Impact

The world’s first legally binding food waste targets are set EU-wide after nearly a decade of Foodrise’s campaigning: legally requiring all EU member states to achieve a 30% reduction in food wase at retail, food service and household level, and a 10% reduction in food waste in manufacturing, by 2030 – mandating the reduction of an estimated 14 million tonnes of food waste by 2030.

Sussex Surplus and Seeding Reparations both become independent Community Interest Companies – to strengthen their missions while continuing to collaborate with Foodrise and the wider food movement.

Blue Empire is published, a groundbreaking report exposing for the hidden harms of sourcing fish feed from West Africa, gaining global attention (including Financial Times investigation) and driving Norwegian giants like Mowi to stop sourcing from the region.

We pioneer strategic litigation in food and farming: from challenging the UK’s National Food Strategy in 2018 to subjecting the Australia-UK trade deal to judicial review, we’ve broken legal ground to hold food systems accountable.

We host the inaugural convening of a new global alliance aiming to defund agribusiness, leading to the establishment of the Global Defund Agribusiness Alliance. 

We launch a legal challenge against the UK government for scrapping mandatory food waste reporting for large food businesses, influences U-turn and shortlisted for Sheila McKechnie Foundation ‘Best use of Law’ Award.

Greenwash Grocers report launches, exposing greenwash tactics of retailers and failure to make the link between meat and climate.

Seeding Reparations puts reparatory justice for historical harms caused by agribusiness in the spotlight at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. 

Foodrise EU are the first to sound the alarm on the impact of biomethane expansion on EU food systems and successfully block harmful EU biomethane targets. Our advocacy led the European Commission to backtrack on overly ambitious, potentially damaging EU biomethane targets.

IDB Invest, the private sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, cancelled its proposed $200 million loan to Brazilian meat giant Marfrig, as a result of campaigning from the Stop Financing Factory Farming (S3F) coalition and other civil society organisations – who first raised the alarm in September 2021, coordinating a letter signed by over 200 civil society organisations urging the bank to reject the deal due to its environmental practices and links to illegal deforestation and indigenous land rights violations.  

Foodrise EU launches in The Netherlands, to scale up retailer and policy-focused campaigns and broaden impact in Europe, strengthen our involvement with EU food policy development, civil society coalitions, and funders to create change within EU institutions, Big Food, and investors, many of them based in Europe. 

We reveal for the first time the staggering scale of UK local authority pension fund investments in factory farming, in collaboration with World Animal Protection. 

Our advocacy efforts and petition – which achieved close to 60,000 signatures – contributes to the inclusion of health and sustainable diets in the UK’s Nationally Determined Contribution and Climate Change Committee pathways. 

We are the first NGO to call for biomethane production to be kept within its sustainable niche, with the launch of Green Gas Without the Hot Air report, highlighting flaws in anaerobic digestion and making it clear that it isn’t a solution to food waste. The report influences the UK’s Nationally Determined Contribution and appears in the Journal of Cleaner Production. 

Sussex Surplus launches as a pilot with Interreg 2 Seas FLAVOUR Project to process food at risk of going to waste into long-life products and community meals that demonstrate the solution to food waste is delicious. Sussex Surplus is now established as a Community Interest Company. 

Our pioneering Big Livestock vs the Planet report is the first global campaign targeting industrial meat and dairy finance, marking the launch of a global divestment movement focusing on the livestock industry.

Meat us Halfway, the UK’s first supermarket scorecard encouraging supermarkets to sell healthy, low-meat diets and reduce climate impact, influences Iceland to consider joining the Cerrado Manifesto, and Tesco to expand their plant-based proteins. The scorecard approach was later adopted in France, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, and Poland. 

Cow in the Room campaign launches at COP24 calling out meat and dairy as key drivers of climate breakdown, the first to push for policy and regulatory interventions on dietary change for climate mitigation. 

The collaboration between WRAP and Foodrise influences 89 UK food businesses, including some of the UK’s largest supermarkets, to commit to the Food Waste Reduction Roadmap; a world-first initiative to halve food waste by measuring and acting on wastage levels from farm-to-fork.

Tesco becomes the UK’s first supermarket to commit to publishing and halving supply-chain waste and persuades its top 24 suppliers to do the same, directly influenced by our campaigning.

We are the first to reveal the global impacts of Scottish salmon farming with the launch of our Fishy Business campaign.

Feeding the 5000 expands globally, serving 170,000+ people worldwide and continuing to move the issue of food waste up social and political agendas.

Foodrise’s Gleaning Network features on ‘Jamie and Jimmy’s Food Waste Fight’ TV show with Jamie Oliver. We also supported Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘War on Waste’ TV programme which featured a gleaning day. These primetime TV programmes led to several supermarkets launching ‘wonky veg’ ranges and food waste reduction initiatives.

Foodrise’s Feeding the 5000 wins BBC Food and Farming Award for Best Initiative in British Food.

Our food waste campaigning convinces Tesco to become world’s first retailer to commit to publicly reporting their third-party audited food waste data. Other supermarkets including Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Asda, The Co-operative and Marks & Spencer soon followed.

The Gleaning Network UK is founded to revive the practice of gleaning, where volunteers harvest and redirect farm-level food surplus to community food and food aid organisations. Network rapidly expands to seven regional gleaning hubs nationwide, coordinated by Foodrise.