Don’t Upsize, Right Size…..

Don’t Upsize, Right Size…..

The shocking news:

India ranks 100th on Global Hunger Index, on a list of 119 countries. Does that surprise you? The worlds sixth largest economy , having more hungry kids (as a % age) than North Korea.

"India... has the third highest score in all of Asia — only Afghanistan and Pakistan are ranked worse," IFPRI said in a statement.

Quoting The Times of India: “IFPRI said more than a fifth of Indian children aged below five weighed too little for their height and over a third were too short for their age. "As of 2015-16, more than a fifth (21%) of children... suffer from wasting (low-weight-for- height) — up from 20% in 2005-2006," IFPRI said. Only three other nations — Djibouti, SL and South Sudan show child wasting above 20% this year.”

Introspection of a Shopaholic

So here I was in my pantry to look for bottles, cans, jars and staples which have crossed their “use by” dates without being opened. After a thorough search, which my spouse thought is my new initiative to clean before the upcoming Diwali, I found almost 8 bottles of exotic sauces, three packets of Khus Khus, some packets of Digestive Biscuits, Pasta packets, sun dried tomatoes, a few cans of Tuna, some Monin syrups and lots of half used opened packets of flours, semolina, flattened rice and what not. There were soft drink bottles, only half consumed; swiss chocolates, bought in bulk sizes in duty free- hardly consumed. I am sure it will be the same with in each of your households. The value of all this waste was equal to one week of Grocery shopping..

The problem of house hold grocery waste is not limited to any particular geography or country, its even more serious in the west, specifically in the US. As per Dana Gunders, a staff scientist specializing in food and agriculture at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Americans waste almost a quarter of the food they buy.

Research on House Hold spends in India shows that middle class Indians are buying ~ 60% more food than what they did two decades earlier. No the family sizes are shrinking, it’s something else at work.

What is fueling this?

I could narrow it down to some key drivers upsizing the quantity of food purchased and subsequently wasted.

Emergence of Packaged products

Remember how your mother shopped. She had a shopping list with specific grocery and food items which were sold loose and bought as per weight. The emergence of plastic defined a new era of pre packaged food sold in standard sizes. So the weighing scale in the Grocer started being used less and less as shoppers moved to convenience of standard packaging.

Offers and bargain hunters

More for less; the marketers started leveraging the age old mantra to drive sales volumes. The shopper, buys it even if the "more" is never used. Think over it, how many times you had to throw away a large pack of food item, half unused, because you could not finish it on time. Happens almost half the time in our household.

Emergence of Open Aisle grocers

I must admit, I love to do Grocery shopping. As a kid of the 80s when the choices of what I could buy where limited, an open aisle grocer with an array of assortment, triggers the small child in me. Curious and overawed, I keep dropping things in my kart till it can take no more. Watching the TLC HD videos of good looking chefs cooking great looking food, I buy food from around the world, probably to be happy at the moment and throw them after a few months, unused or partially used.

Ease of Online shopping

Could not find a particular brand of canned gherkins in the nearby store, don’t worry, your “Apni Dukan” (Own shop), that is Amazon is there …There are the Grofers and the Nature’s baskets of the world in abundance. Food from around the globe ( soon from out of it J) is available at your fingertips.

 What can responsible marketers do?

Understand your consumers, their consumption occasions, frequency and quantity and come up with a pack- price architecture which has solutions for all needs, rather than a generic push to upsize. Imagine the amount of food wasted around, imagine 25% of the middle class pantry being wasted, where as 21% of the children in middle income country like India are wasting without nutrition. It’s on us to think, beyond upsizing, towards rightsizing. Think over it, it could be a meal less wasted, a meal for another hungry child.