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New insights help industry target household food waste reduction
30 June 2014
A report released by WRAP that provides new insights on how to reduce household food waste, can help industry target their activity and enable their customers to waste less and save money.
The report highlights that two million tonnes of household food is discarded because it is not ‘used in time’, half of which is thrown away whole or in unopened packaging, costing consumers around £2.4bn a year.
In a third of cases (660,000t), passing a date label triggered disposal, while foods judged by consumers to have ‘gone off’ before they could be eaten (mouldy, stale etc) were responsible for most of the remaining 1.3 million tonnes. Significant progress is said to have been made around clarifying date labels and storage guidance to keep food fresher for longer, under WRAP’s Courtauld Commitment, but the report states that the level of waste shows more needs to be done in these and other areas.
Three of the report’s main recommendations are:
- Ensure packaging design and storage guidance help consumers keep food fresher for longer
- Maximise the length of shelf life and use a ‘best before’ date on perishable foods, where possible
- Accelerate the roll out and increase public awareness of the ‘freeze before date mark’ label (replacing ‘freeze on day of purchase’).
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