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Olivia B

Feb 20, 2025

7

min read

Food Waste Prevention in the Pacific Northwest: Three Expert Perspectives

At the Collective’s January event, three local experts discussed the challenges, opportunities, and future of food waste.

Food Waste Prevention in the Pacific Northwest: Three Expert Perspectives

Left to right: Judith Hochhauser Schneider, Emily Hovis, Naomi Logan, Leslie Mackie


The Pacific Northwest leads the nation in its efforts to prevent food waste. Anyone keen to join the endeavor—whether they be a multinational corporation or simply a home chef—should heed our region’s advancements in sustainable business, health science, and retail technology as we forge the future of food rescue.  

 

To this end, the Global Impact Collective hosted our third event for the Seattle community featuring three panelists on the cutting edge of food waste reduction. Our Vice President of Partnership Development, Judith Hochhauser Schneider, moderated the panel discussion between these experts: Emily Hovis, an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, former food safety regulator, and small farm owner, brought knowledge of government policy to the panel; Naomi Logan, head of product at Shelf Engine, offered insights into retail technological solutions to food waste prevention by improving inventory accuracy; and Leslie Mackie, founder and owner of beloved local establishment Macrina Bakery, provided a local business and restaurateur perspective.


After a lively social gathering in the workspace of our partner Tactile, Inc., the panel began. The panelists explored the sprawling landscape of food systems, touching on everything from government policy in food rescue to the use of smart sensors in grocery store freezers. Their discussion of health regulation, customer miseducation, and the underfunding of volunteer organizations gave insight into the true scope of the challenges of food rescue efforts in any local community. Yet despite how large each challenge loomed, the panel was optimistic about reducing food waste, citing new technologies that can be integrated into our systems, community partnerships between businesses, and the importance of data to make sure food gets to those who need it. 


Challenges


Changing Business Behavior at Scale

Without incentives that encourage businesses to adopt prevention programs and robust infrastructure, progress can be slow and arduous.

  • Entrenched practices: Many businesses have ordering and supply procedures that, while inefficient and wasteful from a food systems perspective, are deeply ingrained or difficult to alter, and there’s little financial incentive to shift to more prevention-friendly frameworks. 

  • Lack of rigorous transportation systems: Bringing excess food to those who need it is logistically difficult. “Most food banks are run by volunteers,” Leslie pointed out. “Getting someone who can drive to Kent [where the Macrina’s Bakery facility is based] for whatever might be needed is difficult.” 

  • Practical considerations: Leslie explained that Macrina Bakery needs to bake excess product because it ensures that if a baked good is dropped, burned, or not up to quality standards, it can be replaced. Additionally, without advanced data analysis systems at the retail level, it’s impossible to know in advance what products customers will or won’t buy on a certain day. 


Health Policy in Food Rescue

Rescuing perishables from retailers and grocers accomplishes nothing if the food is unsafe to consume by the time it reaches the individuals whom it’s meant to feed.  

  • Mishandling of donations: “You would have a food business who is donating the food and it's like, great. That's what we want to have happen,” Emily said, recalling her days as a food safety inspector. “But then they're not actually handling it like it is food for a customer. They're leaving a pallet of refrigerated food on the loading dock because they're waiting for it to be picked up because they were told that a volunteer would come. Then the volunteer doesn’t come, and the food just sits there.” 

  • Lower food quality: Products with the shortest shelf life, such as fresh bread, milk, and eggs, are often also the healthiest. Without safe transport for these foods, only canned and processed food will reach those in need. “We want to make sure that the food that's being donated and given to people is not just packaged garbage. We want to make sure that they're getting nutrient-dense food that's going to feed their bodies,” Emily said.  


Lack of Consumer Education

Consumers have a role to play in food waste prevention, yet most do not understand how to reduce their own waste or why it’s a problem. “Recycling's not perfect, but I think most people know what recycling is and how to do it,” Emily said. “We don't really have that for food waste.” 

  • Insufficient label regulation: “Almost all labels on packaged foods are a manufacturers’ best guess of the best quality of that food.” She encourages her students to not rely solely on the printed expiration dates when deciding whether to throw food out (within reason), instead using their senses to determine its quality. “I talk to so many people who throw out food all the time because there's a date on it.”  

  • Expectations of abundance: Customers presuming constant and ample access to all types of produce, regardless of season, drive unsustainable farming habits and pollutive, expensive transportation.  

  • Appearance judgments: People are hesitant to embrace “misfit” produce, leading companies to toss perfectly viable but imperfect-looking food. “Consumers need to understand that produce looks different when it comes out of the ground, and only a small subset of produce makes it to market. Some of the ugly stuff never gets harvested,” Emily said.


Opportunities


Technological Advancements

Companies like Shelf Engine are leading the charge towards integrating technology into our food systems to make them more environmentally friendly.  

  • Improved accuracy: “Variable conditions in stores, what lot you got from the vendor, making sure that you order enough so that even with the amount of variability you’ll still have enough product on hand—all of these can be the cause of a lot of waste,” explained Naomi. In the future, she envisions computerized inventory management that uses sensors to detect spoilage, monitor freezers, and track shelf life. 

  • AI-fueled predictive tech: “The predictions are getting so much better, and there's just no way that a human can do that as well as technology does,” Naomi said.


Increased Visibility and Funding

Washington and the broader Pacific Northwest have seen a renewed interest in food waste prevention. “We’ve had more funding within the last few years, primarily because of the COVID pandemic and big increases in food insecurity,” Emily said. “There’s a lot of research and interest in this space, and people are trying to figure out how we can do better.” As a result, we’ve seen: 

  • Investment in hunger relief: Organizations can afford to pay volunteers and invest in more rigorous, standardized systems for transporting rescued food.  

  • Improved food safety: With increased funding, companies can also afford larger fleets of refrigerated vehicles to maintain the all-important cold chain, ensuring that food reaches recipients in a timely and safe manner. 

  • Education efforts: Anne Garsztka of the World Wildlife Fund mentioned the WWF’s Food Waste Warriors program, which could help reduce educational shortcomings. “We can teach kids and reach their parents through them. Once they know about waste, they’ll correct their parents and teachers. They're like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, that goes in that bin.’” 


Community Partnerships

No single business can handle all the moving pieces of food rescue, which is where community comes in. Each party contributes what they can to establish a food rescue chain and create value-added products. For instance, Macrina Bakery has found new ways to reclaim unsold bread by fostering business partnerships with PCC Community Markets and FareStart, a nonprofit helping people overcome barriers to employment by training them in food service. “Macrina is picking up bread from PCC that’s shrink [loss of inventory] left over, then bringing it to our freezer. Then FareStart picks up the bread from Macrina, and they repurpose it into croutons,” Leslie explained. “From March to December of last year, we recovered about 3,500 pounds of bread.” 


Filling Data Vacuums

Missing data often prevents food from reaching its destination. Emily is working on a research project with the Washington State Department of Ecology to create a food rescue map, working closely with hunger relief organizations. When completed, the rescue map will quickly and smoothly connect farms with relief services and people in need, and it will be regularly updated and maintained by the Department of Ecology. 


attendees gather around panelists
Attendees listen to the panelists speak.

Reflections

After the panel, attendees discussed their takeaways. “In any innovation space there’s exciting energy, and we need that. It’s easy to feel bogged down, but in this space, there’s only positive energy,” said Kate Thel, community engagement coordinator at Seattle Good Business Network. “People are putting their heads together to find solutions.” 


Others echoed her sentiment. “I thought my network was so developed and then I come here and realize how many folks I don’t know—who are interested in all the same things!” said Jillian Moore, whose business, Cascadia Produce, specializes in rescuing surplus food from farms and getting it to food-insecure individuals. “There are all these people outside our networks also having these conversations. It’s so exciting.” 


Ideas from the event are also finding their way into schools. Vaanya Sharma, a junior at Interlake Senior High School, not only founded an environmental impact club to educate peers and younger students on food waste, but she also serves as a Lead for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Youth Ambassadors Program. Vaanya is currently collaborating with the school board to create a sustainability plan for the Bellevue School District, and she has been nominated for the 2025 EPA’s President’s Environmental Youth Award. “There’s a lot of opportunity to get younger people involved in sustainability,” she said.  


Naomi Logan from Shelf Engine, one of our panelists, was surprised and inspired by the diversity of participants. “I’m impressed by how many people showed up from totally different levels of experience, ages, industries, et cetera. I hope we’ll figure out if there are ways we can build broader partnerships with these communities and harness some of their interests and ideas, making connections across the industry.” 


True to our values, every leftover pizza found a home by night’s end, and no food was wasted. Every attendee left brimming with ideas that, if the intensity of the discussion was any indication, will soon take root beyond the walls of Tactile—whether that means designing new government policies, investing in consumer education programs, or simply embracing the ugly fruits neglected at the bottom of a grocery display. Change of any size brings us closer to a waste-free, well-fed future. 


Big thanks again to all who attended, and to our amazing panelists who kept this discussion alive. The Global Impact Collective will be hosting our next community networking event in May, tackling another wicked issue with a fresh panel of experts. Keep an eye out for more details soon! In the meantime, follow us on LinkedIn to get involved and stay up to date. 

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Harnessing Human-Centered AI for Societal Good: Insights from Seattle's Design and Impact Community

Writer's picture: James BernardJames Bernard
Oct 18, 20246 min read

A Malawian farmer uses the UlangiziAI app to better understand how to determine crop health. The app uses a WhatsApp front end to communicate with farmers in a format that is familiar to them.



In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, it's crucial to pause and consider how we can harness this powerful technology for the betterment of society.

  

Recently, the Global Impact Collective brought together members of Seattle's design and impact community to explore this topic. Our event, "Harnessing Human-Centered AI for Societal Good," featured an engaging panel discussion with experts from diverse backgrounds, offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by AI. 



Our Distinguished Panel 


We were fortunate to host three remarkable experts: 

 

1. Ruth Kikin-Gil, Responsible AI Strategist at Microsoft 

2. Jennifer Dumas, Chief Counsel at Allen Institute for AI 

3. Greg Nelson, Chief Technology Officer of Opportunity International 

 

Their varied experiences and perspectives led to a rich, thought-provoking discussion that touched on several key themes. 



Key Discussion Themes 


Defining AI: Beyond the Buzzword 

One of the first challenges we face when discussing AI is defining what we mean by the term. As our panelists pointed out, AI isn't a monolithic entity but rather an umbrella term covering thousands of different technologies.  


This complexity underscores the nuances that should be considered when discussing AI's capabilities and implications. For instance, AI can be categorized into narrow AI, which is designed to perform a specific task (like voice recognition or image classification), and general AI, which aims to understand and reason across a wide range of contexts, though we are still far from achieving this level of sophistication. Moreover, the rapid progress in AI research and development has led to a proliferation of techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks, each with its own set of ethical considerations and operational challenges. 


  • The AI Landscape: According to a 2021 Stanford University report, AI publications have grown by 270% in the last five years, indicating the rapid expansion and diversification of the field and the proliferation of new technologies, as outlined above. 


  • Extractive vs. Generative AI  


    • Extractive AI focuses on analyzing and deriving insights from existing data, greatly reducing the risks. Examples include sentiment analysis tools and recommendation systems. Greg Nelson cited an example where Opportunity International is working on an AI-driven agronomy tool, called UlangiziAI, for smallholder farmers in Malawi. Rather than pull from broadly available online information, the model was built using specific data from the Ministry of Agriculture in Malawi, making the information more relevant for farmers in that country. “This way, we know that farmers are getting the best and most relevant data for their own circumstances,” he said. If you’d like more information on this tool, you can read recent articles on Devex and Bloomberg. 


    • Generative AI, on the other hand, creates new content based on learned patterns. It can be used as a creative prompt but shouldn’t be used as a definitive source of the truth. Generative AI includes technologies like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, which can generate human-like text, and GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) used in creating realistic images. These tools, while impressive, may not have the depth for specific AI applications in impact and sustainability. 

 

  • Risk Assessment: The level of risk associated with AI applications varies greatly. For instance, an AI system used for movie recommendations carries far less risk than one used in healthcare diagnostics or criminal justice decision-making. 


  • AI as a Tool: Our panelists emphasized that generative AI should be viewed as a creative prompt rather than a source of factual information. A 2022 study by MIT researchers found that even state-of-the-art language models can generate factually incorrect information in up to 30% of cases, highlighting the importance of human oversight and verification. 



Navigating the Policy Gap 

A significant concern in the AI landscape is the lag between technological development and policy creation.  


  • Policy Development Timeline: Historical precedents suggest that comprehensive policy often lags technological innovation by several years. For example, it took nearly a decade after the widespread adoption of social media for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to come into effect in 2018. 


  • Legal Liability Challenges: The lack of a comprehensive legal liability rubric for AI poses significant challenges. In the U.S., existing laws like the Communications Decency Act (Section 230) provide some protections for online platforms, but they weren't designed with AI in mind.  


  • Cultural Adaptation: As Jennifer Dumas pointed out, "We released a mature technology without the culture having caught up to that." This echoes concerns raised by scholars like Shoshana Zuboff in her book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," which argues that our social and economic systems are struggling to adapt to the rapid pace of technological change. 


  • Ethical Frameworks: The discussion brought to mind Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, highlighting the need for ethical frameworks in AI development. While these laws were fictional, they've inspired real-world efforts like the IEEE's Ethically Aligned Design guidelines and the EU's Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. 



Ensuring Informed Consent in Diverse Contexts 

The concept of informed consent becomes increasingly complex in the context of AI, especially when considering global applications, and users from diverse backgrounds, some of whom may not even be familiar with major technological platforms like Google.  

 

For instance, in many developing countries, the lack of digital literacy can lead to users unknowingly consenting to data practices that exploit their information. Additionally, the concept of informed consent is not uniform across cultures, which complicates the ethical deployment of AI systems globally. Engaging local communities in the design and implementation of AI systems is crucial to ensuring that their voices and needs are prioritized. 

 

  • Digital Divide: According to the International Telecommunication Union, as of 2023, approximately 2.7 billion people worldwide still lack internet access. This digital divide raises questions about how to ensure informed consent in regions with limited exposure to technology. One way to overcome this, according to our panelists, is to use existing technologies, such as WhatsApp, as the front end for AI-generated tools on the backend. 


  • AI in Emerging Markets: There's a risk of perpetuating digital colonialism through AI implementation in emerging markets if practitioners don’t involve local communities in decision making.  


    Getting information on crop health using the UlangiziAI app in Malawi.

A 2021 report by Mozilla highlighted how AI systems trained primarily on data from Western countries often perform poorly when applied in different cultural contexts. Greg Nelson reinforced this notion by talking about the importance of using locally available datasets and local language to train models.  


  • Stakeholder Identification: Our panelists emphasized the importance of considering all stakeholders affected by an AI system, beyond just the immediate users. This aligns with the concept of "stakeholder theory" in business ethics, which argues that companies should create value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. 


Building Trust in AI 

Trust is fundamental to the widespread adoption and ethical use of AI yet remains a significant barrier for broader adoption.  


  • Current Trust Levels: A 2022 global survey by Edelman found that only 37% of respondents trust AI companies to "do what is right." This underscores the point made by Ruth Kikin-Gil that "the technology hasn't earned the trust yet." 


  • Misinformation Risks: The potential for AI to generate and spread misinformation is a significant concern. A 2020 study published in Nature Machine Intelligence found that AI-generated text was rated as more credible than human-written text in certain contexts, highlighting the need for robust detection and verification systems. 


  • AI in Critical Decisions: As our panelists noted, when people's lives depend on AI, such as in healthcare or criminal justice, the margin for error must be extremely low. A 2016 ProPublica investigation into COMPAS, an AI system used in criminal risk assessment, found significant racial biases in its predictions, underscoring the importance of rigorous testing and oversight. 


  • Inclusive AI Development: Building trust with underrepresented groups who have historically been marginalized by technology is crucial. Initiatives like the AI for Good Foundation are working to ensure AI benefits all of humanity, not just a select few. 


AI in the Broader Context of Technology 

Finally, our discussion touched on how AI fits into the broader landscape of technological advancement: 

 

  • Over-reliance on Technology: The tendency to over-rely on new technologies, as exemplified by early GPS adoption, is a well-documented phenomenon in technology adoption studies. A 2022 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that people tend to defer to AI recommendations even when they conflict with their own judgement. This means that developers, policymakers, and users must fully understand the limitations of AI and remain critical thinkers when using it. 


  • Amara's Law: Named after Roy Amara, this principle suggests we tend to overestimate technology's short-term effects while underestimating its long-term impact. This is evident in the history of AI itself - the field has experienced several "AI winters" where hype outpaced actual capabilities, followed by periods of significant but less publicized progress. 



Join the Conversation 


This event was part of an ongoing series aimed at professionals working at the intersection of human-centered design and social impact. Our next event, focusing on food waste, is scheduled for January 2025. 

 

To stay informed about future events, follow the Global Impact Collective on LinkedIn. If you're interested in learning more about our work or discussing potential collaborations, visit our website or reach out to us at info@globalimpactcollective.net. 

 

As AI continues to shape our world, it's crucial that we engage in these discussions and work together to ensure that this powerful technology is harnessed for the greater good. We invite you to be part of this important conversation. 



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