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.

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.

This International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, we would like to continue to raise awareness of the link between food waste and climate change to create a sense of urgency and to share some of the concrete actions we are taking to prevent food waste across our business.

WasteWatch – measuring food waste to change behavior

The 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.

The program is already available in more than 1,000 sites in 26 countries. So far WasteWatch has enabled us to save around 5,000 metric tonnes of food from being wasted. That’s the equivalent of almost 10,000,000 meals, or 28,000 passenger vehicles driven for one year. 

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:

Engaging consumers and employees against food waste in the United States

Food waste often goes unnoticed by consumers. Our teams in the United States decided to take action by running an event when consumers were encouraged to weigh their own plate waste. The event raised awareness of food waste with consumers, starting the process of behavioral change.

Food waste is also a challenge for our employees so we engage them all year around on the topic.

We shared our actions and ideas in a booth at the first United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Waste Fair. Our booth was focused on engaging employees and changing culture and behavior around food waste. We were delighted to see that the Sodexo booth was one of the most visited.

Optimizing production and reducing food waste in France

220,000 merchants in France are able to create and sell take-out baskets from their unsold items. The take-out baskets are registered on an application called Phenix and is an option available to all the merchants in France affiliated with the Sodexo Pass restaurant card thanks to our partnership with Phenix in France.

Rescuing wonky fruit and veg and leftovers in the United Kingdom

In addition to the implementation of the WasteWatch program, which has saved over 294 tonnes of food from going to waste so far. The teams in the UK have been addressing the fact that 7.2% of food harvested from UK farms doesn’t reach the market due to its appearance. The Wasteful to Tasteful initiative rescues and distributes ‘wonky’ fruit and veg to our sites, where our chefs use these ingredients to create delicious dishes. So far, we’ve saved over 300 tonnes of ‘wonky’ produce from landfill.

Any leftovers are also redistributed through Too Good to Go, an app which sells surplus food at discounted rates. Around 8,000 meals have been saved so far and the Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation also works to redistribute food to thousands of community groups around the country.

The figures talk for themselves! Reducing food waste has a positive impact on the planet. Find out more about our actions to prevent food waste:

Food waste is feeding climate change