The foodservice and hospitality sector has been urged to take more action on food waste after a new report found progress remains patchy.
WRAP and IGD published their annual progress report for the UK’s food waste reduction roadmap this week.
Although food retailers, producers and manufacturers providing multi-year data reduced food waste by 17% compared to their baselines, foodservice and hospitality data is not yet sufficiently robust to calculate comparisons over time.
WRAP and IGD said that major opportunities for greater impact remain, with more action needing to be focused on the hospitality and food service sector as well as primary production, plus whole chain collaboration.
Seven new hospitality businesses committed to the roadmap in the past year including contract caterer Elior UK, taking the total to 42. Of those, 29 are implementing a ‘target, measure, act’ approach to food waste, however there is not yet sufficient robust and comparable data to allow changes over time to be assessed.
The report called for more hospitality businesses to report food waste data from the majority of their sites, and actively engage with their staff and consumers on food waste reduction.
In total, 267 businesses and 47 supporting organisations have now signed up to the roadmap; an increase of 25% versus September 2020.
Businesses implementing target, measure, act increased by 36 to 207, representing more than 85% of large businesses committed to the roadmap and the equivalent of approximately a third of all large food businesses in the UK.
The UK is over half way towards the SDG 12.3 target of halving food loss and waste by 2030, however a recent Champions 12.3 report described the world as a whole as being “woefully behind” where it needs to be in order to meet the target.
