Online grocery shopping is more than just a consumer convenience breakthrough – it’s likely to help farmers feed the world more efficiently.
According to Rabobank Group executive board member, Berry Marttin, there is also much more to be gained from technology which enables city office workers order lunch via a smartphone app instead of joining a queue at the sandwich bar.
It’s the sort of technology which promises to help cut Australia’s $10 billion annual household food waste bill and make feeding a ballooning global population more efficient and affordable.
Mr Marttin said the online revolution was speeding up food delivery from paddock to plate and cutting the need for wasteful storage and expensive supply chain handling processes.
Food purchases were arriving in a shopper’s pantry, refrigerator or lunchbox, fresher and tailored to the quantities and choices they preferred.
As an example, internet-based food delivery company, HelloFresh, claimed its 800,000 regular customers in Australia, North America and Europe eat produce within just three days of it being harvested.
Shoppers are delivered weekly boxes of farm fresh produce based on their household needs and accompanied by simple 30-minute recipes.
Technology “disrupters” such as Amazon and Uber are also competing with mainstream retailers in the online food market.
“Ten years ago I couldn’t buy food online, but now I can do the supermarket shopping from my computer or smartphone and it’s delivered to my home by a refrigerated van,” he said.
“I can order ready-made meals, or a sandwich at lunchtime. The choices are everywhere.”
This technology offered more than just a delivery service, because “it even knows what you like to eat and how much you want”.
Mr Marttin said food service providers and grocery retailers could now offer personalised menu and shopping list recommendations, with 90 per cent accuracy, based on past choices, nutritional needs and the quantities shoppers prefered.
“If food suppliers know what we want to eat, and when, they can more accurately predict product demand and co-ordinate with farmers to supply what you need – and that means less waste,” he said.
“We currently waste about a third of everything we buy to eat.
“In fact the world’s food waste generates enough CO2 gas to be equivalent to a whole country’s total carbon emissions – slightly less than the carbon produced by China or the US.
“For example, average Australian households typically cook about 20pc more spaghetti than is required when you make spaghetti bolognese.
“Up to a third of a loaf of bread regularly goes in the rubbish bin because it’s stale.”
Less food waste was critical given every 20 years the number of people depending on a farmer to feed them doubled.
Frustratingly, however the waste problem had been compounded by a rise in processed convenience foods and snacks which had dumbed down young consumers’ understanding of how to cook.
“Very few children learn to cook early in life, but they know how to put a coin in a vending machine to get a can of Coke,” Mr Marttin told the recent Rabobank international Farm2Fork event in Sydney.
More than 2b people were now overweight, a third of whom were obese.
Conventional market supply chains also wasted big volumes of food before it even reached the consumer.
About 2pc of perishable products were lost to waste at the wholesale market point, 5pc during warehouse storage, and another 5pc in the supermarket.
While the new technology-driven supplier HelloFresh boasted a three-day “farm to fork” timeline for almost 8 million meals every month, the conventional supply chain required two days just to get bulk produce to the wholesale point.
By day four it could be sitting in a warehouse, reaching a supermarket by day six, and finally in consumer’s kitchen about 10 days after it left the farm.
It was tempting to dismiss online food shopping as little more than a fad mostly supported by inner city consumers with plenty of disposable income, but Mr Marttin said internet sales were set to account for at least 10pc of fresh food retailing in Europe and China by 2025.
Other growth areas included food service industries, convenience stores and premium food and lifestyle retailers.
In the Netherlands new smart distribution networks and greater consumer shopping choices were likely to cut mainstream retail sales from a 75pc market share in 2015 to about 50pc by 2025.
In China traditional retail share was tipped to shrink from almost 40pc to about 25pc as online food service and hypermarket options expanded.
Given 60pc of the world’s population lived in Asia Mr Marttin said Australian farmers could not ignore the trends and technologies shaping supply chains servicing some of our biggest consumer markets.
The world’s biggest food import regions, Asia and Africa-Middle East, already had the biggest middle class segments and they were growing fast as the planet’s population zoomed towards 9.5b by 2050.