Resources

In June 2020, 40 key stakeholders from across the UK meat production and supply chain came together, facilitated by WRAP's Courtauld Commitment, to pledge to make the UK meat industry one of the most efficient and sustainable in the world. This summary highlights the areas of significant progress made and the areas that require greater focus.

Enabling effective decisions for tackling food surplus and waste on farm.

At an industry level, food surplus and waste on-farms across the UK is estimated at 3.6 million tonnes and worth £1.2 billion. This project has extended that assessment to provide an estimate of the financial implications for individuals farms of acting on food surplus and waste.

Exploring how farmers can be supported to collaborate in measuring food surplus and waste and identifying production efficiencies.

Shaping a sustainable recovery.

The Courtauld Commitment Annual Report sets out the progress that has been made by the food and drink sector this year towards achieving the voluntary agreement’s targets and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In yet another turbulent year for food and drink, the sector has continued  to deliver meaningful action on climate change, driving collaboration across the entire food system to measure and reduce food waste, greenhouse gas emissions and water stress.

Getting together with the whole supply chain is very rare. It provided a unique opportunity for all links in the chain to understand how decisions made at each stage of the development and launch of a product can affect waste.

Paula Higby, Fullers Foods

Redistributing surplus food is one of the best ways that businesses can help to reduce the amount of food that ends up as waste. WRAP has previously reported on progress on increasing surplus food redistribution between 2015 and 2018, and this report provides additional data for 2019 and 2020.

Defining the actions the hospitality and food service sector will take to help to deliver the UK Food Waste Reduction Roadmap. New update coming Spring 2024. 

Under the Food Loss and Waste Standard and the Food Waste Reduction Roadmap Roadmap guidelines biomaterial processing is NOT classified as a food waste destination. To help businesses assess if any of your material qualifies, new guidelines and a supporting assessment tool have been developed.

The purpose of the Framework for Effective Redistribution Partnerships (‘the Redistribution Framework’) is to help organisations increase volumes of food redistributed in the UK by:

1) Providing a structured and efficient approach to the creation and operation of partnerships which enable successful food redistribution, taking into account the needs and ways of working of both the food surplus provider and a recipient organisation;

2) Supporting more consistent exchange of key information; and 3) Stimulating a more structured approach to the identification of surpluses suitable for redistribution.

The Redistribution Framework is intended to help individual providers and recipients to adopt or adapt their own processes and choices for handling surplus, to fit with existing ways of working, while making it easier for multiple organisations to work with each other.

The Government’s current Environment Plan introduced its policy to achieve zero avoidable plastic waste by the end of 2042. One of the aims is to reduce the amount of plastic in circulation through reducing demand for single-use plastic. WRAP has been working closely with retailers to explore plastic-free/loose supermarket aisles and has supported a leading UK retailer, Morrisons, to evaluate a plastic-free/loose fresh produce trial in its store in Skipton, North Yorkshire.

Supporting on-farm measurement of food loss and waste.

This resource pack is for farm advisers, including field teams and technical staff in supply chain businesses who work with farmers, as well as independent advisers. It supports advisers to deliver projects with groups of farmers to measure food surplus and waste together. Working in groups helps farmers to identify differences and collaborate on opportunities to improve.

The resources available to download are:

The Covid-19 pandemic is having a profound effect on citizens’ daily lives, including wide-reaching impacts on food behaviours. WRAP undertook a comprehensive series of four UK-wide surveys – in April, May, September and November 2020 – to understand how it has affected citizens’ food habits, behaviours and attitudes. Each of the surveys were undertaken online with large (4,000+) independent samples of UK adults with responsibility for food shopping and/or preparation.