The Waste Equation reveals how food and drink manufacturers could reduce waste, recover what surplus remains and reinvest savings and other resources, to provide a billion meals a year to people in need. Developed by Newton, The Felix Project and FareShare, and IGD’s Alliance Food Sourcing (AFS), it acknowledges that the causes of food insecurity cannot be solved by increasing food supply. However, often simple changes could significantly help reduce food insecurity in communities, and encourage people to access further support addressing the root causes of poverty. The report shows the size of the opportunity – how many meals is there the potential to send to frontline charities if manufacturing food waste was reduced , unpreventable surplus was recovered and savings were reinvested into making new food? It then outlines how we can achieve this enduring change together. Every organisation can be involved – even those with no waste or surplus – by contributing expertise, fridge space, factory lines, logistics and beyond.
Data findings UK retailers sell 18.5 million tonnes of UK manufactured food and drink each year. In the process of creating that food, we have found around 550k tonnes is wasted – equivalent to 3% of sales . There is the potential to:
Reduce
Reinvest
Recover
Reduce waste by 23% (128k tonnes) through innovation, technology and industry expertise, saving £326 million for UK food manufacturing.
Recover 16% (89 tonnes) of
Reinvest the £326 million saving to help even more people by using the savings from reducing waste to manufacture additional food, generating 657 million meals to donate.
Existing pipeline of food recovered by The Felix Project and FareShare = 148 million meals.
surplus that can’t be prevented cost effectively, creating the equivalent of 212 million meals for frontline charities.
Altogether, we could provide one billion (1,017 million) meals to people who need them. That is seven times as much as The Felix Project and FareShare currently recover each year as it helps the millions of adults and families in the UK facing food insecurity. = Over a billion meals 1,017 million meals
4
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs