Acting on climate change by preventing food waste

Corporate Responsibility
Sep. 29, 2023

Today, almost 40% of all the food produced goes to waste. Food is fuel for life yet producing it and wasting it come with a social, humanitarian and environmental concern.

As a leader in sustainable food, we owe it to you and to ourselves to concretely act on climate change.

Here are three concrete actions – among many others – that we take to reduce our carbon impact:

1. We can’t fight what we can’t see

Our global WasteWatch program enables our teams in the kitchens to easily capture food waste data, providing us with clear insights into how much food is being wasted and why. With this understanding, our teams can implement targeted operational and behavioral changes to help end avoidable food waste, both in our kitchens and from consumer plates.

Our 2025 target is to reduce our food waste by 50% through the deployment of WasteWatch program in 85% of our food service sites globally (based on raw material cost). As of 2022, our WasteWatch program has been deployed in 46% of sites in 37 countries, with food waste reduction of -41.5 % compared to the deployed sites’ baseline.

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2. Acting collectively to preserve our resources

We protect the environment through choices about who we source from, what we buy and how we work with our suppliers. It’s a collective work led together with all our stakeholders: suppliers, clients, consumers, NGOs and governments.

In the UK, our ‘Wasteful to Tasteful’ initiative helps to reduce the volume of surplus and misshapen fruit and vegetables being thrown away or left to rot. Any food surplus are also redistributed through Too Good to Go, an app which sells surplus food at discounted rates.

This initiative was launched in 2018. Currently, 100+ of our UK and Ireland sites receive the weekly vegetable boxes and monthly fruit boxes. We have procured 667 tons of Grade B vegetables, salad and fruits, this includes our work with Wasteknot, where we have rescued 24 tons of fruit and vegetables in the UK in the last 12 months (data accurate May 2023).

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3. It also starts with you!

Since 2012, we’ve dedicated October to ‘WasteLESS Week’, a global awareness campaign to prevent food waste addressing our consumers. This campaign is a key moment to empower our consumers to waste less and support our teams in their efforts to reduce waste every day. Through awareness, we prevent and set a new cultural mindset for us as well as for our consumers.

See how our teams are making an impact:

Acting on climate change by preventing food waste

1. We can’t fight what we can’t see

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2. Acting collectively to preserve our resources

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3. It also starts with you!

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