30% of global food production is wasted

In France, a dis­tinc­tion is made between waste, unnec­es­sary waste, and loss­es. We talk about unnec­es­sary waste for prod­ucts that are dis­card­ed (sort­ing, over­pro­duc­tion…), lost (har­vest­ing, pro­cess­ing, trans­port…) or not con­sumed (expired, served but thrown away). It also includes parts that we do not usu­al­ly con­sume (mel­on skin, chick­en bones, cher­ry stems…), whether or not they are recov­ered. And we gen­er­al­ly use the term “loss­es” to talk about prod­ucts lost upstream, dur­ing pro­duc­tion and pro­cess­ing, because this word does not have the same neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion as “waste”.

Depend­ing on the region and cul­tur­al habits, cer­tain foods (or parts of foods) may or may not be con­sid­ered edi­ble: leek greens, cit­rus peels, fish heads are not cooked every­where in the world. More­over, in some coun­tries, food that is reused for ani­mal feed or ener­gy pro­duc­tion is not con­sid­ered as “wast­ed”. This leads to dif­fer­ences in def­i­n­i­tions, and there­fore actions, from one coun­try to another.

In 2011, the FAO pre­sent­ed the first glob­al esti­mate: about one third of the edi­ble parts of food pro­duced for human con­sump­tion is lost or wast­ed, which cor­re­sponds to about 1.3 bil­lion tonnes of food per year. The waste is fair­ly well dis­trib­uted in all coun­tries and between the dif­fer­ent lev­els of the food chain: 1/3 upstream (pro­duc­tion), 1/3 down­stream (at con­sumer lev­el), 1/3 in between (dis­tri­b­u­tion and processing).

For France, Ademe pub­lished the most com­pre­hen­sive study in 2016 by cross-ref­er­enc­ing dif­fer­ent data and con­duct­ing over 500 qual­i­ta­tive inter­views¹. In 2016, the total amount of food loss and waste was 10 mil­lion tonnes. The waste gen­er­at­ed in the home is equiv­a­lent to 30 kg per per­son per year, includ­ing 7 kg of uneat­en food waste that is still pack­aged, and rep­re­sents approx­i­mate­ly €108 per year per per­son (€240 if we con­sid­er all the loss­es and waste gen­er­at­ed through­out the chain). It should be not­ed that four times more is wast­ed in col­lec­tive and com­mer­cial cater­ing than in the home (130 g/meal com­pared to 32 g in households).

The British start­ed as ear­ly as 2005, with the first stud­ies and var­i­ous actions put in place, but France was a pio­neer in terms of leg­is­la­tion. In the frame­work of the Nation­al Pact to Com­bat Waste in 2013, it set a tar­get for reduc­ing food loss­es. Then, in 2016, the Garot law (named after the MP Guil­laume Garot) pri­ori­tised actions to com­bat waste, banned the destruc­tion of edi­ble food, and oblig­ed shops over 400m² to draw up a dona­tion agree­ment for food that had pre­vi­ous­ly been destroyed.

In 2018, the Egal­im 1 law extend­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of dona­tions to col­lec­tive cater­ing and the agri-food indus­try. Final­ly, the 2020 Anti-waste for a Cir­cu­lar Econ­o­my (AGEC) law extends the Garot law to the whole­sale trade and adopts tar­gets for a 50% reduc­tion in loss and waste. By 2030 for pro­duc­ers, the food indus­try, and con­sumers, by 2025 for dis­tri­b­u­tion and col­lec­tive cater­ing. These are very ambi­tious tar­gets, which aim to set an exam­ple at Euro­pean level. 

At the inter­na­tion­al lev­el, 2015 was a deci­sive year, with the adop­tion of the Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals (SDGs). The objec­tive is to halve the vol­ume of food waste per capi­ta by 2030, both in dis­tri­b­u­tion and con­sump­tion, and to reduce loss­es through­out the pro­duc­tion and sup­ply chains.

There are still no reli­able indi­ca­tors to mon­i­tor the evo­lu­tion of waste. Many actors, whether upstream (farm­ers and breed­ers) or down­stream (notably com­mer­cial cater­ing, trades­men, house­holds), only have a vague idea of what they lose, and often tend to under­es­ti­mate it. As for man­u­fac­tur­ers and dis­trib­u­tors, they are often faced with a prob­lem of data confidentiality. 

But a Euro­pean direc­tive makes it com­pul­so­ry, from 2023 onwards, for each coun­try to pub­lish a glob­al waste fig­ure every four years and a fig­ure per item every year: col­lec­tive and indi­vid­ual cater­ing, house­holds, etc.

Our objec­tive at Ademe is to set up tools to help actors at each link in the chain to make diag­noses and define their reduc­tion actions. We have already devel­oped such tools, for exam­ple for can­teens, which help man­agers to mea­sure waste and then reduce it², or for food man­u­fac­tur­ers³. The impor­tant thing is to get the ball rolling, to show the var­i­ous play­ers that it is pos­si­ble and prof­itable since it allows them to save on pro­duc­tion costs.

It is very ambi­tious, because it is often quite sim­ple to reduce loss­es by 30%, but to reach 50% requires real reflec­tion and changes in behav­iour. But peo­ple are sup­port­ed, it is fea­si­ble. In 2019, as part of a “zero waste acad­e­my” oper­a­tion, we recruit­ed 243 house­holds who agreed to assess their waste and then fol­low « anti-waste » ges­tures. One year after the start of the sur­vey, they weighed the dis­card­ed food prod­ucts again: they had reduced their waste by 59%!

They are decreas­ing. Although sig­nif­i­cant resources were put in place in 2016 and 2017, it has been dif­fi­cult to mobilise them since. It is how­ev­er essen­tial to have relays in the ter­ri­to­ries such as the REseaux de Lutte con­tre le Gaspillage Ali­men­taire (REGAL) which help to raise aware­ness among all the actors. It would also be nec­es­sary to run a major nation­al infor­ma­tion cam­paign on this issue.

For­tu­nate­ly, in civ­il soci­ety, com­pa­nies such as Too Good to Go and Phenix have not wait­ed to act and are effec­tive­ly shak­ing up pub­lic author­i­ties and con­sumers alike by invent­ing orig­i­nal solu­tions to com­bat waste.