What makes me not believe it is that I read the study you're indirectly quoting[1]. I can't see how the articles you & the sibling comment could be written by a journalist with any other agenda than to deliberately misinform.

The 25% number is not 25% of food produced, but 25% of the waste in the supply chain being on the consumer side. Nowhere that I can see in the 2013 study cited does the FAO make the claim that "fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection", that number also encompasses e.g. people overbuying produce that goes bad etc.

By the criteria of the article you're citing if the production & distribution part of the supply chain got more efficient that scary 25% number would rise. Indeed if you read the study this is what's happened in industrialized countries, we have a higher food waste percentage on the consumer side because we have more relative savings in the rest of the supply chain.

1. http://www.fao.org/3/i3347e/i3347e.pdf

I have an anecdote too - I used to work for SAP and lead their FMCG practice in EMEA. We did many ERP projects for large grocery chains and we could see that a lot of their material waste was down to damaged good and expired goods. Two of the largest chains had a field in the their system to track items that had expired due to being left to rot on the shelves, the amount of fruit and veg that expired was large and it was mostly oddly shaped veg. We introduced a business process where the suppliers could only send produce that met a certain 'grade', this radically changed the amount of wastage on the store side but increased the wastage on the supply side.

Programmes like 'the odd bunch' where produce that looks funny is sold cheaper has gone some way to addressing the issue for certain grocery chains.

I don't believe there are any public studies on individual store wastage over this issue.

Wow. I know that folks prefer better looking produce, but I hadn't realized it was quite that dramatic.