About Us
Food on the Move: Innovation, Sustainability and Food Safety in the Age of Delivery
Mark McGlinn
The future of food delivery
Together, we can design, develop and implement food delivery systems that promote food safety and sustainability. We can eliminate the use of inappropriate packaging and improve our foodservice equipment. We can ensure that food labels which authenticate food items, always travel with the item. We can collaborate and create solutions that help restaurants and food retailers manage their food delivery requirements sustainably and safely.
Open Innovation and Change
Using an Open Innovation approach, Food on the Move encourages collaborative partnerships and an open exchange of ideas and information to help design and promote the introduction of highly innovative food service systems that improve product quality, provide full traceability of product, streamline and optimise operations, are designed with optimal sustainability credentials in mind and guarantee the safety of the product for consumers.
New Food Service Standards
Food on the Move invites and supports open dialogue between food service practitioners, food equipment manufacturers and food safety regulators to develop new operational and performance standards that will help us improve food safety, advance the capabilities of our food delivery systems and provide commercial benefit for businesses and consumers alike. Food Safety and Sustainability in Last Mile Delivery.
Past Conference
Food on the Move Today
Barbican Centre, London
March 27th, 2019
Our story thus far..
Food on the Move Today was conceived to help innovate the future of food delivery and to promote food security and food sustainability.
We started by looking at the changes to the food system wrought by the uptake of food delivery and the growing complexity and size of the dominant commercial delivery platforms. What we saw were increasing levels of waste, unsafe food management practices, displacement or lack of regulatory control, redundancy and reduplication across transport systems with the associated environmental degradation and some questionable labour practices, etc
We understood that by looking carefully at food delivery systems, we were seeing a microcosm of the larger food system itself, with all the challenges that urgently need addressing.
We thought however that if food delivery systems are here to stay, and we believe they are, we ought to ask ourselves, how could they be improved and what this might mean for the larger food system itself. The changes required seemed obvious: addressing the lapses around food safety, making sure food was transported at the right temperature, introducing food product traceability, ensuring products could always be recalled, ensuring the packaging was biodegradable and intervening where we could to ensure that drivers and those transporting the food, were trained to do so and paid accordingly. Providing consumers with timely and relevant information that would help them with their purchases, linked to an open delivery services platform, designed like a public service, etc, was also very much on our mind. It still is! Looking out at the vast amount of reduplication of transport on our roads, you do have to ask yourself the question: why don’t these private logistics companies, some of which are very large, speak to each other and share resource. Well, when you do that, you’re on the ‘road’ to a public service. We think something of this kind will begin to emerge soon.
In the end, we summarised our thoughts and asked what such a food delivery system would look like. The Food on the Move conference is the start of that conversation and we invite you in join us in thinking through the future of food delivery.
Why Focus on Food Systems?
Improving our food production, distribution and service industries is one of the major challenges of our time. With security risks, pervasive hunger, malnutrition, obesity and environmental degradation escalating, our current food system requires significant change. This will involve a fundamental rethinking of structures and systems. Envisioning alternative systems of food production and food service that will nourish and support the health of a growing global population and provide economic development and security to the communities that support and depend upon it, is vitally necessary now. Work in Food Systems Innovation is as rewarding as it is urgent.
Welcome to Food on the Move Today, working with innovators and food service professionals to improve food safety and sustainability in last mile delivery!