DIARY DATE: Watch this space for the next campaign
FOOD WASTE ACTION WEEK 2025
Many of you joined us to celebrateFood Waste Action Week – 17 – 23 March 2025 by sharing the actions you are taking to prevent your food from being thrown away.
The campaign theme was ‘Buy what you need, avoiding the ‘just in case’ food purchases.’
Why? Almost one-fifth of food purchased by the sector is binned.
This is not only a waste of good food, it’s also a waste of money and the planet’s precious resources that have already been used to grow, produce and transport the food.
Future food and hospitality management professionals
Training our future food and hospitality students in sustainability is a top priority so we ran a pilot competition for students to create a social media reel and amplify it to our target audience. It’s a creative way for students to learn and it helps us get the message across in a different way.
The overall winner Vai has won an amazing career boosting experience at the OXO Tower Restaurant, Bar and Brasserie (part of Harvey Nichols Group). Thank you to our wonderful Ambassador Andrea for all your help with this prize and the three Ambassadors working in unis/colleges for helping to promote the competition with your students – Dimitri, Peter and Vince.
Food Waste Action Week may be over, the action continues. Take a look at our Food Waste Action Week page for ideas on how to start the conversation with your teams.
FOOD MATTERS: MAKE IT COUNT CAMPAIGN
Hospitality and Food Service teams – you can still make a difference
Throughout November 2024 we ran our Food matters: make it count campaign as an energy boost to kick-start action to reduce food waste. November was a great opportunity to get food waste prevention action plans in place before the sector’s busiest month of December.
We called on Hospitality and Food Service CEOs and senior leaders to rise up and lead the way to tackling food waste across the sector.
We stood together, as a sector, to demonstrate the impact we can generate through our effective action plans and creative solutions to drive down food waste.
Thank you to everyone who supported the campaign to spread the word to many more people.
Food continues to matters: so let’s make it count, today and every day. From kitchens to boardrooms, from menus to balance sheets.
WHY IS REDUCING FOOD WASTE IMPORTANT?
Every year our sector throws away 1.1 million tonnes of food. 75% of the food we bin could have been eaten, costing our sector £3.2 billion.
If we save food from the bin, then we can cut business costs and save money too.
We also make the most of the planet’s precious resources that have already been used to grow, produce and transport the food to our businesses and organisations.
Take a look at the return on investment that you could generate by reading *‘The business case for reducing food loss and waste.’ It identified an average return on investment of 1:14 across a range of Hospitality and Food Service businesses; for every £1 invested in reducing food waste businesses realised a £14 return.
Bringing circular living to life through measurable action.
* Report by the group Champions SDG12.3 which includes WRAP.
TAKE ACTION TODAY
Be part of the community taking action by:
- Signing up to WRAP’s Food waste reduction roadmap – a great framework for formalising your actions in the most efficient and effective way.
- Embedding the simple principles of food waste reduction Target-Measure-Act – creating and implementing action plans that are practical, realistic and achievable.
- Proactively share your data with WRAP annually so that we can celebrate how well the sector is progressing and identify common challenges where the sector needs more help to succeed.
