Food waste at the wholesale supply centers

The world wasted 1.05 billion tonnes of food in 2022 in retail, food services and households alone, about 19% of everything available to consumers. The figure comes from the Food Waste Index Report 2024, by the United Nations Environment Programme, released on March 27, 2024. Before that point, FAO estimates that about 13% of food is lost between harvest and retail. The wholesale supply centers sit exactly in that middle stretch, where fresh food changes hands every day.

What happened

The UNEP report, covered by UN News, framed waste as a global problem and not only one of rich countries. Households accounted for about 60% of the volume, 631 million tonnes, and the difference in household waste per person between high-income, upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income countries was just 7 kilos a year. All this in a world where, according to the same coverage, 783 million people were going hungry.

In Brazil, the place where this account becomes visible is the wholesale fresh-food trade. The 54 centers tracked by Conab sold 16.6 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables in 2025. At the largest of them, the Ceagesp market in the city of São Paulo, an average of 10,053.81 tonnes of food comes in per day, according to the company's own data published by Exame in November 2023. In that report, done during a heat wave, Ceagesp reported discarding 242.58 tonnes in a single day, 2.41% of the volume, a figure that includes inedible parts such as straw, peel and packaging, and which the company considered within normal levels.

Why it matters

Even small percentages become tonnes when the volume is large. Fruit and vegetables spoil quickly, and whatever doesn't find a buyer in time loses commercial value within hours. Part of the loss is logistics and refrigeration. Another part is information: the product that didn't reach those who needed it at the right moment.

Target 12.3 of the UN's 2030 Agenda calls for halving per capita food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reducing losses along production chains by 2030. A little over three years remain. At the same time, according to IBGE, 27.6% of Brazilian households experienced some degree of food insecurity in 2023. The distance between the food left over and the table that goes without is, in large part, a distance of connection.

In Bairo's view

For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, hunger is, to a large extent, a connection problem. In his reading, the box of tomatoes too ripe for the next day's trip, in a market pavilion before dawn, and the empty refrigerator a few kilometers away are the same problem seen from different sides. He argues that technology should play a modest and decisive role: giving warning in time.

Bairo is betting on a direct connection between grower, trader and buyer, with quotes based on CEASA and Conab data, so that the product finds a destination before it becomes a loss. For him, when the price is visible and the buyer is one tap away, less food is left without a destination at the end of the day. And whatever is still left over should have an organized path to those who need it.

Where this meets the ecosystem

Two fronts founded by Bairo meet in this fact. CEASA Bank is an agribusiness financial platform that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution; it is not an authorized bank. Its proposal is to give growers and traders a quote with artificial intelligence fed by CEASA and Conab data, which helps them sell at the right time.

Instituto CEASA is the humanitarian front. The proposal is a factory that uses the supply centers' surplus as raw material and, through autoclave processing, produces long-lasting food, with a verifiable record of where it came from, when it was processed and where it went. It is a project being set up, which depends on partners: supply centers, growers, industry, government and organizations already working on food security.

Sources

• UN News, "With 783 million people going hungry, a fifth of all food goes to waste", 03/27/2024 (UNEP's Food Waste Index Report 2024): news.un.org
• Exame, "Ceagesp diz que perda de alimentos no atacado está em nível normal, apesar da onda de calor" (Ceagesp says wholesale food loss is at a normal level despite the heat wave), 11/17/2023: exame.com
• Conab/Prohort, sales at the Ceasas in 2025, 07/28/2026: gov.br/conab
• UN Brazil, Sustainable Development Goal 12 (target 12.3): brasil.un.org
• Agência Brasil, "Moradores do campo ainda são mais afetados por insegurança alimentar" (Rural residents are still the most affected by food insecurity), April 2024 (PNAD Contínua, IBGE): agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br

Read also

• Ceasa surplus against hunger
• How food lasts two years without refrigeration
• Brazil's Ceasas moved R$ 68.7 billion in 2025
• Instituto CEASA: what it is and why it matters