This panel explores how businesses can meaningfully reduce food waste while improving profitability, resilience, and climate performance. Where along the value chain are interventions most material, and how can companies move from diversion to true waste prevention through smarter procurement, product design, AI-enabled shelf-life tracking, and logistics? What business models – such as secondary markets, upcycling, or data-driven forecasting – have proven scalable, and what barriers remain? We’ll explore how current federal and state policies shape incentives and whether emerging tools like extended producer responsibility or mandatory waste reporting could accelerate change. How do opportunities and constraints differ for rural producers versus urban retailers and foodservice operations? How can companies quantify food loss and waste within Scope 3 reporting and ensure that circular solutions also deliver genuine environmental and social benefits? Panelists will identify practical research and policy priorities to bridge the gap between commitment and measurable impact. Panelists:
- Lauren Davis, North Carolina A&T State University
- Muriel Williman, North Carolina Composting Council, City of Durham Solid Waste Management
- Leonard L. Williams, NC A&T, Center for Excellence in Post-Harvest
- Rachel Surtshin, Duke University
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 Robert Fetter 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
Robert Fetter: I’m Rob Fetter. Nice to see all of you here. And I’m really excited to present this panel on the business approaches to reducing food waste and to some extent food loss through the system. I’m excited to present this panel of professionals who work deeply with businesses and also people who have worked with businesses themselves in the past and inject this sort of private sector reality and very innovative approaches into the conversation. I’ll start with a question where I’d like each of our panelists to introduce yourself. If you could sort of help us understand the structure of the system and, in your experience, what causes food loss and waste? Where along supply chains is it greatest? What foods and regions are most at risk? What processes in businesses contribute most to food loss and waste?
Rachel Surtshin: My name is Rachel Surtshin and I’m a Master of Environmental Management student here at Duke. I just started in the fall and before this I was in corporate sustainability both at Kroger and at Walmart. When I was at Walmart, I was working specifically on food loss and waste quantification across the value chain. And at Kroger I worked on food loss and waste measurement strategy in addition to a range of other sustainability topics like climate and biodiversity and nature. I think, you know, being in the retail space, thinking of the graph that we all saw last night, we’re a space where we have kind of a lot of public scrutiny over food loss and waste. But also, you know, in looking at the value chain, it’s one of the smaller segments. Not to say that it’s not very important in terms of the causes of food loss and waste at retail. I thought it was really well said last night that food is relatively inexpensive, but labor is very expensive. From the perspective of a business owner, we’re talking about employee hours, and you know what it takes to actually successfully execute. For instance, really great markdowns for sell through really great donation programs. And I think from the employee perspective, we’re looking at frankly, overworked to underpaid folks who are being tracked on a really wide variety of financial metrics for each store. And so, thinking of it as an added piece to that, obviously it’s incredibly important in terms of kind of the location distribution. At Walmart we were looking at food loss and waste, for Walmart, US and some of the international branches too. And that was really interesting because we got to see a lot of variability not only in the types of diversion options that were available, but also, you know, in the food banking networks in different countries. At Kroger we were a US based company with branches in most of the regions here in North Carolina. You would know us as Harris Teeter. And it’s a slightly different model there. There’s a lot more autonomy of the different business units. And so, you know, from an organizational perspective, it’s thinking about taking these top-down goals related to food loss and waste reduction and making sure that they’re being an implemented, really at the ground level. And so, I would say that the people I saw making the biggest impact were folks working, you know, on the ground, in the divisions and stuff. And actually, working with managers a lot of times doing this having a job title like Environmental Health and Safety Manager. Those were the folks that I really saw showing up every day and being, being heroes in this space. A lot to mention in terms of types of food. I think this is something that you can really research and look into in the ReFed Insights engine. But ultimately, I think that as was said last night, this is a particular issue that has real bipartisan appeal. And so, in this minute of polarization, I do think that from a corporate perspective, it’s a relatively risk-free thing to incorporate into a corporate social responsibility strategy for that reason. And that’s why I think it’s going to continue to be important regardless of these very turbulent times that we’re in. Thank you.
Leonard Wiliams: Good morning. My name is Leonard Williams and I’m currently director for the Center for Excellence and Post Harvest Technologies on the campus of the North Carolina Research campus in Kannapolis. I’m also a faculty member at North Carolina A&T State University in Department of Family & Consumer Sciences. My expertise or what I bring to the food loss or food waste industry is more on the side of food safety or microbiology. But I’m a, if you can say, I’m a laboratorian. My research and my team, which I lead about 45 to 50 research scientists, is we’re trying to find ways to upcycle a lot of these food products. More importantly, develop new value-added products. As you’re aware, most consumers don’t understand, as my colleagues have mentioned, some of the labeling that goes behind how food is regulated and how it is consumed. But more importantly, how it’s produced. We’re trying to find ways to take in some of those, what we call small pieces of the food. Such as most people don’t know that when you eat peanuts, a lot of people don’t like those skins on the peanut, so they just throw ’em out. Well, we actually throw away about 50.1 megatons of peanut skins away every year. So, our scientists, including myself, we’re trying to take some of those products and add value back to it, such as developing ice cream believe it or not. Or developing new immunotherapy technologies that can help fight hypersensitivity to peanuts. So that’s a unique way of taking some of these food loss or food waste and adding value back to those products.
Muriel Williman: That’s awesome. My name’s Muriel Williman. I work for the City of Durham Solid Waste Department. I’m a little different here, in an academic space. I’ve been working in local government and nonprofits. In North Carolina for about 30 years. So, I’m very North Carolina centric. But, you know, less of a global picture, although I think that North Carolina can certainly provide a snapshot of what’s happening other places in the country. I’m also board president of the North Carolina Composting Council, I’ve been in that position for seven years, which is a chapter of the US Composting Council. I’m chair of the Advocacy and Advisory Committee where we try to build relationships with the General Assembly in North Carolina to build legislation that supports composting and the composting industry in North Carolina. I come from sort of the end of the line, but I always say you have to think of the end at the beginning when you’re talking about waste. I’ve been in garbage for a long, long time. Once you get in, it’s hard to get out is what I’ve learned. But I’ve worked a lot with trying to message with people, you know. It’s always been my dream to kind of figure out how to change people’s behavior around all kinds of waste. Not just food waste, but you know, that’s what we’re talking about here. When I talk to people about the different steps that they can take, from my perspective convenience is the enemy. This is not news, but honestly, people just want to pack it up, they want to reel it in, they want to get it done, and they want to get it out of their way. And they don’t necessarily think about what happens next. And it’s really, you know, critical thinking, right? Like and then what happens, and then what happens, and then what happens. And trying to encourage people to kind of think beyond themselves can manifest tremendous change. I worked in for Orange County solid waste for almost 20 years. We reduced the county’s waste by 60% over 15 years with integrated waste diversion program that included robust recycling, robust composting. I sold compost bins and we worked with our local composter, which is actually 45 miles away from where I was in Orange County to compost food waste from businesses. So even at the end of the day if you’re working in a restaurant, you want to pack it up and bring it out. And even if you have a food waste cart out there, you may end up throwing the garbage in there too. And that kind of ruins the whole prospect. But it’s dark, it’s late. You’re underpaid. There are all these other complex issues. I feel like the support, both from the managerial perspective where the needs and concerns that make the opportunities for food waste reduction easier, but then are also supported with the things that they need. I’m also a fan of community-based social marketing where you find out from the community themselves what their needs are, what their understanding is, and how they get their messaging. And then actually use that practice to promote the message that you want. From the North Carolina Composting Council perspective, we’re working with the North Carolina General Assembly to try to add composting to the definition of agriculture. And I’ve had Assembly members say to me, isn’t it already? They’re farmers, they know that we need to add nutrients back to the soil in order to grow healthy food, in order to reduce the need for pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. All those things that are costly. And the economic message is the one as well as the agricultural message that really communicates to the General Assembly, to businesses, to households.
We’re all concerned about the environment, it seems. It’s too vast to really wrap your head around. But when you start talking about the bottom line and how waste impacts your pocketbook, whether you are a individual, a household, a school, a community, then build that political support. You’ve got the grass tops advocacy that helps support the programs that people want and will use to help reduce their household and individual and business costs so you can kind of meet in the middle and really have impact. I’ve seen it. Political support building programs that work locally to really mitigate and reduce waste.
Lauren Davis: Good morning, everyone. My name is Lauren Davis. I’m a professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina A&T. My area of research is supply chain management, both for-profit and the humanitarian sector. In terms of my contribution to this conversation, I’ve done a lot of work with my graduate students and colleagues from other universities, some of my colleagues are in the room, exploring hunger relief supply chains. And, specifically working with Feeding America food banks to understand how they operate and what are some of the challenges.
In response to this question about structures that contribute to food waste within the supply chain, one of the things that struck me in terms of the conversation last night around consumer behavior and consumer preferences. First of all, in any supply chain matching, supply and demand is always a challenge that has to be dealt with, right? And it’s particularly challenging when you’re dealing with the highly perishable commodity like food, right? If you think about all of the stages within the supply chain to move the food from the farm to the retailer, to the consumer, and it has to be temperature controlled, right? There’s lots of opportunities for loss to occur during that movement process, compounded with the fact that you have highly, maybe picky I’ll say, because I’m thinking about my own children, consumers, right? Like, who want perfectly round apples, perfectly red, without any kind of little minor blemish, right? I’m tempted to throw it away, right? And again, the confusion around the labels that was mentioned last night also contributes to the supply demand mismatches. Now the food banks are standing in the gap. They’re ready to recover this surplus food, right? But again, we have to make sure that we’re not shifting the problem further down the supply chain. Just redistributing the waste into another stream. One thing that can contribute to additional waste within the hunger relief supply chain is one, not having the infrastructure to support recovery of the food. When you think about infrastructure, you can think about some I’m going to say partner agencies, but food pantries may not have appropriate refrigeration or cold chain capacity to take fresh food. Even though they would like to provide that to the neighbors that they serve. They may not have transportation resources to collect the food. These organizations will primarily rely on volunteers, some of whom may be seniors. And you may not have the workforce to support sorting through the food, making sure that it’s available and pushed through to the right location. And then again, there’s consumer preferences that have to be considered both in the food insecure side as well, right? We have to make sure we understand what is it that the neighbors that are being served actually need. They may have health related conditions that have to be taken into consideration. You can’t just push well intentioned food down the supply chain and fix the potential waste problem at one stage, making it a new problem for someone else. Other aspects that can contribute to potential food waste is around just logistics and being able to match available supply at donor sites with agencies or people who actually need it. If you think about potential waste that can occur on the farm there’s opportunities there for gleaning, but again, it requires resources available to actually make that happen in a timely fashion so that the food does not get wasted. So those are just some of the contributing factors within the supply chain that increase food waste and loss.
Robert Fetter: One of the things I really like about this panel in particular is that we really span kind of the whole supply chain from farm and farm gate close to farm to point of sale retailers who assemble private label goods and branded goods, to systems perspectives where both me and Lauren especially work. You know, sort of across the system including households. The question I have is about reflecting on the people, the processes, the systems, the institutions that become enablers or barriers to reducing food waste. What are some of the most effective approaches that you’ve seen to overcoming those barriers? And Lauren, this is where the particular hook is for you. As you reflect on examples where those barriers have become enablers, what are some unintended consequences that you’ve seen in the system?
Lauren Davis: A couple of things come to mind. First, an important issue within this food banking community is making sure everybody has equal access to the food. And we can think about access from not only the food distribution perspective, but also from the transportation perspective. One of the things that is potentially a barrier is assuming that people can get to the food. If I bring the food to a food pantry, the folks that need it actually can make it there to access it, right? And that is not necessarily the case, right? One of the ways that I’ve seen that food banks or hunger relief organizations trying to deal with that is bringing the food closer to the people through mobile distribution options. And another thing that is important to bring up is this use of data to drive decision making. Issues around collecting additional data. And then how do you take that data and just make a make the story come alive with what it is that you need so that you can make better decisions, right? We know in the retail sector, for example, you know, with the advance of AI, retailers are getting better at forecasting demand and as a result there’s potentially less opportunities in the retail sector for those type of donations to come to the food bank. So that’s the sort of the tradeoff here, right? Better information, better technology, better systems closing that supply demand mismatch gap. It creates an additional challenge for the hunger relief supply chain because you might have had a traditional steady stream of donations coming in from this particular source that now has somewhat dried up. Which then also increases competition within the food rescue landscape as well for this potential resource. Particularly if you have multiple organizations operating in the same geography. That’s another sort of challenge around interventions that are good, but also creating additional problems or headaches or new problems to think about, I would say. I’ll stop there.
Muriel Williman: That’s great. I’m also interested in accessibility to data and one thing that was mentioned last night was waste characterization studies on the national level to try to find out how much food is being wasted. But I’m also a fan of that at the at every level. It’s highly accessible and, you know, depending on what program you’re trying to drive, having that baseline data is really critical. I was involved in a cafeteria waste audit where we found that 80% of what was thrown away was milk. And part of the problem there was that North Carolina nutrition rules for schools had changed. Cafeteria workers were not required to hand every child a carton of milk. Previously that had been true, but that law was changed given lacto intolerance and, you know, other issues. Plus, just tastes like kids don’t maybe like milk. They’ll only take the chocolate, but they don’t want the white, you know, forget about skim anyway. And so, they’re taking the carton because they’re supposed to, and then throwing it away. 80% of the food waste, one cafeteria, one audit. It took an hour afterwards. And so what we ended up doing, there was a tip and recycle program where the kids learned to tip out the milk, recycle the carton, and without any other resources that milk went down the drain. But the custodians were in favor of it because they didn’t have to carry heavy wet bags of dripping garbage anymore to the dumpster. And it was very informative to the child nutritionist who could educate the cafeteria workers.
So that’s just one small example. We do waste characterization studies for local government as well to find out what are the components of the waste stream so that we can identify the low hanging fruit, no pun intended to really build programs that will have meaningful impact. You can do it whether you’re a restaurant, institution like Duke University, from the dorms, from the cafeteria. Wherever you’re trying to impact the waste stream, identify what’s leaving and you can impact it upstream. Maybe you’re throwing away a lot of different types of Styrofoam or other types of packaging waste for items that don’t necessarily need to be wrapped. How can that be reduced upstream, you know, supply and demand. We always want these full racks of whatever. It’s just an American culture question as well. I’m just a big fan of thinking about like a waste characterization study as a strategy for both upstream reductions. Identifying what’s coming in, how to manage it most effectively to reduce it before it goes out. And then also find out how can you build programs that help support the diversion at the end? It’s not all going to a landfill where it’s then producing methane that’s impacting greenhouse gas emissions and leachate, which is directly impacting the local community potentially.
So, that’s my pitch. The unintended consequences I’ll say though, California is a great example. Someone brought up the California food waste ban in the previous panel. Excellent job everybody, by the way. I loved it. But I question the data because, you know, the ease of being able to compost increased food waste. No, I mean, that is the data, but it’s also people just throwing away whatever. It’s like, I’m going to throw away my to-go container box and all I’m going to throw away my bag of, you know, sprouting potatoes bag and all. And the waste has increased. The contamination for the composters has increased to the point where that’s an unanticipated major, major problem in California because the composters have to be able to produce a quality compost if they’re going to sell that upcycled value added product at the end. The California Food Waste Ban is touted as being powerful legislation, but it’s had some really strong unintended consequences where it’s not actually maybe addressing food waste the way that they had hoped to.
Leonard Wiliams: My colleagues make valid points especially if we’re talking about some of the barriers that may impact quality of foods. Especially when we’re thinking about downstream with post-harvest loss. Especially post-harvest quality. Consumers typically are well educated on how well and what they should do with their foods once it leaves the farm or the grocery store, but I think they don’t understand the perishability of those different food products. An example is when you get home, typically, especially with fresh fruits and vegetables, we don’t know that we should rinse and sort them appropriately. Most households would take all the fruits and put it into a fruit basket including those produce or samples that are high producers of ethylene gas. Essentially what you’re doing is you’re increasing the ripening of all of your fruits that are in close proximity of, let’s say bananas, which is one of the highest producers of ethylene gas. Now you’re taking the bananas, your oranges, your apples, all of those excellent produce and food samples are fruits. And you’re thinking you could get maybe a week, two weeks if you have kids, maybe less. But then you find out two days later you’re starting to see mold, fungi, and this leads to taking the whole bucket for the foods and discarding them. I think one message as several of my colleagues from the previous panel mentioned is messaging education. And that will help with potentially reducing food loss.
And then my final note is from the microbial standpoint, a lot of us want to go into producing foods for ourselves. That seems to be the push right now. Perhaps some of you all already are doing that with having your own laying hens in your yard or having your own garden. But you have to understand how climate control plays an important role in the perishability of your crops. More importantly, if you have free range, I’m going to use chickens as an example. If you have free range chickens, how that could potentially decrease the shelf life or the safety of your products because the birds will now be pecking and defecating all over your crops. You then bring them back into your household and that potentially could contribute to multiple or multitude of food quality issues. The message that consumers should understand is the perishability of their food products.
Rachel Surtshin: Thanks. Hi. I have a couple thoughts on this solutions, unintended consequences. In my time at Kroger, one of the biggest impactors to where food waste was going was the launch of a partnership with a company called Divert. I’m sure a bunch of you in the crowd are aware of them, but I think what they’ve done is basically utilize back hauling. So basically, Kroger has empty trucks. The truck goes from the distribution center to the store, back to the distribution center. And Divert has leveraged these empty trucks so that Kroger basically then back hauls a lot of this food that is wasted back to the distribution center. Divert can pick it up and they have really importantly repackaging capabilities, which is that big saver in terms of labor. And so for Kroger, you know, launching the Divert anaerobic digestion program has been, I think, really game changing in terms of unintended consequences though. I think Divert does do work to donate food that that is still edible. But I think there’s this question of the solution that solves the business problem might not be the same solution that’s reaching to that like highest form of valorization, right? I’m personally really interested if anyone here knows more about animal feed. Those sorts of diversion pathways in this country, I’d love to learn more about it.
Speaking as a person who loves bargains, and maybe this is kind of biasing my interest, is this idea of how can retailers mark down foods in more effective ways? We have a great food co-op here in Durham and they do great produce markdowns and I always go in there looking for great buys and invariably spend extra money on some lovely breads and cheeses and such. But it’s this idea that this is the way to drive engagement with consumers to make more money, increase, sell through. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the last panel is we then just moving the burden onto consumers and just generating more consumer level food waste? And I think this is one of those tensions there.
Thinking about policy and thinking about, for instance, tax incentives for donation. I think this is great. I think this is definitely a motivator for retailers to donate, but I think it’s also worth recognizing that it shapes the sort of donation partners that they’re going to want to work with. If the amount of food that you donate is then something that you’re claiming on your taxes that requires an additional level of scrutiny. And I think that might be one of the reasons that certain retailers have preferences for working with certain networks, food banking networks, essentially. And so, what sorts of policy interventions can take those sorts of consequences into mind is an area of interest for me. Thank you.
Robert Fetter: Fantastic, thank you. I did in fact have a third question on policy, but I think we’re very close to time and I want to make sure that the audience has some time to ask questions.
Audience member: Hi, I’m Michelle Lewis. I’m with the Nicholas Institute but in my free time, which is relatively non-existent, I grow food for families in need and teach people to grow food. And we also distribute food. And I’m really glad that you all are talking about like food waste and distribution and supply chain issues because it’s not uncommon for one of our partners that’s a large food bank in the state to be like, oh, we have this produce, right? Because they know we grow food and they’ll show up with like recently it was like a crate of cabbage that was moldy, right? And so then we have to put volunteers to the work of peeling off moldy leaves because if we give people moldy food, they post about it on social media, right? And then that affects the work that like organizations are able to do in their community and like lessens their credibility. And so, I’m curious about if you know of any work that’s being done to educate like these food banks, like these large-scale distributors so that they fully understand how to handle food. How to distribute food. Because I think some of the issue is they’re just getting so much from farmers and they don’t know, they don’t have an end point, right? In some communities, like fresh produce doesn’t go as far right? What have you heard of that’s being done for education around issues like this so that these local community organizations have like better working relationships.
Lauren Davis: I think you hit on one key word that is important that I know I’ve heard is important in a food bank and community is relationships. So that experience that you had with the large food bank organization, they also want to make sure they don’t have that experience with their donors. Now as I mentioned earlier, food banks do rely on volunteers to do the sorting of the food, right? I did volunteer several times at food banks to sort the food, right? They do provide that initial education of how this food should be. Sorted package because it’s a huge, if it’s some highly perishable, like I worked with sweet potatoes, right? Then you have to look through each sweet potato, and I’m personally making an assessment of whether or not I think it’s edible or not, right? There is an opportunity for volunteers to maybe miss the mark on defining what’s edible. And I think it’s important to communicate because they are your supplier, right? Communicate with your supplier that we received a bad batch from you, right? Is it possible for you to, you know, educate your volunteers on how to properly deal with this food so that when we receive it, like you said, it doesn’t hurt our credibility with the neighbors that we are trying to work with. But again, it’s volunteer based. We have to provide that education and training and think about ways to make that education easy for volunteers and in a format that’s repeatable. If it’s a TikTok video or something like that, right? Because a lot of times it could be college students coming in do, or it could be, you know, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts coming in, right? Any community organization that’s coming in to do volunteer work. So how do we make sure that education material is palatable for the audience that’s doing the work?
Leonard Wiliams: Can I make just one quick statement? I agree wholeheartedly. Even though I’m not on the education side of things, more on the research side, we actually work with that where we’re developing new ways to reduce and extend shelf life for produce. But I agree, perhaps signage where you are showing the stages of degradation, and it would be kind of a go-no go scenario for people to receive the produce to cabbage in that case. Have pictures of saying this is the stages of proliferation of fungi. Yes, we receive it at this stage, no, if it has or looks this way. And that may help with having to receive products like that.
Muriel Williman: Can I just say really quick, this is not a solution, this is another problem, sorry. But it just like your staff then your volunteers were charged with peeling off the moldy leaves, but still being able to provide the part of the cabbage that was still edible and good, right? There’s another layer potentially of a requirement where not just only being able to identify, but also, I mean who doesn’t like cut off the bit of the moldy cheese and still eat the rest of the cheese. Peel off the wilting leaves and eat the center, right. We all do that. We all understand like, well, this is just the exterior that started to degrade. So how do we fold in processing. It is the upcycling piece perhaps? You know, and them building an entire meal or something like that, that is available. But I think, you know, because at that point, like people are on such a shoestring, you’re relying on volunteers. How are they going to all understand the same message? I feel like there’s another layer of opportunity here of, you know, just really of an intermediary that really process the material, pushes back the waste maybe back hauls the moldy strawberries back to Kroger. Sorry. Just say, and, you know, the boxes that are good can go to the kids that want to eat it. Anyway, another problem.
Lauren Davis: And I would just add, from my experience, food banks typically do not reject loads from donors. Again, because of that relationship building. Because if they start rejecting, then the donor may just overlook them completely when there is a higher quality load available. It is a lot of education and relationship building that has to happen. And again, it’s highlighting the resource capacity issues that exist throughout the hunger relief supply chain.
Audience member: Thank you. I’m a sociologist. I’ve done a lot of interviews with people who use food pantries, and my question is about the unintended consequences. It’s what you’ve been talking about, about what gets to the consumers. People for sure perceived that a lot of the food they got at food pantries was kind of weird things like. Spicy yogurt, or something like that. Like jalapeno yogurt. And then I met another person who studied it for more of a supply chain. And she said part of that was because of the tax incentives that companies get for donating their foods, which basically subsidizes if you make a risky choice with spicy yogurt, and it doesn’t work out. My question is, is that accurate? Because that’s kind of outside, you know, those kind of incentives of what trickles down. And or are there other kind of policy tax kind of places and in terms of what’s reaching the food banks and then the consumers?
Rachel Surtshin: I think so. I think like the tax incentives, what I noticed is that the tax incentives are realized kind of at this high corporate level in finance and accounting and a lot of the decisions about ordering and where stuff goes and why. At least at Kroger was happening more at the division and the store level. And I know that people are doing some really interesting work on forecasting, but from what I’ve seen, that’s something that’s still really being realized. Actually, I think that better ordering has not been something that’s been fully realized. And in terms of, you know, taking like basically the subsidization of risks on other product types, I think that’s a really valid point, right? We go into the store and, and do we need to see 20 types of salad dressing, 10 of which nobody’s really buying. And so yeah, I think in the kind of competitive retail space, they’re always looking to differentiate themselves from competitors with branding, with private brand items. It’s certainly a challenge and really, really tied to this kind of novelty aspect of that. That’s really a big part of marketing and merchandising. So not a great answer for you. Sorry.