How can food loss and waste management achieve sustainable development goals?

The main purpose of this literature review is to establish a state of the art of food loss and waste management system that addresses the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal number 12: sustainable consumption and production. The paper constitutes a detailed summary of recent literature on the concepts, product categories, causes, solutions, and research challenges surrounding food loss and waste management. The contribution of this article is a new classification of the causes, solutions and research challenges, based on diverse existing classifications. Solutions for reducing food loss and waste include awareness raising, business process redesign, integrated supply chain models, redistribution, recovery, and disposal. Several research direction propositions came out of this literature review: developing standardised and up-to-date data collection and concept definitions; analysing the 'awareness of the need' concept in redistribution; studying consumer behaviour; examining the performance of local versus global logistics networks in terms of food loss and waste; and identifying the role of packaging in food loss and waste and greenhouse gas emission reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]