Why food waste persists despite abundance

How can a world that produces more than enough food still leave millions of people struggling to put a healthy meal on the table?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Jordan Schenck, CEO of Flashfood, about the growing paradox at the heart of our global food system. Grocery prices are climbing, families everywhere are making harder choices at the checkout, and food banks are seeing rising demand. Yet at the same time, vast quantities of perfectly edible food never make it onto a plate.

Jordan shares the startling scale of the problem. In North America alone, billions of pounds of edible food are thrown away every year, including huge volumes from grocery stores themselves.

Fresh produce, meat, and dairy often end up discarded even though they remain safe and nutritious to eat. The result is a system where food waste and food insecurity grow side by side, despite a supply chain that already produces far more calories than the world needs.

Flashfood is attempting to change that equation with a simple but powerful idea. Through its marketplace app, the company partners with grocery retailers to sell surplus food at steep discounts before it reaches the landfill.

Shoppers gain access to fresh groceries at far lower prices, while retailers recover value from inventory that might otherwise be lost. What emerges is a rare triple win for shoppers, grocers, and the environment.

During our conversation, Jordan explains how consumer behavior, retail expectations, and supply chain logistics have shaped today's food waste problem. She also shares how technology and data are beginning to shift the system in a different direction.

Flashfood is now working with more than two thousand grocery partners across North America and serving over a million users, using data and AI to help retailers price surplus inventory more effectively and move products before they are discarded.But the story behind Flashfood is also personal.

Jordan reflects on her earlier experiences at Impossible Foods and as founder of the beverage brand Sunwink, and how those roles helped her see both the strengths and weaknesses inside modern food production.

Over time, she began to question whether the industry truly needed more products on shelves, or whether the bigger opportunity lay in fixing the inefficiencies that already existed.

Our discussion touches on the psychology of grocery shopping, the economics of surplus inventory, and the cultural expectations that lead retailers to overstock shelves in the first place.

We also explore why many consumers are more open to buying discounted food than retailers once believed, particularly as the cost of living continues to rise.

Perhaps most encouraging of all is the idea that solving food waste does not require entirely new supply chains or radical lifestyle changes. Sometimes it simply requires connecting the dots between food that already exists and the people who need it most.