Economic headwinds only strengthen the case for tackling food waste

It’s time to move the dial on redistribution.

Let’s get one thing straight: policies purely focused on redistribution will never reduce food waste and its production. This may seem obvious, but I want to be explicit that we all  – industry, agriculture and charities – have to focus on reducing waste before anything else.

Food waste has been part of my professional life for 25 years. Over that time, the awareness of waste as a climate issue has cut through to the general public in the UK. However, despite the efforts of many organisations, we don’t seem to be moving the dial fast enough.

Best guesses from Wrap indicate just over 10 million tonnes of food are wasted in the UK annually, while 1.6 million are wasted on farms. Others estimate much more –  including the WWF, which suggests a figure of 3.3 million tonnes on farms. You can see the dilemma.

Recording food waste ‘accurately’ will cost. Discussions trying to nail down what is considered edible and inedible are OK, so long as we avoid an eternal debate that gets in the way of making accurate figures a reality. There is lots of industry support for this, as shown by the open letter from the BRC, which had 33 industry signatories.

The bigger question for me is what to do with the data once we have it. I would suggest Defra puts more strength behind the food waste hierarchy principles. The fact is, it’s cheap and convenient to put food into anaerobic digestion (AD). It’s encouraged economically, but its life as a ‘renewable’ energy source is slowly being challenged. It creates natural methane, another fuel source we are trying to engineer out of day-to-day life.

I know others have said just how competitive the redistribution sector is, but AD is the true competitor. It is literally gobbling up food that ought to be eaten by far more efficient anaerobic digestion systems: us.

The AD sector has been subsidised for over 20 years, to the tune of £750m every year. In 2023, 10.4 million tonnes went into AD, roughly six million tonnes of which were food waste and crops. Last year, only 191,000 tonnes of food were redistributed. That’s 3% of the food that went into AD.

The industry wants to reduce and redistribute before we waste, but wonky economics have skewed the landscape and made it cheap and easy to waste.

If we were to enforce food waste hierarchy principles and introduce mandatory food waste reporting, we would see the volume of food that the anaerobic sector is taking in and from where.

Don’t forget, this is food we’re talking about. It’s only classed as waste because we put it in the bin. A banana in a bin is still a banana.

And this is before we even consider the political perspective. The economy just won the election for Donald Trump, because everybody knows how much more expensive everyday life is. New Labour MPs will tell you the economy and everyday costs were regularly spoken about on the doorstep.

Access to affordable, nutritious food is something low-income families really struggle with. That six million tonnes of food that goes into AD could help nourish families and stretch budgets.

There are people working in our factories, shops, schools, care homes and hospitals hanging on by the skin of their teeth. And yet we continue to pour surplus food into the bin. The lack of policy supporting us in reducing and redistributing needs to change, once and for all.