A team led by the Clean Technology Centre has been successful in a mini-tender to provide expert advice and technical assistance relating to food waste prevention in the food services sector.

The team is comprised of: CTC, Waste Resources Action Plan (WRAP), Anthesis Group and Flannery Nagel Environmental Ltd.

The project team will provide advice and technical support to EPA to assist with the delivery of a collaborative programme for food waste prevention initiatives in the food manufacturing and processing sector.

This will involve developing a programme to drive reduction in food waste across the food supply chain as a complement to existing work with householders through the Stop Food Waste campaign. This sector is very broad and diverse in its nature.

The programme will be focused on the Retail, Distribution, Processing and Manufacturing sub-sector in order to help deliver a 50% reduction in waste in the food supply chain by 2030. This phase of the programme will have an emphasis on measurement and reporting of food waste as a precursor to building capacity for food waste reduction in the various sectors.

The framework is a system of developing and testing data driven procedures to help the industry target food waste reductions. It is imperative that credibility in both the support and team providing it is built so that there is a solid foundation for expansion in following years.

The flow of this work programme is represented by the following:

Task 1 – develop standard measurement protocol that aims to link national reporting requirements to process specific data useful for prevention. Where applicable, sector specific variables will be highlighted.

Task 2 – test the protocol in a number of the main sub-sectors that exist within this broad sector

Task 3 – produce topic based case studies of businesses that have engaged in the data gathering process, have made changes to improve food waste data reporting or have instructive historical instances of successful waste prevention actions

Task 4 – develop guidance based on the experiences of those involved in using data as a precursor to prevention

Task 5 – communicate to the wider sector on the importance of food waste reporting as driver for reduced food waste