Tetra Pak Workshop Highlights Critical Middle to Strengthen India’s Food Security

Leading organizations including NIFTEM, ICAR, TERI, UNIDO, Nestlé, PepsiCo, BASF, IFPRI and the Good Food Institute (GFI), among others, participated in the workshop, which focused on greater collaboration, innovation and sustainable solutions across India’s food systems.

The event commenced with a keynote address by Shri Siraj Hussain, Former Secretary, Ministry of Food Processing Industries and Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare. Raising the question, “How can we bring innovation and technology to build a more resilient, efficient and much more sustainable supply chain in India?”, he highlighted that India’s food security challenge extends beyond increasing production to minimizing food losses through improved preservation, processing and supply-chain systems. He stressed the importance of leveraging innovation and technology to strengthen the resilience, efficiency and sustainability of India’s food systems.

Dr. Rajbir Singh, Deputy Director General (Agricultural Extension), ICAR, then spoke about how the growth in food production reflects the resilience of India’s agricultural system. He said the focus going forward must be on reducing post-harvest losses from the current 15–20% to around 5% by 2047, while improving nutrient-use efficiency, mechanization and water-use efficiency.

“At present, overall post-harvest losses are around 15–20%, and we want to reduce them to around 5% by 2047,” he added.

A central theme of the discussions was the need to strengthen the “critical middle” of the food value chain—the infrastructure and systems connecting agricultural production with consumption, including aggregation, processing, packaging, storage, logistics and distribution.

Participants underscored the importance of strengthening integrated food systems through better coordination among stakeholders, improving farmer access to technology and markets, adopting digital solutions for supply-chain efficiency, promoting circular economy approaches to food systems and scaling evidence-based interventions that simultaneously address food security, climate resilience and food loss and waste reduction.

The roundtable also highlighted the need to strengthen food security and resilience across India’s food systems, reduce food loss and waste through improved post-harvest management, processing, packaging and logistics, and invest in processing and packaging infrastructure and innovative technologies to extend shelf life, improve food availability and reduce losses across the food value chain.

Participants further emphasized the role of food processing, sustainable packaging and digital technologies in improving supply-chain efficiency and minimizing losses.

From a policy perspective, participants highlighted the need for agencies to collect more granular, ground-level data on food loss and waste to identify hotspots, inform targeted interventions and track progress. The discussions also emphasized that without specific and measurable targets for reducing Food Loss and Waste (FLW), efforts to address the issue are likely to remain only partially successful.

Participants therefore underscored the need to consider the inclusion of FLW reduction targets in India’s NDCs, alongside greater recognition of innovative technologies in food processing and packaging that can help India achieve these targets.

A key highlight of the event was the launch of the NIFTEM-Tetra Pak report on “GHG Emissions from Food Loss and Waste,” which presents research on the environmental implications of food loss and waste in India and reinforces the importance of reducing FLW as a pathway to improving food security while advancing climate action.

The workshop concluded with a shared commitment to deepen collaboration across sectors, strengthen evidence-based policymaking and data collection, promote investment and innovation across the critical middle of the food value chain, and identify actionable next steps to improve food security, reduce food loss and waste and build a more sustainable food ecosystem for India.

Tetra Pak is a world-leading food processing and packaging solutions company. Working with its customers and suppliers, it provides access to safe, nutritious food for hundreds of millions of people in more than 160 countries every day. With over 24,000 employees worldwide, the company commits to making food safe and available everywhere and promises to protect what’s good: food, people and the planet.