The Fight Against Food Waste - State PIRGs

Food waste is an environmental tragedy. Wasted food is not only a waste of natural resources, but it is also a source of avoidable pollution. Furthermore, the race to generate increasingly excessive quantities of food leads to the use of environmentally harmful farming practices that could be replaced with better practices if crop yield goals were better aligned with actual demand. To make matters worse, global food waste accounts for eight percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, making it a major, wholly unnecessary contributor to climate change. 

Yet while 161 to 335 billion pounds of food are wasted in the U.S. annually, about 13.8 million households were food insecure in both 2019 and 2020. The absurd fact of hunger amidst abundant food presents a clear opportunity to solve a significant social problem as part of efforts to drive down the environmental impact of food waste.

Food waste is not just a threat to the environment and public wellbeing. Wasted food is wasted money and resources for the businesses and consumers that contribute to it. Annually, the cost of food loss and waste amounts to an estimated $408 billion in the U.S. alone, which is money that could go to productive uses for companies and households. As such, it is in the best interests of the public and entities within the food supply chain to cut down on food waste.

Although the task of eliminating billions of pounds of food waste while simultaneously ensuring millions more mouths are fed may seem daunting, many entities all along the supply chain have spearheaded initiatives to tackle the problem. In this report, we look at some of these leaders—from farms and grocery stores to restaurants, schools, and hospitals—that have taken action to fight food waste. From these examples, we highlight food waste reduction best practices and draw takeaway tips that can guide any person or organization looking to combat food waste. While there are many entities that are taking critical steps to fight food waste, the ten we highlight in this report have been particularly effective in combining tactics to achieve greater food waste reduction outcomes and adhering to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) hierarchy for food recovery, which emphasizes preventing food waste in the most sustainable and socially responsible manner possible. The ten entities are:

1. Boundless Farmstead
2. Pace Family Farms
3. HelloFresh
4. Hannaford Supermarkets
5. The Kroger Company
6. Sprouts Farmers Market
7. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
8. Equinox Restaurant
9. La Salle Language Academy
10. The University of Texas at Arlington

Following these ten, we will also briefly identify other leaders in food waste reduction. These entities show that fighting food waste can happen at every point in the food supply chain. Despite the differences between these companies and institutions, it is clear that tracking food waste, planning production and inventory around demand, reimagining new uses for conventionally discarded items, embedding food donation in everyday practices, adopting multiple mechanisms to divert food waste, emphasizing food waste education and stakeholder support, and exploring innovations are key methods to meaningfully reduce food waste.

From glean teams at family farms to Stop Food Waste Day at college dining halls, the food waste reduction practices of all of these entities demonstrate ways we can combat food waste, and their results show that significantly reducing food waste is achievable. Armed with the knowledge of what is possible, we hope that other entities along the food supply chain will use the examples of these ten businesses and institutions as a catalyst to fight against food waste.

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