The second SAVE FOOD meeting is slated for Sept. 26, 2016 in Spain at the Ateneo de Madrid.

The event — which is being co-organized by the Spanish Exporters and Investors Club along with the business association AECOC/GS1 Spain — will be dedicated to the issues of food waste and loss in relation to the various stages of the food value-added chain.

In a year without the interpack trade fair (held every three years in Düsseldorf, Germany), this meeting serves as a gathering point for more than 140 industry partners partners and several hundred NGOs and research institutes, who are registered at the FAO (UN Food and Agricultural Organization) in the SAVE FOOD Network.

Speakers at the meeting include representatives of industry and retail companies such as PepsiCo and the Spanish supermarket chain Eroski. And, high-ranking policy-makers from the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment as well as the French government will also participate.

The program will be rounded off by presentations from the FAO, companies from the primary sector and the packaging industry.

The individual lectures will be followed by a round-table discussion on whether consumers are sufficiently informed about dealing with food. The participants, which include food producers, retailers, policy makers and (state) consumer protection organizations, will discuss issues such as the best-before date, methods of food preservation and responsible consumption.

The meeting will close with the “Leftover Cuisine Cocktail Lunch”, organized by the retail trade association Grupo IFA.

The event also includes the interactive SAVE FOOD exhibition, which features detailed visualizations of the scale of international food loss and waste, and provides an overview of the various projects of the SAVE FOOD Initiative along with information about the involvement of individual member companies and associations.

The SAVE FOOD Initiative is a cooperation between the world food program of the United Nations, FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), the United Nations’ Environment Program (UNEP) and Messe Düsseldorf launched to fight worldwide food loss and waste.

SAVE FOOD seeks to network between the relevant players in business, politics and research, stimulating dialogue and help to find solutions along the food value-added chain. In May 2011, SAVE FOOD was launched with an international congress and exhibition as part of interpack, the world’s leading trade fair for the packaging sector and associated processing industry.