The move could also save businesses up to £100M in waste prevention and shoppers up to £500M in unnecessary spending on food and drink, according to the study.
For Reducing food waste by extending product life,WRAP assessed the amount of product life available to consumers on shelf. It reviewed how product life codes such as ‘use-by’ and ‘best-before’ dates were set by retailers, brands and food manufacturers.
The study examined a range of popular foods where there were typically relatively high levels of waste, for example fresh prepared salads and pizzas. It estimated the potential overall tonnage and financial savings by scaling-up data from these products to all food groceries.
WRAP’s report includes five recommendations to enable retailers and manufacturers to slash waste.
Five ways to cut food waste
1: challenge safety and quality buffers to identify opportunities to extend product life for the consumer;
2: adopt a standardised approach to ‘open life’ guidance – the time an item is deemed safe to eat or retains its optimum quality once opened – and use open life only for food safety, not quality issues;
3: review supply chain practices such as stock rotation to increase the available life for consumers;
4: benchmark delivery times to retailers to improve performance;
5: remove ‘display-until’ dates from all foods and use only ‘use-by’ or ‘best before’ dates.
WRAP sampled more than 23,000 products and interviewed major retailers as well as food manufacturers and trade associations to compile the report.
10 staple products
The organisation selected 10 staple products known to generate high levels of domestic waste for in-depth investigation. They included sliced ham, potatoes, apples, minced beef, juice, chilled pizza/chilled ready meals, bread, chicken breasts, bagged salad and milk.
“By implementing these simple recommendations, food manufacturers and retailers can make a big difference in the battle against food waste, without even having to change products and packaging,” said Dr Richard Swannell, director of sustainable food systems at WRAP.
“We estimate that shoppers could save upwards of £500M, and businesses could save £100M in waste prevention alone.
“We have a fantastic opportunity to take action here. We’ve identified the business case based on savings in the true cost of waste and the potential for increased sales from better availability. “Today’s report is part of our continuing work to reduce food waste and we’re keen to work with industry on how best to act on this information.”
Dr Linden Jack, head of food hygiene policy branch at the Food Standards Agency (FSA), said: “We welcome these recommendations and believe they offer sensible proposals which could enable the life of a product to be extended without compromising food safety.
Food safety
“The FSA’s number one priority is food safety and use by dates in particular have an important role to play in protecting consumers. However we recognise more needs to be done to help us all reduce the amount of food wasted every year in the UK.”
WRAP, the organisation that first highlighted the issue of food waste in 2007, said it would now work with industry to apply its recommendations and explore other ways to build on the report.
Iain Gulland, ceo, Zero Waste Scotland said: “In Scotland, we throw out 630,000t of food waste annually from our homes.
“This report contains some interesting recommendations on extending product life for the consumer, which if implemented could help people to get longer out of their food before throwing it away and could make a difference to the amount currently being wasted needlessly.”