WasteWatch in action in Health & Care
Sodexo colleagues at Nuffield Hospital in Leeds share their experiences of how the WasteWatch programme has helped them understand the importance of reducing food waste.
Our fight against food waste
Cutting our food waste by 50% by 2025
Our commitment at Sodexo is to halve our own food waste by 2025, a key element of our roadmap to Net Zero. But with the United Nations stating that one-third of the world’s food goes to waste, we are determined to also work towards supporting measures which will cut food waste outside our own operations.
Tracking food waste to create actionable insights
A third of all food produced globally ends up being wasted*, making food waste one of the greatest contributors to climate change and biggest scandals of our time.
Whether it’s during the ordering, storage, preparation, or serving process, we are working together with our teams, clients and suppliers to reduce food and collateral waste across Sodexo sites.
WasteWatch is a measurement system allowing kitchen teams to understand what’s thrown away, and why, making it easy to identify efficiencies and make informed menu choices backed up by real-time data. This technology is a key weapon in our fight against food waste and we’ve committed to roll it out to 100% of relevant sites by 2025.
*According to the United Nations Environment Programme
Reducing food waste across our business
Tracking our WasteWatch progress
Over the past 12 months, our WasteWatch programme has prevented food waste equivalent to 1,011,713 meals (data accurate August 2023), by capturing data and sharing insights.
Educating children on food waste
Sodexo and client colleagues at Oasis Academy Media City explain the importance of WasteWatch and how it is educating the pupils on the importance of preventing food waste.
Our Appetite for Action
In 2021, we launched Appetite for Action. This is an ongoing mission for Sodexo with the goal of using our scale and food industry expertise to convene and work alongside political and industry stakeholders, chefs and customers to drive meaningful change in food service procurement to help cut food waste.
How to change food buying trends to help reduce food waste
We commissioned research among 275 food procurement senior decision-makers across the private and public sector in the UK to understand their thoughts on how food buying trends need to change in order to reduce food waste.
Roundtable: tackling food waste is urgent to meet sustainability standards
In October 2021, building on the results of the research, we hosted a roundtable of experts including WRAP, WWF and Defra, to discuss how food buying standards can change to reduce food waste and meet the UK's sustainability standards.
Reducing food waste and carbon emissions in food services
We brought together the results from the research we commissioned and insight from the roundtable to create our Appetite for Action report. This includes strategies for reducing food waste and carbon emissions in food services.
A holistic approach to achieving net zero and supply chain resilience
With food waste a significant contributor to climate change, the situation has been made worse by recent supply chain challenges, which have resulted in a dramatic increase in food waste. This case study includes some of the key data, but also looks at how cutting food waste and supply chain resilience can be complementary goals.
Supply chain challenges caused by world events led to an increase in food waste.
In 2022, we commissioned further research to find out how the unprecedented pressure on supply chains had impacted food buyers’ ability to meet their food waste targets. We visited one of our suppliers, Watts Hill farm to see what work they are doing to ensure supply chain resilience whilst cutting food waste.
Infographic: The secret to supply chain resilience
So how can resilience be built when pressures are already extraordinary and the future demands a net zero existence? We’ve put together an infographic to show how organisations need a net zero strategy that tackles food waste urgently, but also need agility, flexibility and diversification to navigate current supply chain issues.
