On November 27, 2024, Torus announced its first research paper on SSRN. The paper, Exploring Fundamental Causes of Food Waste and Direct Donations through Analyzing Existing Solutions and Discrete Event Simulations, was written by Zikang Jiang, Anthony Woo, David Chen, and Matthew Gao.
Studying why food waste persists
The paper starts with a broad problem: food loss and waste persist across the food supply chain even after years of investment in technical and organizational solutions. The authors examined organizations that reached a meaningful scale alongside solutions whose reach remained limited. Their goal was to identify the conditions that help a food-waste solution move beyond a small pilot.
That comparison placed information flow and resource allocation at the center of the analysis. Food may be available in one place while demand, transportation, storage, or timing sits somewhere else. A useful solution has to connect those parts of the system, not treat each handoff as an isolated problem.
What direct donation means in the paper
The authors describe direct donation as a method for moving edible surplus food directly to a person who needs it. The model tests how direct donations and food banks could work together, using each option where it fits the supply, demand, and timing of a donation.
Edible food and unavoidable food scraps need different destinations. The EPA’s Wasted Food Scale prioritizes preventing waste and donating suitable food before recycling the remaining scraps through options such as composting or anaerobic digestion.
Testing the idea with a discrete event simulation
The research uses a discrete event simulation to examine how direct donations could move through a larger food-recovery system. Instead of assuming that every donation follows the same path, the model represents individual events and handoffs over time. This lets the authors study how a direct-donation option might interact with the existing food-bank network.
The paper explores whether that combined system could make donation a more practical default for edible food that might otherwise be composted or sent to a landfill. Its scope is the structure of food recovery for edible food, where donation comes before composting.
How the research connects to Torus
Torus began with the operational work of collecting household food scraps, but the research examined the wider system around that work. Collection capacity, information, timing, and the destination of material all affect whether a solution can grow. Studying those relationships gave the team a clearer framework for evaluating food-waste programs and the bottlenecks that limit them.
Composting remains useful for material that is no longer suitable to eat. The paper’s direct-donation model addresses the edible portion earlier in the system, before it becomes a waste-management problem.
Read the paper
The full abstract, author list, keywords, and paper are available on SSRN. The paper covers food waste, information flow, resource allocation, supply and demand, optimization, food donation, and food banks.