How Food Companies Are Fighting Food Waste — And What the Rest of Us Can Do

From IKEA's AI-powered kitchens to Kroger's plant-based shelf-life technology — the world's leading food companies are proving that food waste is not inevitable, it is a systems problem with measurable, scalable solutions available to every company, community, and household willing to apply them.

A Billion Meals. Wasted. Every Single Day.

In 2022, the world wasted over one billion meals every single day.

Not food that was inedible. Not food that had truly spoiled beyond recovery. Food that was grown, harvested, processed, packaged, transported, refrigerated, displayed, purchased, and then thrown away. While 783 million people worldwide faced severe food insecurity, one-fifth of all food available to consumers was wasted at the retail, food service, and household level.

The numbers behind this are staggering enough to require a pause. The world generated 1.05 billion tons of food waste in 2022, according to the United Nations Environment Program's Food Waste Index Report. Food loss and waste generate between 8 and 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — almost five times the total emissions of the entire aviation sector. The economic cost is estimated at upwards of $940 billion per year. Food waste occupies nearly 30 percent of the world's agricultural land. And food loss and waste is predicted to top 2.1 billion tons per year by 2030, costing $1.5 trillion, if current trajectories continue.

This is not a problem of scarcity. It is a problem of systems, habits, and choices — at every level of the food chain, from farm to factory to supermarket shelf to kitchen bin.

The good news is that some of the world's largest food companies have decided to do something serious about it. Their strategies are innovative, measurable, and in several cases, already producing results significant enough to offer a genuine blueprint for the rest of the industry — and the rest of us.

Why Everyone Is Affected — Whether They Know It or Not

Before examining what food companies are doing, it is worth understanding why this problem touches every person on earth regardless of where they live or how much food they personally waste.

Food waste is an environmental issue. When food rots in landfill without oxygen, it produces methane — a greenhouse gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Food waste in landfills is responsible for 58 percent of all landfill methane emissions in the United States alone. The climate consequences of wasted food ripple through every country's weather patterns, growing seasons, and food security.

Food waste is an economic issue. Every kilogram of food that goes uneaten represents not just the food itself but all the water, energy, land, labour, fertiliser, fuel, refrigeration, and packaging that went into producing and delivering it. The World Economic Forum estimates that food loss and waste costs the global economy $936 billion annually — a cost that is ultimately passed on through higher food prices, supply chain inefficiencies, and the public cost of waste management infrastructure.

Food waste is a humanitarian issue. The food wasted globally each day at household level alone is the equivalent of 1.3 meals per day for every person currently affected by hunger. Reducing food waste is one of the most direct and cost-effective interventions available for addressing food insecurity — not by redirecting existing food systems, but simply by keeping usable food within them longer.

Food waste is a resource issue. Producing food consumes enormous quantities of freshwater, topsoil, and biodiversity. Agricultural land cleared to grow crops that are subsequently wasted represents a permanent environmental cost — soil degraded, forests cleared, waterways diverted — for food that never nourishes anyone.

The people most affected by food waste are not those who cause the most of it. Climate disruption driven partly by food waste already threatens the food security of agricultural communities in lower-income countries who contribute least to the problem. Food prices inflated by waste inefficiencies hit lower-income households hardest. The environmental externalities of food production lost to waste — pollution, land degradation, water depletion — fall disproportionately on communities with the least political power to resist them.

This is a shared problem with an unequal distribution of consequences. The solutions must come from every part of the chain — including from the companies at its centre.

How Food Companies Are Taking Action

The food industry occupies a uniquely powerful position in the food waste problem. It sits at the intersection of every link in the chain — purchasing from farmers, processing ingredients, packaging products, distributing to retailers, and supplying to the food service sector that reaches billions of meals per day. Research suggests that food manufacturers and retailers working together across the value chain could cut food loss by 50 to 70 percent. The following companies are already proving what that looks like in practice.

IKEA — The First Global Company to Halve Food Waste

IKEA is not primarily a food company. But its in-store restaurants — serving more than 660 million customers annually in over 400 locations across 32 markets — make it one of the largest food service operators in the world. And it became the first global company to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 target of halving food waste, completing this milestone nine years ahead of the 2030 deadline.

The result: a 54 percent reduction in production food waste across its stores. That translates to more than 20 million saved meals, 36,000 tonnes of avoided CO2 equivalent emissions per year — the equivalent of taking more than 8,000 cars off the road annually — and $37 million in annual savings.

The strategy behind this result was built on artificial intelligence. IKEA partnered with Winnow, a food tech company that uses AI-powered cameras and scales to measure exactly what is being thrown away in commercial kitchens in real time. The system identifies which dishes, ingredients, and preparation processes generate the most waste, allowing chefs to adjust portion sizes, modify recipes, and recalibrate purchasing before waste occurs rather than after.

More than 20,000 IKEA food workers were trained to use this system and integrate it into their daily routines. The technology identified patterns invisible to human observation — the specific dishes that generated the most trim waste, the service periods that produced the most unsold food, the preparation steps that created avoidable loss. Chefs then used this data to redesign menus, adjust cooking quantities, and time preparation more precisely to actual demand.

In 2025, IKEA extended this work further by partnering with Vanguard Renewables to convert unavoidable food waste — kitchen trimmings, expired culinary products, and leftover customer meals — into renewable natural gas and low-carbon fertiliser for agricultural use. What cannot be prevented is now being converted into clean energy and returned to the soil that grows the next round of ingredients.

IKEA's achievement matters beyond IKEA itself because it demonstrates, with verified and audited numbers, that the UN's 2030 food waste reduction target is achievable. The technology exists. The economic case is proven. The barrier is decision and commitment, not capability.

Kroger — Turning Shelf Life Into a Technology Problem

Kroger, the United States' largest supermarket chain, approached food waste as an engineering challenge. Its Zero Hunger Zero Waste mission established a commitment to eliminate food waste across its operations by 2025 and to donate surplus food to communities experiencing food insecurity.

One of its most significant technical investments was its partnership with Apeel Sciences. Apeel has developed a plant-based coating — derived from food byproducts including grape skins and other agricultural waste — that creates an invisible layer on the surface of fresh produce. This layer slows the rate at which moisture escapes and oxygen enters the fruit, dramatically extending natural shelf life without refrigeration, preservatives, or chemical treatments.

When another grocer added Apeel to its avocado supply, it reported a 60 percent reduction in avocado waste and a 10 percent increase in sales. The technology allows produce to stay ripe up to twice as long as untreated fruit, reducing the pressure on supply chains to move produce quickly and giving consumers longer windows to actually eat what they buy.

Beyond technology, Kroger created a $1 million innovation fund specifically dedicated to finding new food waste prevention solutions across its operations. Its surplus food donation programme has redirected millions of pounds of unsold but still-nutritious food to food banks and hunger relief organisations rather than landfills.

Between 2019 and 2022, grocery retailers participating in the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment — a public-private partnership in which Kroger is a significant participant — decreased the amount of unsold food by 25 percent, preventing nearly 190,000 tonnes of food valued at $311 million from going to waste. The same period saw a 20 percent increase in the rate of unsold food being donated and a 28 percent increase in the rate of unsold food being composted — along with an estimated 30 percent decrease in the total carbon footprint of unsold food in the region.

Nestlé — Reducing Waste Across a Global Manufacturing Network

Nestlé is the world's largest food and beverage manufacturer, operating across more than 180 countries with a portfolio that spans everything from infant nutrition to pet food to instant coffee. At that scale, even marginal improvements in waste reduction produce significant absolute results.

Nestlé has embedded food waste reduction into its broader net-zero roadmap, targeting a 20 percent absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 relative to its 2018 baseline — a milestone it reached a year ahead of schedule. The company has successfully decoupled its growth from its emissions, continuing to expand revenue while cutting its environmental footprint.

A central part of Nestlé's waste strategy is its partnership with Veolia to develop innovative valorisation processes — methods of recovering value from production waste rather than disposing of it. By-products from Nestlé's manufacturing processes are redirected into alternative uses: agricultural inputs, animal feed, energy generation, or ingredients for other products. Nothing that can be redirected leaves the system as waste if a value pathway exists.

Nestlé has also been a prominent supporter of standardising food date labels globally. Confusing and inconsistent date labelling — the patchwork of "best before," "use by," "sell by," and "display until" labels that vary by country, retailer, and product type — is one of the leading causes of unnecessary food waste at the household and retail level. Food that is perfectly safe to eat is discarded by consumers and retailers because the labelling creates uncertainty. Nestlé, alongside Unilever, Danone, and Walmart, has publicly backed the US Food Date Labeling Act as a practical, cost-effective measure to reduce this form of avoidable waste at scale.

Unilever — Redesigning the Supply Chain for Less Waste

Unilever, whose food brands include Hellmann's, Knorr, Ben and Jerry's, and Lipton, has built its food waste strategy around two complementary approaches: reducing waste within its own manufacturing and logistics operations, and using its scale and influence to shift waste behaviour across the entire supply chain it sits within.

Within its operations, Unilever has pursued significant SKU simplification — reducing the number of active product variants by 14 percent in 2023 alone. Fewer product variants mean simpler supply chains, shorter production runs, less overproduction risk, and less surplus inventory at every stage from factory to shelf. This is a structural approach to waste prevention rather than a downstream cleanup strategy.

Unilever has also deployed waste-to-energy methods at its manufacturing facilities, converting unsold or off-specification food products into renewable energy rather than sending them to landfill. Its partnership approach extends to suppliers, where it works with agricultural producers to reduce post-harvest loss — the food that spoils or is damaged between the farm and the factory before it ever becomes a product.

Through its food solutions division, Unilever has identified "low waste menus" as a leading trend for the food service industry, publishing guidance and recipe solutions that help chefs and restaurateurs build menus around whole-ingredient cooking approaches that use more of every ingredient, generate less trim waste, and reduce the volume of food purchased and unused.

Too Good To Go — Rescuing Food at the Retail and Restaurant Level

While the companies above operate primarily within the supply chain, Too Good To Go addresses the food waste problem at its most visible point: the food that sits unsold at the end of every business day in restaurants, bakeries, cafés, and supermarkets across the world.

Too Good To Go is a platform that connects consumers with local food businesses that have surplus food at the end of their trading day. Businesses pack what remains — meals, pastries, prepared food, produce — into mystery boxes sold to consumers at a discount through the app. The consumer gets good food at reduced cost. The business recovers value from food that would otherwise be discarded. The food stays in the food system rather than going to landfill.

The model uses AI-based matching in real time to connect supply with demand efficiently — identifying which businesses have surplus, which consumers are nearby and available, and how to route the transaction quickly enough that the food reaches someone before it expires. The platform has grown to operate in 17 countries and has saved hundreds of millions of meals from disposal.

Too Good To Go also runs consumer education campaigns — including the "Look, Smell, Taste, Don't Waste" initiative that teaches consumers how to assess food quality independently of printed date labels, reducing the volume of food thrown away at home because of label confusion rather than actual spoilage.

What the Strategies Have in Common

Across these five companies, several consistent principles emerge that define effective food waste reduction at scale.

Measurement comes first. Every company that has achieved significant results began by measuring precisely where and how much waste was occurring before attempting to fix it. IKEA's AI cameras, Kroger's innovation fund, Nestlé's scope 3 emissions tracking — all of these start with the data, not the intervention.

Technology enables but does not replace culture. The AI system IKEA deployed worked because 20,000 employees were trained to use it and engaged with the goal it served. Technology without buy-in from the people operating it produces reports, not results.

Waste prevention generates economic returns. IKEA saves $37 million annually. Kroger's Pacific Coast partnership prevented $311 million of food loss. Nestlé achieved its emission targets a year early. In every case, the environmental and economic returns align — waste is inefficiency, and eliminating it saves money.

Supply chain collaboration multiplies individual impact. No food company operates in isolation. Nestlé works with Veolia and its agricultural suppliers. Kroger works with Apeel and food banks. Unilever works with chefs, farmers, and retailers. The companies achieving the greatest reductions are those that extend their commitments beyond their own walls.

Policy advocacy amplifies operational action. Several of the companies above have gone beyond changing their own operations to publicly advocate for the policy changes — standardised date labels, extended producer responsibility, food donation incentives — that would change the structural conditions generating waste across the entire industry.

What the Rest of Us Can Do

Food companies operating at the scale described above have both the greatest capacity to reduce food waste and a commercial incentive that households do not share. But household food waste — accounting for 60 percent of all food wasted globally — cannot be solved by corporate action alone.

Every person who buys food, stores food, cooks food, and throws food away is part of this system. And the changes available to households, schools, restaurants, and community organisations are neither technically complex nor financially costly.

Plan before you buy. The single most effective household food waste intervention is meal planning before shopping. Buying only what a specific plan requires eliminates the speculative purchasing — the aspirational vegetables and the optimistic bulk buys — that fills bins at the end of the week. The average American family of four currently loses $2,913 per year to uneaten food. A shopping list tied to a weekly meal plan can cut this significantly.

Store food correctly. A large proportion of household food waste occurs not because food was unwanted but because it deteriorated faster than expected due to improper storage. Understanding which foods belong in the fridge, which ripen better at room temperature, and which should be frozen immediately rather than left to chance extends usable life without any additional cost.

Understand date labels. "Best before" indicates quality, not safety. Food past its best before date is often still perfectly edible — its texture or flavour may have changed slightly, but it does not become dangerous. "Use by" indicates safety and should be respected. Learning this distinction, and applying the smell and taste test rather than the calendar, prevents enormous volumes of safe food from being discarded unnecessarily.

Treat leftovers as ingredients. The cooking traditions of virtually every culture on earth developed ways to extend ingredients across multiple meals — stocks from bones and vegetable trimmings, soups from leftover cooked vegetables, stir fries from the previous night's rice. These approaches are not inconvenient compromises but the basis of some of the most flavourful and efficient cooking there is.

Compost what cannot be eaten. Some food waste is genuinely unavoidable — bones, certain peels, coffee grounds, eggshells. These materials belong in a compost system rather than a landfill. Composted organic matter returns nutrients to soil, supports biodiversity, and avoids the methane generation that occurs when the same material decomposes anaerobically in landfill. Even a small kitchen compost bin changes the destination of a meaningful volume of unavoidable organic waste.

Advocate and choose consciously. Supporting retailers and food businesses that donate surplus food, use Apeel or similar technologies, sell imperfect produce, and display clear date labels reinforces the market conditions that reward responsible practice. Consumer choices aggregate into market signals. When those signals are consistent and sustained, they change what companies invest in.

If you have children — start early. The habits formed around food in childhood persist into adulthood. Children who learn to value food, understand where it comes from, avoid waste, and compost what is unavoidable carry those habits into their own households, shopping decisions, and eventually their own professional and civic choices. The most durable food waste reduction strategies are the ones taught before waste becomes normal.

For families ready to start measuring and reducing their own food waste, our free Home Waste Audit Kit gives households a structured seven-day system to track what they throw away across five categories — including food — identify their biggest waste streams, and commit to specific changes. It is available in three formats — printable PDF, editable Word document, and mobile-interactive HTML — and is free for a limited time at payhip.com/b/I7NCx.

And for teachers who want to bring the food waste conversation into the classroom, Planet Protectors is a complete five-day zero waste unit for Grades 2–5 covering every principle discussed in this article — reduce, reuse, recycle, rot, and rethink — through hands-on activities, visual aids, worksheets, and rubrics. Explore it here.

The Opportunity Is Larger Than the Problem

The food waste problem, at the scale described at the opening of this article, can feel immovable. One billion meals a day. $940 billion annually. Eight to ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But the companies profiled here demonstrate something important: this problem yields to systematic, data-driven, sustained effort. IKEA halved its food waste. Kroger prevented $311 million of food loss in a three-year window. Nestlé decoupled its growth from its emissions a year ahead of schedule. Too Good To Go has saved hundreds of millions of meals that would otherwise have been discarded.

These results were not achieved by technological miracle or regulatory mandate. They were achieved by companies that decided to measure the problem honestly, invest in solutions methodically, and extend their commitment beyond their own operations into the broader system they are part of.

The same logic applies to households, schools, restaurants, and communities. The food waste problem is large. The solutions are available. The only remaining variable is whether enough people decide to apply them.

Bring the Food Waste Conversation Into Your Classroom

The companies profiled in this article — IKEA, Kroger, Nestlé, Unilever, and Too Good To Go — all share one strategy that rarely makes the data: they invested in education before they expected behavior to change.

The same principle applies in classrooms. Children who understand where food comes from, why wasting it matters, and what real companies are doing to fix it carry that knowledge into their homes, their habits, and eventually their own professional decisions.

Food Heroes is a complete five-day food waste unit for Grades 2–5 — built around exactly the companies and strategies in this article. Every lesson is fully planned, scripted, and ready to teach. Students trace food from farm to bin, calculate the real cost of food waste, study company strategies through group research cards, audit their own lunchboxes, and close the week with a Food Hero Pledge Poster.

No prep. No searching. No writing scripts. Just open, read, and teach.

👉 Explore Food Heroes at payhip.com/b/AFMqP

And if you want to extend the learning beyond the classroom, our free Home Waste Audit Kit gives families a seven-day system to track exactly where their household waste comes from — with a printable tracker, action guide, family pledge card, and a mobile-interactive version that works on any phone. Free for a limited time at payhip.com/b/I7NCx.

The solutions already exist. The next generation just needs to learn them.

References

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