UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently announced a raft of measures aimed at easing the cost-of-living pressures.
In response, WRAP CEO Catherine David outlines how focussing on food waste is another opportunity to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, and halving our household food waste could put £10 back into household budgets every week.
Stopping food waste in the home could put £10 back into the pockets of every household in the country, every week.
With food prices rising and predicted to be 50% higher by November compared to 2021, there is an urgent need to help reduce people’s food bills and food waste in the home is an often overlooked element of the picture.
We can help people stretch their household budgets further by reducing food waste.
When it comes to energy, we rightly look both at the prices people are paying and energy efficiency measures. But when it comes to food, recent debate in the media has focused on food prices – already highly competitive – without any mention of the huge opportunity of ensuring that we get everything we pay for when we pay for food, and that we only pay for food that we actually end up eating.
Today, the average household of four throws away £1,000 of food every year – £20 from a typical weekly food shop. But this is rarely seen as a way of reducing costs. Our research shows that people underestimate how much they waste and don’t connect food waste with their spending. It’s an invisible cost households never see, but pay dearly for.
Seven in ten people are concerned about food bills, second only to concerns about rising energy costs. Indeed, they expect food bills to rise more than energy costs in the coming year. When it comes to those whose incomes are stretched, most people have already cut back, traded down to a cheaper supermarket, and three-quarters feel there’s little or nothing more they can do. In this context, even halving household food waste could put £10 back into people’s pockets every week – £500 a year – adding up to £8.5 billion in savings a year on food bills as a nation.
We must bring food waste prevention into conversations about the rising cost of living, and build an innovative, ambitious coalition across government, industry, trusted cultural voices and communities to reach millions of people. WRAP has an evidenced-based approach backed by UK food and drink businesses that could support stretched households and deliver real savings. Our recent Food Waste Action Week showed how much can be achieved when we give people the tips and tricks to make their food go further – but one week is not enough to empower a generation of people to take control of their food bills.
We are setting an ambition to help the average household of four save £500 a year through a 50% reduction in food waste.
Food waste can happen for several reasons, and most people don’t realise they waste food or the cost to their budget of throwing out food they paid for. Luckily, there are simple ways we can help people buy only what they need, use up all of what they buy, and store and use leftovers. The trick is how we communicate this to a mass audience. This is why we need collaboration across a range of sectors. One person might discover a way to save food through prompts in their banking app, another by following a popular influencer, another by attending a parent and toddlers’ activity at their community centre.
It comes with environmental savings too. Globally food waste – together with food loss – produces 8-10 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Almost five times the total emissions of the aviation sector. And as the Climate Change Commission reported this week, the UK is set to see higher temperatures so we need to take every step to minimise emissions, wherever we can.
When we each typically waste the equivalent to three meals a week, isn’t it time we took wasting food as seriously as we do the price of food itself?
