FRED Project

Informing policy on food waste prevention using a total food system sustainability approach

The Food Waste Problem

Over a third of the food is wasted and this happens all along the supply chain and it has become clear that food waste occurring in one sector may often be due to issues occurring in another sector, and that the issues are overall interlinked throughout the supply chain. Therefore tackling any one stage alone, will not solve the real problem.

There are 196 solutions out there to tackle food waste, and despite the significant efforts, resources and campaigns that are being put towards food waste prevention, the impact (i.e. reduction in food waste) has been minimal. We believe that future decisions around food policy need to be based on real Irish research that shows which solutions actually have a high potential for creating real impact – before more resources are wasted on interventions that don’t work.

FRED focuses on the top priorities within the food waste hierarchy: prevention and redistribution.

Food Waste Prevention: Avoids the problem at source and completely avoids the use of those resources that would have gone into producing the wasted food.
Food Waste Redistribution: Takes “would-be-food-waste” and redistributes it to those in need, preventing the food from being thrown away and reducing food poverty simultaneously.

Our Work

We published a literature review on the interventions that exist to tackle food waste and simultaneously undertook 18 months of stakeholder engagement with people working throughout the Irish food system (producers, processors, distributors, retailers, food service) as well as with...

...consumers and policymakers, to understand what is needed from all from the Irish food system.
From this work, 196 interventions were matched with 18 core stakeholders needs, to produce the below wheel of food system interventions.