Food distributors team up to fight food waste

Some of the largest names in the U.S. food system, including Walmart, Aldi, Aramark, Compass Group, Del Monte, Whole Foods and more, have teamed up to fight food waste under the U.S. Food Waste Pact.  

Announced at the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the national voluntary agreement aims to help food businesses accelerate progress toward their waste reduction targets. Using precompetitive collaboration and data-driven strategy across the supply chain, the pact is designed to drive meaningful action.  

The pact is a nationwide expansion of the efforts of Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC), a public-private partnership that shares data and best practices with major players across the food system with a goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent along the West Coast by 2030.  

As part of the pact, national nonprofit partners ReFED and World Wildlife Fund will provide business partners with detailed custom waste analytics, industry benchmarking and solution road maps, as well as facilitate working groups and pilot projects to test, implement and scale cost-effective and high-impact food waste solutions.  

“This level of industry collaboration to reduce food waste is unprecedented and exactly what is needed to successfully address such a systems-level problem,” says Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, a national nonprofit working to end food loss and waste across the food system. “The data component of the Pact—from within their own operations and from across their sector—is critical to enabling our business partners to identify where to focus their resources while also benchmarking their efforts against the rest of the industry. Those types of insights aren’t available to businesses right now.”   

In the U.S., 38 percent of all food goes unsold or uneaten, according to the nonprofit Feeding America. Food waste is also a major competitor to emissions, contributing 6 percent to national greenhouse gas emissions.