Reducing food waste in the public sector

In the context of public meals, preventing food waste has become increasingly crucial since most of the waste comprises serving and plate waste, which represents food that has undergone resource-intensive preparation processes. Despite this, most sustainability practices that target food waste in public canteens focus primarily on upgrading food waste management to recycling, rather than prevention or reuse for human consumption.

Solutions that tackle plate waste in public catering exist, but generalized measures may not always effective in every organization. To achieve a sustained reduction in food waste, there is a need to develop these interventions together with service users and providers so that they become embedded in daily practices. In this project, we want to assess the effectiveness of traditional implementation strategies of already existing tools and innovations versus co-designing them together with food service users and providers by jointly defining problems and exploring solutions considering the needs of both (“service design”).

To do this, we will divide the participating hospital and school canteens into three groups: control, best practices, and a service design group. First, we will identify proven measures for reducing food waste and adopt them in the best practices group. Then, we will co-create a toolbox of measures for the service design group. We will then identify barriers and enablers to their implementation throughout the food service sector. Finally, we will evaluate the effectiveness of each approach to establish a tailored, tested, and practical toolbox and a transitional process to reduce food waste which can be scaled for use in the entire food service industry.