Food giants and key retailers join forces on new food waste coalition

18 Aug 2020 --- The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) has launched a CEO-led Coalition of Action on Food Waste, which sees 14 of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers join forces. Their goal is to halve per capita global food loss at retailer and consumer levels. Some of the biggest players in retail have joined including Walmart, Tesco and Sainsbury, while food giants like General Mills, Kellogg Company and Nestlé are also onboard.

The coalition and its members, with their explicit CEO engagement, action-oriented commitments and acceleration toward sustainable change on a global level, can contribute to reducing food loss in supply chains worldwide.

The new coalition will build off five years of experience that the CGF has on tackling this issue, dating back to its ground-breaking Food Waste Resolution and call for standardized date labeling.

 A third of food produced is never eaten, which amounts to approximately 1.3 billion tons of food lost annually.

Tackling the sheer scale of food waste 
Food waste is an enormous environmental, social and economic problem. A third of food produced is never eaten, which amounts to approximately 1.3 billion metric tons of food lost each year. That represents an economic cost to the global economy of US$940 billion. 

Food waste is also responsible for adding 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the planet’s atmosphere annually. That means that if food waste were a country, its carbon footprint would be third only to China and the US.

The 14 initial members of the Coalition are Ahold Delhaize, Barilla, Bel Group, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Majid Al Futtaim, McCain Foods, Merck Animal Health, Metro AG, Migros Ticaret, Nestlé, Sainsbury, Tesco, and Walmart. 

The Coalition is sponsored at the CGF Board level by Dave Lewis, Group Chief Executive of Tesco, and Max Koeune, President and CEO of McCain Foods. The Coalition Steering Committee is co-chaired by Francisco Cordero of Kellogg Company and Brittni Furrow of Ahold Delhaize USA.

Through their participation in the coalition, these members will take important steps to reduce waste by fulfilling three coalition commitments. First, the coalition recognizes the critical importance of measuring and reporting food loss data, with members committing to report their data by 2021. Second, in support of Champions 12.3, a long-time CGF partner and multi-stakeholder organization working to reach UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3, coalition members agree to scale up Champions 12.3’s 10x20x30 Initiative – extending their collaboration beyond the coalition to engage their suppliers and other stakeholders. 

Finally, members commit to addressing food loss at the post-harvest level, which is responsible for creating 30 percent of food waste, by engaging with stakeholders to develop innovative and effective food loss prevention strategies.

“Food loss is a serious global problem and it can only be effectively addressed through committed collective action. The launch of the Coalition of Action on Food Waste is a positive and important step to creating sustainable food strategies and preventing loss, and we look forward to seeing the impact the Coalition will have on the issue,” says Ignacio Gavilan, Director of Environmental Sustainability at the CGF.

To support the global commitments of the coalition, the group is also creating regional working groups to drive implementation at the local level and to help engage key stakeholders in those regions. Groups include those in North America, Latin America and China and Japan.

The coalition is expected to have a powerful role in the effort to reduce waste, reducing stress on the environment, benefitting the global economy and ensuring more food makes it to stores and onto consumers’ tables in the process, notes the CGF.

The CGF’s Managing Director Wai-Chan Chan has also joined Champions 12.3 as a “Champion”, one of several executives dedicated to inspiring ambition, mobilizing action and accelerating progress toward achieving SDG Target 12.3 by 2030.

By Gaynor Selby