Food waste is feeding climate change

Food is everywhere. It plays a central role in our daily lives and relationships. Food is fuel for life but producing it and wasting it come with an environmental cost.

When people talk about climate change, it is not generally food waste which comes to mind as the first topic but, food waste is responsible for 10% of all emissions caused by human activity globally. In fact, wasting food generates more greenhouse gas emissions each year than all the commercial flights in the world.

At Sodexo, with 60% of our business linked to food and serving million consumers worldwide each day, we know how important preventing food waste is! Fighting against food waste is the single most important climate and social action we can take to cut our emissions as an organization and we’ve taken the ambitious commitment to reduce our food waste as a business by 50% by 2025.

WasteWatch – measuring food waste to change behavior

Our WasteWatch program enables our team to quickly and easily capture food waste data, providing us with clear insights into how much food is being wasted in our kitchens 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 Sodexo’s WasteWatch program in 85% of our food service sites globally. As of 2021, our WasteWatch program has been deployed in 27.6% of sites in 26 countries, with food waste reduction of 45.8% compared to the deployed sites’ baseline.

WasteLESS week – empowering consumers to reduce their waste

Since 2012, we’ve celebrated ‘WasteLESS Week’ globally as an organization. This campaign, which runs during October, is a key moment to empower our consumers to waste less and to support our teams in their efforts to reduce waste all year around. This year the focus of our campaign will be food waste, driving awareness of the huge opportunity we have to reduce our carbon emissions by reducing our food waste.

Here are some of the great success stories from our teams around the globe:

Saving delicious surplus food in Australia 

Sodexo Australia is taking strides in its commitment to food waste prevention, by pledging to purchase at least 100 tonnes of food for next year from certified Social Traders Yume. In the past month alone, Sodexo worked with Yume to intercept 32,000 Red Velvet cakes and 12,220 bowls of soup destined to become further figures in Australia’s food waste problem.

Sodexo was the first corporate buyer to take the Yume Pledge in 2018 and since then have pledged each year, purchasing more than 190 tonnes of food through Yume to date, preventing unnecessary food waste.