Panelists explore the critical question: How do we help consumers think more carefully about avoiding food waste? As food waste becomes an increasingly pressing global issue, what are its implications for households, and the choices consumers make? Is it true that low-income households are less likely to waste food, or does this assumption miss important factors? This panel debates this and examines the structural challenges, such as access to resources and affordability, that often lead to higher food waste in economically disadvantaged communities. From behavioral change to policy solutions, this discussion addresses both the consumer mindset and the societal barriers that impact food waste on a larger scale. Panelists:
- Ben Chapman, North Carolina State University
- Brian Roe, Ohio State University
- Gavin Fitzsimmons, Duke Fuqua
This panel discussion was held at Duke University on Friday, January 23, 2026 as part of the Rethinking Food Waste – Duke Climate Collaboration Symposium event, organized by the Duke World Food Policy Center. The moderator is Norbert Wilson of Duke University.
This symposium is the sixth of the Duke Climate Collaboration Symposia, a series of convenings designed to accelerate climate solutions by developing new collaborations among Duke scholars and external partners. The series is funded by a gift from The Duke Endowment in support of the Duke Climate Commitment, which unites the university’s education, research, operations, and public service missions to address climate challenges. The Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability manages the symposia series.
Transcript
Norbert Wilson: So, what do we know about Americans who care about food waste? And what about Americans who do not care about food waste? Why do we need to understand these two segments, these two market segments?
Ben Chapman: Alright, I’m first in line here. Ben Chapman. I’m a department head in the Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences at NC State University. Also served as a food safety extension specialist for about 15 years. The work that my group does at NC State, the Safe Plates Program, is really at the intersection of food safety and human behavior. I work a lot in the space of how people make decisions around food safety choices, how they prepare food, especially in home settings. But also, perceptions around what makes food safe and what makes food unsafe. And so my perspective on this, Norbert, really comes from that framework, is around microbial food safety. And it’s a fantastic question. It’s a really tough one when it comes to the food safety aspects of this. I would say that one of the things that is always a bit of a battleground in households and some of us may experience this. Is how far do we want to push food that we’ve purchased and have. And what are the risks and the trade-offs associated with that. And one of the things, when I think about the, you know, the question about what do we know about Americans who care about waste and what do we know about those who don’t? I think my world of food safety lies right in the center of that. And it drives a couple of different things. One, sometimes we have individuals who very much care about food waste and begin to make risky choices about the food that they’re consuming because of that concern. And then we have another section who are overly conservative, I would say from a scientific standpoint, around food safety and really start to throw food out at a time that is not really risky. And we don’t have, we have some data on this, and unfortunately right now, I would say that we don’t have a good understanding of the motivators or a clear picture of what would change things. And there are lots of different places throughout the world that are looking at changing labels and looking at date marking in a different way to impact waste. But we really haven’t filled that void as of yet on what it means for actual behaviors. There’s a lot of self-reported work out there, which is a great starting point. Sorry, I like cagily didn’t answer that question because it’s really… it’s tough from a perspective of food safety. But thank you.
Brian Roe: Hi all. I’m Brian Roe at the Ohio State University. Applied economist. And the past about four or five years, we’ve been collecting data on a regular basis from consumers around the United States documenting their self-reported levels of food waste. We’ve been able to do some moderately deep dives on who is wasting food. And an interesting question about who cares and who doesn’t. And it’s interesting, there are many people who care about food waste and some of them succeed in not wasting much. And others fail miserably because of extenuating circumstances or life. And the same with those who don’t care about food waste, some of them… one group, what we call the unrepentant wasters, just seem to be fine wasting. And there are others who don’t care about it and don’t waste because they’re just so frugal anyway. So, I think perhaps the more relevant question is who is wasting, and of those who would like to reduce it, what are those mechanisms in place? And so, we’ve identified segments that we called, the harried profligates and the guilty carb wasters, who are very interested in reducing waste and seem to have some motivations to do so, but just can’t quite pull it together to do that. And so I think that’ll be something that we can talk about further in this panel about how we might be able to reach them.
Gavan Fitzsimons: Thanks. Morning everybody. I’m Gavin Fitzsimons. I’m a consumer psychologist here in the business school at Duke. Most of my work, or our work focuses on understanding the sort of unconscious drivers that actually lead consumers to engage in the behaviors that they engage in, or don’t engage in as the case may be. You know, why should we think about breaking the world into people that care about food waste and people that don’t care about food waste? In a business school, we talk about basic principles of segmentation. If there are two groups that have very different needs, you can’t treat them the same. And that’s the fundamental argument for segmentation. So, if we have underlying different needs, then the remedies, if you like, that we need to apply to these different groups are going to be very, very different. Everybody that’s in the room today, I would argue cares to some degree about food waste. Fantastic. I can probably get you guys, using some little simple nudges, to improve and reduce the amount of waste that you generate. A different room on a different part of campus where no one cares about food waste is going to be very difficult for me to engage them and get them to reduce food waste. What percentage of the world, what percentage of America do you guys think cares about food waste? I am a cynic. I’m going to go with a very small percentage of the population actually cares about how much food they waste. Most people are just worried about feeding their family, getting by, you know, trying maybe to get something healthy into their kids’ mouths. They’re not worried about the leftovers and that is basically our biggest challenge. If people don’t care, if they’re not even really consciously thinking about it, how do you motivate them to change? If we can motivate them to change, that’s great. They can change at the individual level. And then as a business school guy, I know the next panel’s going to talk about this as well, then businesses will come to meet their needs. Why? Not because they care about food waste, because they want to make money. If we can drive and generate motivation at the individual level to care about food waste, not only will we get those folks reducing the amount of food they waste, but we’ll generate businesses that want to cater to that need and make money off it and thus reduce waste yet again. And so it’s kind of a win-win if you can figure out how to motivate at the individual level folks to reduce their food waste. I don’t have the answer you. This is why we’re here. How do we all collectively figure that out?
Norbert Wilson: And actually, this is a great place to ask, well, what has worked? I mean, I agree, or at least I appreciate what you’re saying, Gavin, it’s really hard to move people who really don’t care. Are there any examples where people have actually made interventions work where we’ve seen some differences in the behavior of folks?
Ben Chapman: Well, I’m going to give you an example of something that has worked, but maybe in the negative way. Because I think there’s lessons in that. I do a lot of work in tracking social media conversations around food safety. And over the last I would say five or six years based on media inquiries that I’ve had, based on sort of the scanning that’s out there, there’s been one persistent story that’s at this intersection between food waste and food safety forming. And it’s around leftover rice. And so, if you’ve all spent any time on any of your social media feeds, there are just a vast a mass variety of videos sort of purporting this concern of never, ever eat leftover rice, right? So, the consequence is throw out all your rice once you’ve consumed your first meal. And it really is rooted in some level of evidence, which is one case of an individual who had consumed rice that was left on a counter for three days with no temperature control. Which did lead to toxin issues and amputation of a leg. Oh, yeah. And so that’s graphic, right? If you start to equate leftover rice with amputation, you’re probably not going to eat it. For me, that’s where we have to kind of jump better into that public discourse. Not to say, no, no, no, you’re wrong, you’re all idiots. This is not what happens. But to really jump into the details where some of this stuff is complicated, and we have to do a much better job explaining what’s happening in the stream. But it does lead to an a very, you know, guttural reaction. Just, you know, that’s why I wanted to share it today. Because I could see it on faces in the audience. But also, it like leads to these behaviors that are not evidence-based. For me it’s about how do we figure out how to capitalize on that? How do we get into that discourse? How do we start to steer folks away from, you know, the things that you think are risky, really aren’t. And the things that you’re not thinking about are probably the riskiest things.
Gavan Fitzsimons: I love that example. And if I can, I’ll keep talking about leftover rice here for a second. If you think about like, why does that stick right? Why does this issue of leftover rice lead to amputation stick? Well, it’s highly viscerally, you know, impactful. As a result, when you think of leftover rice, all of us tonight, are non-consciously, if you see leftover rice in your fridge, you’re going to think about losing a limb. Alright? Honest to God, from a psychological perspective, that is what happens. That’s how our brains work. That’s a very strong association. What do we know psychologically about trying to break this link? You can’t simply say leftover rice does not lead to amputation. Because what people hear the cognitive psychologists talk about is negation. The “not” is a negation. We don’t encode negation. Every time I say leftover rice does not lead to amputation. What everybody in this room’s going to code is leftover rice amputation. Alright, so understanding it at a psychological level is super important. So how do you start to change it? So, one interesting phenomenon, I think, that’s happened over the last year that has combated this. There’s some evidence, I think it’s a little bit shaky, that leftover refrigerated rice binds the carbohydrates in such a way that if you eat refrigerated, leftover rice, it’s lowering carbs than freshly cooked rice. If you’re a keto person, if you’re really interested in trying to stay healthy and trim… has anybody seen this on their social media? Okay. A bunch of people have. Okay, so that message is getting out there. Now that from a cognitive perspective is building new associations, positive associations, and unique associations with leftover rice, which are going to lead many of us to think: huh, why not eat the leftover rice is lower in carbs than if I cook a fresh batch? And that will lead to actual consumer change,
Brian Roe: Or you’re two steps away from free fried rice which is another way to reframe. There have been numerous attempts to change household food waste behaviors, many campaigns. Sadly, the evaluative evidence is limited and normally short term. A few that we have seen, for example. Unilever and Hellman’s with their fridge night mission and their Super Bowl ads, had a very detailed evaluation and they showed there was definitely some success in their ‘flexcipies’ intervention where they helped train people to have a strategy. Get a free meal per week out their fridge by putting together items very simply. Providing some training. But, as I think Kai and I were talking about last night, saying that if you don’t maintain this type of campaign effort, it doesn’t necessarily stick. And so, they found that after about six to eight weeks after the campaign ended, there was kind of a reversion. They originally documented about a 30% reduction in household food waste among those who are part of this program compared to their control group. But sadly, that was kind of backslid after about six weeks thereafter. There are some green shoots here, but being able to maintain these interventions to develop long-term changes are what’s really critical. Another interesting example is data coming out of the company Mill who provides these very fancy and lovely food dehydrators that act as a precursor to composting. And they found that those people who are engaged enough to interact with these devices tend to reduce their food waste considerably after installing the devices. And that tends to stay in place for a while. This is a very self-selected group, already very engaged with kitchen ideas and wanting to change their kitchen apparatus and behaviors. Setting that up to find those individuals who are on that cusp of willing to change might also be another key issue here as we think about efforts to try to change behavior.
Norbert Wilson: Oh, this is really rich. And I’m intrigued by the idea of how we change behavior. I mean, there was a conversation that we had earlier about this equivalent of like a driving speed check. I mean, what are the ways that we can think about mechanisms that can allow us to actually help people figure out that this is important? Or at least I won’t say trick people into it, but how do we make it so that it’s not such a hard conscious thing to address this challenge?
Gavan Fitzsimons: I think there’s lots of ways we can do it. Emily talked last night about some of the legal actions that have taken place that can have an impact and be quite powerful. You know, I’m Canadian. I go back and forth to Canada and here. When I’m in Nova Scotia, \ there are legal rules there that require us to engage in composting. For example, household composting is required in Nova Scotia. How do you enforce it? Well, you have transparent trash bags and if they see any compost in the trash bag, they don’t take it. So literally everybody has to compost because if you want your household trash taken away, you need to do it. Legally we can mandate these things. We can do it not just in food waste, but across lots of different behavioral domains. One of the courses of action that we’ve used over the years to persuade folks to change behavior is activating kids work through the schools. Educate the kids. If you tell kids, you know, food waste is costing the country all sorts of money, it’s costing your family $50 a week. That’s $50 could go to new sneakers or this or that for you. The kids go home, they say to their parents, well, what are you doing with that? We learned that food waste is a horrible thing. And all of a sudden as a parent you’re like, oh, well gee, that does sound terrible, and I should do something about it. All of a sudden, it’s not tricking the parents into changing behavior, but it’s encouraging the parents. And kids are very open. Now, of course we have to have the partnership of the schools, et cetera, to do this, but oftentimes they’re very happy to help.
Brian Roe: That’s a great point. And collaborators at World Wildlife Fund are doing exactly that. They’ve got these great classroom curricula that they’re instilling. Obviously too few schools around the country. But I think you’re talking here about kind of norm shaping through policy. And then salience heightening through perhaps engagement of kids. One thing you do have to be a bit careful about: some policy issues. So, for example, California implemented in 2022 the requirement that all Californians, at their households, put their organic material into a green bin. And we’ve documented that that actually kind of backfired in the sense that we found that food waste generation increased after that went into place. As people were so taken by having to generate new activities to divide things into the green bin that they actually stopped doing as much food waste reduction. And there’s a bit of moral licensing going on there as well say, oh, I can throw that food into the green bin and it’s all good. But, obviously more emissions are generated through the creation of food waste, than by simply putting into the compost bin. I think those norms can be very powerful, but we have to be very careful to look for potential backfire effects that might emerge from very strident attempts to try to enforce those norms.
Ben Chapman: I’ll just add onto Gavin’s comments. So, one of the things historically that we’ve had a lot of success in passing down food decisions through families is from older generations down. And some of the work that we do, we have kitchens at NC State where we bring individuals in for observation. Ask them to go through a variety of recipes for food safety reasons. But, you know, deception study where we’re not really telling people exactly what we’re interested in. But, in many of our studies, we interview people afterwards about well, how did you learn how to wash your chicken, as examples. Which is something that we’re concerned about in food safety, not in not a waste thing. And many of the answers are, well, this is what my mom taught me to do. This is what my family does. It’s culturally what we do. And those are rooted in an individual’s decision making as we see in food safety for years. You know, generations, it’s passed down. Give another example for this, we do a lot of work in home food preservation. We also run the State Fair Home Food Preservation competition, which is a totally different conversation. But a few years ago we started asking for the recipes that people were entering into the categories in the State Fair, and people were really guarded on those. They didn’t want to share those recipes, right? Well, because it’s been passed down, it’s a family secret. Well, when we looked at the recipes, we got about 800 of those recipes over the course of five years and had a student who did a little bit of analysis on this. And compared it to the USDA Guide to Home Canning that was produced in the 1940s. Those recipes are all pretty much coming directly out of that guide. And so you have this like, generational disconnect, right? Where it’s like, well, this is passed down from my family and that’s why it’s so special and so important. And I’m going to make these actions. I’m not going to do it any other way. But really, they all came from one central location. To me, you know, going back to the previous question, Norbert, but that’s a positive thing. How do we do that? How do you manufacture that as we move forward? And I really love, you know, Gavin’s approach. I think it’s multi-generational. It’s that we’re looking at trying to get these messages to different individuals to be able to push it all the way through the lifespan.
Norbert Wilson: I have one more question and then we’ll open up to the audience. And with this question, I’m actually going to start with you, Brian. What would you like to share with the team developing the National Food Waste Reduction education campaign from EPA. And could you just tell us a little bit about that program?
Brian Roe: Yes. So, it’s led by the World Wildlife Fund and collaborators, including some people in the room, WRAP the Waste and Resources Action Programme, the Ad Council, ReFed and a couple others who I’m forgetting off the top of my head. The US Composting House. And part of that effort is to stand up a national food waste reduction campaign with a goal to reduce national food waste by 10%, and then in key communities by 20% that receive what they are going to call the ground game. And so, right now we’re involved in an extensive review of the literature to understand exactly what might be successful in shaping one of those campaigns. And so, yeah, we are trying to study past campaigns, do segmentation studies, combine that with knowledge of the behaviors that tend to exacerbate waste in the home. And we are trying to tee up exactly ideas of which segments are large enough to be able to target. You can’t go too niche when you’ve got a limited budget. So how do you consolidate segments to have overlapping motivational aspects or overlapping intervention targets? And then what is the hook? What is the behavior that might be prescribed to them?
Norbert Wilson: Would anyone else like to talk about how do you address these sort of large national campaigns?
Gavan Fitzsimons: I love that this is happening. It’s fantastic. You know, lots of up potential upside. I think just building on Brian’s point, this issue of segmentation just really strikes me as critical. If I think about some other domains, it’s low hanging fruit to go after people that care about the issue. And will you have an impact? A hundred percent. You can move the needle, right? Will it change what’s happening in America in terms of food waste? I’ll go out on a limb and say no. A tiny idea that makes a small difference to people that don’t care about food waste is going to be way bigger. And I’ll give you an example of a campaign that we were involved with. So many of us are in the room are also interested in the environment and making environmental change here in America for a variety of reasons. The environment apparently is a political issue and half the population, if you say the environment goes, whoa. So, but it turns out that if you’re trying to make an impact on the environment, engaging that half of the population turns out to be really an important thing. And so, one of the most sort of promising avenues that we’ve been engaging with is reaching out to hunters and folks that fish. They care enormously about clean rivers, clean woods, clean forest, so that they can pass those on to their kids and grandkids. And in fact, will engage in pro-environmental behaviors as long as you don’t say the word environment, alright? But if you talk about protecting our rivers and forests, that population can move in the right direction. Now, what’s the equivalent of hunters and fishers in the food waste space, I’m not sure. But if I could just throw a word to the folks developing all of this, that’s where the real money is. That’s where the movement could happen. If we could come up with something simple like that to engage all the folks that really currently don’t care about food waste.
Brian Roe: I think it’s people who feel like they’re spending too much money on food, which is nearly everybody.
Ben Chapman: Yeah, yeah. Totally, totally agree. And I’ll give a, I guess, a lesson learned from a project that we had a few years ago. Again, around food safety. Targeted as a pilot campaign in Fayetteville, North Carolina. A small, small market. And we did not on purpose, do any sort of segmentation, because we were trying to answer a question for USDA on should they put out public service announcements around food safety? Should they have a national campaign around one particular risky behavior, which was not using a thermometer when cooking ground beef burgers, hamburgers. And we spent you know $300,000 in media buy developing a whole campaign, again for a very targeted geographic area. If you lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina in the summer, I think it was 2016, in between Memorial Day and Labor Day, you heard this message: 160 degrees is good. Multiple times. It was like on average, like 30 or 40 times. It was on radios, it was when people used to go to movies, it was in the theaters and the prescreen. And you know, the study was all about where’s the baseline? Let’s look at what the population thinks about this message before, what does it think about it afterwards. And what we heard afterwards, we were able to move the self-reported needle of, and this is, I think it was like 300 individuals who we connected with before and after. We were able to move their self-reported needle. About 2% of them said, I would use a thermometer more. Which is like, truthfully significant in our area. But what we did hear was I saw or heard something about temperatures and food. Not helpful, right? Like, like that… and, and it was one message, and it was very simple and it was targeted. You know, all of that stuff. And to me, well, I shouldn’t say I was a skeptic, I was interested in helping USDA on some like $50 million national campaign. Sounded like an awesome impact. Just thought we should pilot this out first. And then we were able to go back and say, don’t do this. Do something more targeted. Think about specific audiences. Who is it that you want to move, and are there higher risk individuals that you would want to move more than just the general population? And so that to me, is a lesson for anything that we’re trying to do in food is it does get all complicated and wrapped up. And we have to be very specific about what the goals are.
Norbert Wilson: Great. Well folks, thank you all for those responses. Let’s open it up to you. Do you all have questions?
Audience member: Being involved in food security for the last six years, so I have learned just a little about it. But I realized the most important thing, and you touched it briefly, is education. I learned last night in the talk that the biggest producer of food waste is households. That blew my mind. I have no idea that that was. I thought it was the stores and things like that. You mentioned start educating the children. That’s great because they forced the parents to do it. But then also the labeling of things like that. Myself, if I have a piece of something there, I say Best Buy today that goes to the trash. You know, I didn’t realize that still quite a few days that you still can use it. From the NGO point of view, we get a lot of food recovery from the stores. And we get a banana box on the bottom is full of overripe tomatoes on the top. We have two or three cabbages. When it gets to us, you know, you can imagine what the soup that we get there. So, educating all the segments that handle food, I think that will be extremely important. Probably the fastest way to start reducing food waste.
Audience Member: Hi. I just wanted to build a little bit on what Brian highlighted for the national wasted food campaign, which we’re really excited about, as a bit of an enticement for all of you to get involved. As he mentioned, there’s going to be a ground game. It’s going to involve 25 cities or counties around the country. I might be a little biased because I went to Duke and have a great affinity for the Durham area and hope that North Carolina might be a part of it. We’ve already had some conversations on how that might be possible. I wanted to pick up on Gavin’s point and some of the discussion about education and schools, because one of the things we see is really important is how do you reach people and where. So, it’s the messaging, but then the schools, but also, we’re looking at how do we reach people where they buy food at the supermarket, where they’re eating food in restaurants and they’re thinking about food. Also, big public venues like stadiums and conference centers, you know, like this, where we have, you know, 50 people here. If you go to a stadium, you have thousands that you can reach with messaging. And so, I was wondering if you guys might comment on that, on the importance of how you reach people and where. Oh, farmer’s market’s also a great place.
Audience member: I’m an NGO based in Greensboro, North Carolina. In food recovery. And we have one program is our share program where we did put, you know, it’s based not on just share tables, but we put our refrigerator in all of our schools. It looks like a house fridge. But a lot of times when I try and sell it, it’s like when you go to kindergarten, isn’t that the first time you really learn to throw something away, a food away, right? Because we have a half hour to eat and versus, you know, at home you might, well, you know, when they’re three and four, put that in the fridge and we’ll get it later, right? So sometimes that’s one of the things is like getting ’em there where they’re just, it looks like a home fridge. They put it in there, they can get it later, ebb and flows. But it’s a difficult process to get it in schools. And so even thinking of you at the academia level, you know, in food safety, I mean, I’m meeting with North Carolina DPI and all these things all the time, and we’re a very open book, but sometimes I think at any moment they could shut us down, right? And then what do we do with our 120 fridges? But you know, when you say too that, you know, every year we’re re diverting million pounds of food just in our county. Let alone Wake. And we don’t look any different than, you know, any other, but the support to continue in the schools is sort of what is really needed. And for education, for not making food waste. Like, there’s every good thing at the school level of share and to really maybe consider that is partnering with the NGO if you’re in food safety, because you know, we’re trying to do everything by the book. We don’t want food that’s not safe, right? So anyway, just the support and I do think that if it becomes rote and they’re always seeing a home fridge from kindergarten up till our high schools, because we have them in our high schools, they know what to do, right? Kids don’t need training. They know that this fridge is. They can ebb and flow and take and give and whenever they want and they’ll come back and get a packet of carrots later, you know?
Gavan Fitzsimons: There we go. Great. Well across the three questions was this, again, building on this theme of education and how do we understand, and how do we help households and individuals make better choices? I spent my entire career working on this problem about how you help people make choices that will be better for them and better for society and the world around them. It’s not an easy thing. The schools can work, but you know, as you guys have articulated, it’s hard to do it. After Emily’s talk yesterday, I was thinking to myself, and Emily I’m not even going to remember the exact wording, but the food labels and it was Best Buy was, it’s unsafe to eat after. And no, I’m getting it wrong, right? Quality.
Brian Roe: It’s the quality. That’s quality,
Gavan Fitzsimons: That’s the quality. Okay. There you go. See, I’ve got it wrong and I just learned it yesterday. I just learned it yesterday. Okay. Of course. And, and I, you know, and, and, and this, this is, you know, I’m someone that cares about this topic and issue and, and, and yet I’m unclear. I was thinking last night, you know, how do we make this more transparent. And of course, you know, we could try to regulate it. Of course, if we could get the federal government to pass federal guidelines, that’d be fantastic. What’s the level of optimism for that right now? Not so great, right? One thought I have, I was thinking like, is there a way, like, could we get a big retailer to basically put stickers on things that have these messages on them with an explanation. Well, all of a sudden, millions of people would get a little sticker, and even if you bought something from another retailer, the sticker on that one would remind you repeatedly what it is. The challenge is that the retailers, of course, make more money if we throw more things away. That’s where I got caught last night. And you know, again, are there examples of big retailers driving change? For sure. Like, I love to use the example of when Walmart moved away from incandescent light bulbs. They did it overnight. Walmart gets a lot of bad press, but let me tell you, they made an enormous impact on the environmental draw of light bulbs in America just by saying they were going to do it. Now they made more money by moving away from incandescent. So again, I’ll throw it out. That’s my sense. Education. Maybe we can work with a big retailer to help us. Because as evidenced my blundering it up already. I literally, less, what went 12 hours later. I’ve already bungled it up. So yeah.
Brian Roe: The key for education is having it accessible to the person at the point they need it. And so, some, you know, interactions with retailers and in increasingly availability through AI bots and things like that, which are oftentimes could be co-branded with retailers. Have to be careful about these secondary motivations of the retailers, obviously to sell more. Which is natural, but also then things on the refrigerator, things on packages. These are where educational moments can happen when they’re proximate to the actual actions being taken.
Ben Chapman: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to belabor the labeling point, but I agree a hundred percent that it’s this challenge, right? It’s that there’s this, we’ve established that we put these on there and people kind of expect them and they look for them. And then they throw stuff out when it goes past it. And we don’t often talk about, well, what goes behind. What was all the information that went into it and was it, well, it tastes the best before this time. It’s not about anything other than quality. And there are lots of reasons why retailers and the food industry don’t want to change that. I’ll go back to, I guess, where I started today with leftover rice and social media. I think that’s an area that this conversation with the folks in this room we’re not there. We’re not in that space. We’re not always, and I’ll give TikTok as an example. You know, it’s been sold as of this morning, and so it sounds like it’s going to be around for a while. Our group, when we jumped into the world of social media and TikTok and food safety, you know, we might get a few a few hundred people go to a website or look at things on Instagram. But we’re talking like hundreds of thousands of people getting this information in their feed. And if we’re really looking at targeting younger generations, that’s where we need to go. And I’ll speak a anecdotally, as a father of a 17-year-old and 15-year-old boy, and also a youth hockey coach. All these kids, they’re consuming, like they’re not going to CNN. They don’t consume, you know, ESPN for their sports highlights. They really are on their phone and the feed that they get is where they’re learning what their decision should be. And they’re taking that information to their schools and asking their teachers about something they’ve seen. So really, we’ve got to get there. We’ve got to figure out how to be part of it. And it’s not like, Hey, let’s find an influencer and get them to talk about food waste. Because that’s not genuine. It’s that we have to generate this interest and it’s hard and it takes time and it’s frustrating. All of that stuff is where I feel we need to go with education on this. And it’s uncomfortable because truthfully, the group who’s in the room, we’re not even the target audience. We just happen to know who we think the target audience should be, and we need to figure out who knows how to get to those audiences.
Gavan Fitzsimons: Just, just one last thought, and I totally agree with that. I mean, social media is the way to reach the kids. How do we reach the adults? And it’s sort of combining lots of things that were just said. It’s point of decision is where you need the information, right? So, refrigerators are a point of decision. Children are a possible pathway to influence kids. Dumb idea or maybe dumb idea just popped as we were talking, as Brian was talking, what about sending fridge magnets to the children that explain what these food labels mean and they put it on the fridge magnet. And now every time I go to open my fridge, I’m reminded what these different labels mean, and perhaps that will lead me to reduce less waste and maybe not eat the thing that’s really bad for me. That’s the kind of low hanging fruit that I think we want to try to identify, because that could potentially change a behavior.