**1. Introduction**

Feeding a global population of 9.5 billion by 2050 is anticipated to become one of the greatest challenges of our time [1–3]. Rapid population growth [1,3–7], decreasing agricultural productivity [8–10], climate change [3,10,11], natural resource scarcity [3,12], and biofuel production [3,13–18] collectively undermine the current and future capacity of global food production systems. The risk of food insecurity is no longer a challenge exclusive to lesser-developed countries. In Australia, one in six Australians reported having experienced food insecurity in 2016 [10], with an estimated 2 million people having sought food relief [19,20].

While there have been considerable effort to identify strategies to enhance and diversify current food production systems [4,5,9], of equal importance is an increasing realisation of significant inefficiencies in the global food system due to food loss and waste (FLW) [6,21–25]. Global FLW has been estimated to represent 27% to 50% of total agricultural production [26–31]. Annually, there is around 4 Mt or AUD8 billion worth of FLW in Australia, 33% of which is horticultural product [19,32,33]. Due to their relative perishability, horticultural products are considered particularly vulnerable to elevated losses. Until recently, reliable and systematic estimations of global FLW have been difficult to

determine, due to an absence of a universal and consistent quantification methodology for reporting and managing food removed from the food supply chain [31,34–36]. In response, the Food Loss and Waste Protocol was established in 2013, with the first international *FLW Accounting and Reporting Standard* ratified in June 2016 during the Global Green Growth Forum (3GF) in Copenhagen.

FLW within commercial food supply chains is shaped by multifarious contributors, including various types of production system inefficiencies and consumer behaviour [21,23,24,27,28]. Of increasing concern and importance is the discourse between the food marketing and consumer purchasing behaviour that is perpetuating FLW throughout the food supply chain [3,6,22,25,31,37,38]. Supermarkets showcase only premium and unblemished product, fabricating unrealistic expectations of how fruits and vegetables should appear. Accordingly, consumers often equate food safety and freshness with elevated cosmetic standards. In combination, these factors have created intrinsically wasteful food systems [1,3,19,22,24,25,27,29,31,35,39]. Private food policy and standards aligned with marketing campaigns often reinforce high levels of FLW via cosmetic product specifications and use-by-dates, driving losses up-stream within the food supply chain [3,19,37].

In seeking to address FLW, potential remediation strategies are predominantly directed at the consumer-end of the food supply chain, in part due to difficulties in quantifying loss at the primary production stages [6]. Highlighting this fact, a newly established protocol for quantification of FLW [40] specifically quantifies postharvest losses, deliberately excluding pre-harvest losses and consumer waste. There is a premise that commercial farms, operating highly mechanised and technology-centric agricultural production systems have achieved an optimum level of FLW minimisation [31,41]. While it is intuitive to presume low levels of FLW within technology-dense horticultural supply chains, there is increasing evidence to the contrary [21,22,25,27,28,42] proposing that such production systems may in fact be more wasteful given the stringent adherence to private food policy and standards.

This study sought to quantify horticultural postharvest losses associated with a highly mechanised commercial tomato enterprise with access to appropriate and effective postharvest handling equipment and infrastructure. The aim of this study was to document accumulative and overall postharvest losses, and to better understand the impacts of technology (e.g., packing shed mechanisation and grading/sorting automation), supply chain length (distance, time, and biophysical conditions), and private food policy and standards (i.e., supermarket standards and product specification) on FLW. To do so, a multi-disciplinary approach was undertaken, based on quantitative documentation of postharvest losses and handling conditions, and qualitative techniques to identify the drivers of the loss and contextualise the findings within the food supply chain.
