we focus on the visible sort of solid waste issues. The reduce, reuse, recycle mentality of plastics has to be terrible and whatever has more plastics must be worse is a fairly narrow mindset and we need to think much more broadly about overall environmental impacts than just plastics and packaging waste.
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Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals
Barb Stuckey: I just really wanna thank you for your time and thanks for doing the paper 'cause that is just ... It's so necessary these days for us to shake up our beliefs. So thank you.
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