Food Waste - Foodrise

What's the problem?

Billions of tonnes of good food are wasted worldwide each year – fuelling climate chaos, wasting the work of farmers, squandering energy, land and nature.

The waste of a flawed corporate food system

Food waste isn’t inevitable, it’s a result of business decisions by powerful players like supermarkets, who prioritise profit above all else.

Supermarkets reject perfectly good food for being “wonky” or cancel orders at the last minute, leaving farmers with produce they can’t sell in time. As a result, nearly half of all food waste in the UK occurs in businesses before it even reaches our plates.

Packaging fruit and veg in plastic bags forces people to buy more than they need, while confusing date labels lead to unnecessary waste at home.

Voluntary action isn’t enough

Businesses are failing to act quickly enough to meet the 2030 target to halve food waste in line with Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, or even report how much they waste. That’s why we need governments to step in, break the deadlock, and drive real change.

40%

of the world's food

is thrown away each year

8-10%

of global greenhouse gas emissions

is produced by food waste

28%

of the world's agricultural land area

is wasted growing food that never gets eaten. That's more land than China and India combined.

Our solutions

Governments must make it mandatory for businesses to report food waste

We’re demanding that businesses – especially the big players – are legally required to measure and report their food waste. Without knowing how much food is wasted, where and why, we won’t be able to take effective action to tackle this huge problem.

Through our Make Food Waste Count campaign, we’ve built a powerful movement, including 29 MPs, 35 civil society groups and experts, and over 16,000 members of the public, to push the UK government to adopt this groundbreaking law. Will the government act?

Our policy briefing, Make Food Waste Count, lays out the case of mandatory food waste reporting.

Governments must introduce ambitious policies to tackle food waste from farm to fork

We’re asking governments to step up and take stronger action on food waste from farm to fork through ambitious policies.

In our report, Actions To End Food Waste, we outline seven critical policy measures to do this, including legally binding targets to reduce waste, laws to protect suppliers from unfair trading practices, relaxing cosmetic standards that reject perfectly good food, and packaging reforms to help reduce food waste at home.

Using public policy to move beyond voluntary measures and accelerate global food waste action.

Our demands

Introduce mandatory food waste measurement and public reporting for larger businesses.
Introduce legally binding targets at national level to reduce food waste from farm to fork.
Such as requirements on supermarkets to sell fresh (uncut) produce loose, and regulating unfair trading practices that lead to food waste in supply chains.
Enact the right to food to ensure that no one needs to rely on food banks, on which businesses all too often dump their unsold food surplus.

Our impact

Following our campaign alongside allies, which mobilised 66 EU organisations and 71 experts, EU countries are now legally required to reduce their food waste by 2030.

Starting in 2025, all EU member states must cut household, retail and catering food waste by 30% per capita, and manufacturing waste by 10%, by 2030.

We are proud to have secured this historic target, the first of its kind worldwide, projected to reduce 14 million tonnes of food waste across the EU.

16,000

people signed our Make Food Waste Count petition

pushing for mandatory food waste reporting.

29 MPs

signed an Early Day Motion

supporting mandatory food waste reporting.

14 million

tonnes of food waste across the EU

is likely to be saved as a result of the new EU food waste targets.

In 2023, after the government announced plans to scrap its plan to introduce mandatory food waste reporting for businesses, we launched a legal challenge, highlighting contradictions with their own impact assessment and expert advice.