Somewhere in the back of Haruki Nishimoto's kitchen there is a graph-paper notebook, water-stained on the cover, that contains four years of produce waste tallies from a mid-sized Osaka distribution hub. The number that fills the most space in that notebook is 34 percent. Not an estimate, not an industry average pulled from a trade association PDF — a figure Haruki calculated himself, route by route, week by week, during his time moving fruit and vegetables from the Osaka Central Wholesale Market out to restaurants and hotel kitchens across the Kansai region. This article is about where that number came from, what it actually measures, and why it is the honest founding document of Clay Crest Zone. The methodology matters here, because "food waste" is a phrase that gets used loosely, and Haruki's 34 percent means something specific — specific enough to be argued with, which is part of the point.

What the 34 percent actually counts

Haruki worked in produce logistics from 2014 to 2018 for a regional distributor that handled roughly 40 to 60 tonnes of mixed fruit and vegetables per week across three cold-chain routes in Osaka Prefecture. His 34 percent is not total post-harvest loss from farm to table — a figure that global bodies like the FAO typically cite in the 45-50 percent range for fruit and vegetables. His number is narrower and harder: it measures the share of inbound fruit that left the distribution hub as waste, downgrade, or unsold return within a single logistics cycle, defined as the 72-hour window from intake to final delivery. He started keeping the notebook in the second year after noticing that a recurring citrus order — primarily mikan from Ehime Prefecture and hassaku from Hiroshima — was arriving with a higher cull rate than the purchase orders anticipated. His supervisor called it "normal seasonal variation." Haruki started writing down the actual tonnage.

The mechanics of a Kansai distribution hub in the 2010s

The hub Haruki worked at was not unusual. It sat between the wholesale auction floor and the end buyer, a role that sounds simple and is not. Fruit arrived in auction lots, often in mixed-grade boxes, and the hub's job was to sort, repack, and route. The problem, as Haruki documented it, was timing: restaurant buyers in Osaka's Namba and Shinsaibashi districts placed orders with a 24-hour lead time, which meant the hub was constantly forecasting demand against perishables that had a narrowing quality window. When a forecast missed — and in his records, forecasts missed by more than 15 percent on roughly one week in three — the excess fruit moved into one of three categories he labelled in the notebook as R (returned to supplier at a loss), D (downgraded and sold at a steep discount, often to school canteens or factory cafeterias), and W (waste, disposed of without recovery). The W column was the one that grew.

Building the 34 percent, week by week

Haruki's method was straightforward. Each week he weighed fruit at intake using the hub's floor scales, then tracked each lot through its outcome: delivered as ordered, returned, downgraded, or disposed. He excluded vegetables from his personal tally because the hub's vegetable operation ran on a different forecasting model and he did not have access to the full intake records. His fruit-only dataset runs from April 2015 through March 2018, covering 156 complete weekly cycles. The 34 percent figure is a median, not a mean — he chose the median specifically because several weeks during the 2016 summer stone-fruit season skewed heavily toward waste due to a cold-chain breakdown, and he did not want those outlier weeks to make the typical week look worse than it was. The mean across the same period was 38.2 percent. Both numbers, he has said, were hard to look at.

What prompted the notebook in the first place

This is the part of the story that does not appear in any press release, because Clay Crest Zone has never written a press release. In late 2015, Haruki was assigned to a new citrus route serving a cluster of high-end hotel restaurants in the Umeda district. The hotels were buying premium fruit — the kind sold in individual gift boxes at department stores — and rejecting anything that did not meet their aesthetic specification for size and skin uniformity. The rejection rate on that route ran between 22 and 31 percent in the first three months. Haruki's supervisor absorbed this as a cost of doing business with prestige clients. Haruki instead started asking where the rejected fruit went. The answer, almost always, was W. That specific route, and that specific question, is the origin of the notebook. The 34 percent came later, after he had enough data to calculate it.

From a notebook to a cold-press machine

Haruki left the distribution company in 2018. He spent the following year reading everything he could find about what happens to culled or cosmetically rejected fruit at various points in the supply chain — processing plants, secondary markets, direct-to-consumer schemes, and juice operations. His research was practical rather than academic: he visited three juice producers in the Kansai region and one in Aichi Prefecture, attending intake days to watch how they sourced. What he observed was that the most reliable cold-press operations were the ones with a direct relationship to a specific distributor or farm co-operative, rather than buying on the spot market. The variable he kept coming back to was predictability: a juice operation that could commit to a weekly minimum volume could become a planned outlet for a distributor's surplus, rather than an opportunistic one. That framing — being a planned destination, not a last-resort buyer — became the supply model for Clay Crest Zone.

The numbers that shape the menu today

Clay Crest Zone's current sourcing involves a standing weekly agreement with two distributors and one farm co-operative in Wakayama Prefecture. The agreement specifies a minimum intake of fruit that would otherwise enter the D or W category by the distributor's own grading system. The practical result is a menu that changes composition week to week depending on what the surplus actually is, rather than a fixed menu built around a stable supply. In the first full year of operation, the team tracked intake and output volumes against Haruki's original notebook categories to see whether the model held. The waste figure on their own operation, measured by the same 72-hour window method, ran at 6.1 percent — a number Haruki is cautious about celebrating because, as he points out, a juice bar's tolerance for cosmetic imperfection is structurally much higher than a hotel restaurant's, which is most of why the number is lower.

Why this number matters beyond one bar

The 34 percent from Haruki's notebook is not a universal finding. It applies to one hub, across three routes, over a defined period, for fruit only. But it is also not nothing. Published research on post-harvest losses in developed-country food supply chains — including a 2019 review by the Institute of Food Technologists and a 2021 WRAP report on UK supply chains — consistently finds that loss rates at the distribution and retail stage for fresh fruit run between 20 and 40 percent, depending on how waste is defined and where in the chain it is measured. Haruki's figure sits comfortably within that range, which suggests his notebook was not anomalous. What it adds is granularity: a week-by-week record from inside a specific type of operation that normally does not publish its numbers. The data journalism team at Clay Crest Zone would like to see more notebooks like it.

The notebook is still in Haruki's kitchen. It has not been turned into a wall graphic or a brand story, which is a deliberate choice — it is a working document, not a decoration. If the 34 percent ever gets updated by someone with access to a larger dataset and a more formal methodology, the team here would genuinely like to read that paper.